Here’s an article I thought many of you would be interested of. I’ve often seen discussion here regarding men’s ability to understand refusals, and of course the whole communication trophy is often made fun of (for a reason). That always makes me think of this Kitzinger’s and Frith’s brilliant article from 1999 which still holds true today.

Just say no.

The article uses conversation analysis in debunking the presumption that men don’t understand sexual refusals and that sexual assault victims should just say no. Conversation analysis is a method for investigating practices of interaction. It sees both verbal and non-verbal aspects of communication as sequential social actions in which intersubjectivity (shared understanding) is built turn-by-turn. CA research began with the investigation of practices of everyday talk.

It has been well researched that in everyday interaction refusals are so-called dispreferred responses, which always require complicated actions and don’t often involve ‘just saying no’. Typical characteristics of everyday refusals are different delays (such as silences or use of particles like ‘well’, ‘um’, ‘I dunno’), softening the blow (‘sounds like fun but’, ‘I’d love to but’ etc) and offering explanations (‘I have other plans’, ‘I’m really tired’ etc) and then there’s the prosody of speech and body language to accompany all that. Refusing is almost always an interactionally delicate action, but despite that, we can always interpret them correctly even without hearing the word ‘no’, and that’s something you can all easily observe by paying attention to ordinary refusals you hear in your lives.

Therefore, when refusing unwanted sexual advances, women already say ‘no’ in ways, which are perfectly clear and understandable in interaction. It is the men who make the conscious decision to ignore them. You can trust your instinct when you feel like someone is pressuring you and cast self-doubt if you ever find yourself thinking whether you gave mixed messages. The chances are he understood your refusal, he just didn’t care.

Compulsory note: I’m not a native speaker of English, so sorry for possibly faulty grammar. Also, this is my first post so I hope you enjoyed it.