A Communication Culture Gap

Like most things, it is a spectrum; few people will be at the extremes. But like sexuality or gender, there's a lot of population near the ends. It's a skill issue. Most people seem to be either better at reading others or better at reading themselves. Few are truly bifocal. That means if you're trying to do the opposite of your innate preference and/or practiced skill, you will be less adept and less comfortable at it. You might still attempt it if there's need, but that doesn't make you any better at actually doing it.

This matters. Some cultures are strongly Ask or Hint. Dominant groups tend to be Ask while disadvantaged groups tend to be Hint. The surrounding expectations and opportunities therefore often pressure individuals in a given direction. If you're Ask and expected to be Ask, you get excellent support and education, so you'll usually do it very well and do Hint very badly if at all. The reverse is also true. But putting someone who is innately Ask in a Hint expectation and environment will usually frustrate the hell out of everyone. No matter how you try, you're never going to be as good or comfortable as someone whose innate inclination matches expectations. It can be trivial -- or as bad as being transgender.

One of the ways I clock very strongly masculine is in communication. I'm innately Ask and I suck at Hint. People have often looked at my female body and assumed that I do female-standard submissive, Hint, and girltalk. I don't. I prefer balanced communication, but if necessary I will go not just to verbal football but to hockey. I have no problem throat-checking someone's logical fallacy into my team's goal net. I warn people that if they hint things, I'll usually miss the hints. And I can't stand girltalk, I'd rather watch paint dry. Some people have gotten quite exercised over this divergence between appearance/expectation and performance. But this is me. Don't use a screwdriver to pound nails.

Those are good examples.

Bear in mind that dominant/submissive and guytalk/girltalk are different spectra. Like sex and gender, they often appear together, which makes it easy to conflate them; but they are not the same. Also people may classify a given language behavior in different categories or spectra, and argue about where they belong and why people use them. That's linguistics for you. Doesn't help that it's in the part of the science that women pay more attention to than men, so there aren't as many studies of it as, say, phonemes.

The womanlanguage Láadan was specifically designed to encode many of the things that women care about communicating, that other languages don't facilitate much, which leads to a lot of talking around and around things.

*ponder* Which of course now has me thinking about a dominant/submissive conlang to go with the D/s trope in fictional settings ...

>> Would you consider Japanese a hint language? <<

Very strongly. Japanese culture considers it rude to say no directly, and so they find more oblique ways of testing out approval or disapproval.

>> Hey, does Láadan have a word for bisexual (or even a word for lesbian) yet? :ducks and runs: <<

I don't know. They're not in my hardcopy dictionary, and the online one is down right now.

>> What would the switches speak? And how would it correlate for the kinky people who have nothing to do with D/s? (The hard masochists who don't do power exchange, for example?) <<

It would depend on the setting and the language.

Setting: D/s settings sometimes specify that everyone has a a D/s orientation; there may or may not be switches. I'm usually not that restrictive, so I'd allow for switches and unaligned people.

Language: Here the issue is how it encodes the difference in the first place. It might have different dialects or just registers. It might have different pronouns, affixes, or other grammatical structures. Think of how gender is encoded in different languages and you'll have an idea.

My first thought was to mark the changes depending on speaker/listener combinations. So you'd have the basics: Dom-to-sub, sub-to-Dom, Dom-to-Dom, sub-to-sub. The first two are the most different. The second two could be separated, or joined as equal-to-equal. A switch could simply choose based on their presentation at the moment, or they might feel dominant to men but submissive to women, or some other combination. They might also use equal-to-equal with everyone. Unaligned people would probably use equal-to-equal.