22 Jump Street and Speech Patterns

In the modern classroom, there is said to be speech habit differences between males and females. It is said in an article written by Deborah Tannen called, “How Male and Female Students Use Language Differently,” and it is widely known. The article goes into showing, with her personal experiments, that in today’s classroom, males express themselves in a different way than women and that as a result, the modern classroom setting can be labeled as ”unfair” because women tend to not express themselves as much or as fluently as the males do. In a movie that I am analyzing called, 22 Jump Street, there is a scene, which the claims in Tannen’s article comes to life. In the scene, two of the main characters, Maya and Schmidt are sitting on a bench together in the sculpture park on the MC State campus. Maya and Schmidt begin to talk out personal things such as their majors. Since Schmidt is a poetry major and Maya is an art major, they joke about not being able to go anywhere in their lives, financially and not having real jobs. This part of the scene can be related to Deborah Tannen’s article because being in only a group of two, Maya feels comfortable joking around expressing herself, in a way that, according to Tannen, she would not do in a larger group setting. Since they are sitting in front of a sculpture that looks like two eggs leaning on each other, Schmidt asks what Maya thinks about the sculpture. Maya answers with an in-depth analysis of what she understands the sculpture to be. She began by explaining that it was 2 beings, leaning up against each other in perfect balance and it one were to fall, they would just lose each other, so she says that it is just about support. Then Schmidt, being a normal teenage male said, “You can’t admit that it looks just like giant testicles?” Going along, Maya then said, “That’s exactly what it looks like.” This part of the scene, even though it does not relate to Tannen’s article, it is obvious that Schmidt does not care about what he says, he does not have much of a filter, but this act is what makes males different from females in speech. Women tend to think more about what they are going to say before they say it and males, not so much. Maya then begins to speak in a more personal way, she explains to Schmidt that she loves to be alone and in peace. Now Schmidt is trying to go along by saying that he too loves to be alone. Maya tells Schmidt that she is going to go and hang out with people if he wanted to come. Schmidt replied by saying okay repeatedly. At the end of the scene, when Maya begins to speak about liking to be alone, this is a perfect example of what Tannen sees as the representation of a woman. Speaking about personal things is something that is generally done in a small group and according to Tannen, women send to come out of their shell when they are in small groups and that is what Maya was doing at the end of the scene. Based on the previous analysis of men and women in their speech habits, do you believe that this is true in real life too or is it just a Hollywood representation of what male and female speech habits are like?