If Men Are From Mars, Women Are Also From Mars

The American relationship counsellor John Gray – or as he prefers to be known, “John Gray, Ph.D” – came up with a simple explanation in his bestselling book, Men Are From Mars And Women Are From Venus.

I’ve always taken the view that this book wasn’t worth reading. The central metaphor has always irritated me, with its trite gender essentialism fancied up for a pop audience. While I’d never judge a book by its cover, in this case, judging by the title seems warranted.

And yet, an academic study reported this week went to the trouble of properly debunking the theory, and I found reading about it fairly satisfying, so I thought I’d look in more detail at what Gray had to say.

A lot of people have done that – his original book has sold over 50 million copies, and was apparently the best-selling non-fiction book of the 1990s. Which is a little depressing, frankly.

Now, I’m not going to read the whole book. He’s sold enough copies, and if he can be essentialist, so can I. Wikipedia boils his argument down to a few main points. Firstly, men and women keep score differently. Women sweat the small stuff, tallying up little points for everything, whereas men tend to look at big one-off, ‘high scoring’ items. And secondly, men retreat to their ‘cave’ and take time out, whereas women like to talk issues through.

The reason these theories were so thoroughly discredited by this new study is because after surveying 13,000 people, the researchers discovered that people don’t fit neatly into gender groups in terms of “122 different characteristics such as fear of success, intimacy and empathy”.

Now, this doesn’t mean that men and women are exactly the same as one another. If they were, Daily Life wouldn’t have its army of eccentric gentlemen commenters who like to accuse its writers of ‘misandry’. Hello, boys!

Rather, the picture is much more complex. You can’t simply generalise that all women are alike in one particular way, and that no men are like that.

Think about this question of keeping score. Of course there are women who like grand relationship gestures, and there are men who prefer little demonstrations of affection – and moreover, there are relationships where nobody keeps score, because both parties think that the whole idea of keeping score is stupid. That’s certainly my preference, for the record.

And let’s talk about “man-caves”, an irritating term because it suggests that we gentleman are lower on the evolutionary scale, and like to retreat into spaces where we can grunt, scratch ourselves and do metalwork. I dispute that, although we do like to scratch ourselves.

Sorry, that was an essentialist joke. See, it’s so easy to think that way!

Sure, okay – men like having spaces to put stuff in and pursue our hobbies in – and why wouldn’t women, for that matter? (See A Room Of One’s Own.) But the suggestion that us guys retreat into them to avoid confronting problems is such a simplistic stereotype. I can only think of one man who retreated into a cave to avoid confronting a difficult situation, and that was Osama bin Laden.

While some men admittedly don’t like talking things through, some love it. I know this because I’m one of those who enjoy incredibly long conversations about problems; yes, including emotional, relationship-type problems. Does that somehow make me less of a man?

And if men are so thoroughly unable to engage with those kinds of conversations, why would any of us become psychologists – or, for that matter, consult them?

Indeed, anyone who’s familiar with the work of Woody Allen knows that some men, if anything, talk altogether too much about their problems.

In fact, Gray, Ph.D himself is proof positive that not all men dislike talking about this stuff. The guy's entirely unable to shut up about other people’s relationship difficulties. Not only has he written no less than 18 books, but the guy does a live streaming show on his website every single day where he talks about this stuff.

Retreat, John Gray, Ph.D, would you please? Perhaps into some kind of man-cave?

And yet, according to his theory, women are the ones who constantly want to talk about stuff. Well, not always. It’s well known that women in abusive relationships often go to great lengths not to confront the situation, and resist talking about them with anybody, least of all their partner. This is too widespread and serious a problem to gloss over with a stereotype about the ladies loving a good ol’ chinwag.

Then there’s the contrast he makes where men want to solve problems and women just want to discuss them. How thoroughly patronising an analysis. Has Gray surveyed women and discovered that they don’t ever want any of their concerns addressed? And to suggest that women don’t care about solutions is to imply that their concerns are trivial, because it doesn’t ultimately matter whether they’re resolved.

I must confess that I was a bit surprised to discover that Gray is persisting with this Mars/Venus paradigm in 2013. But then again, as he says in his original book, “not to be needed is a slow death for a man”. I very much dispute that, but perhaps it’s slow death for Gray not to be needed to deliver these pop psychology homilies, and so he battles on. How typically Martian of him!

Here’s another thing – if women and men are so different, and can’t understand one another, what can a man such as Gray tell us about women? Because if the gender comprehension divide is as steep as he suggests, the book should be called Men Are From Mars And Women, I Dunno, They Confuse Me.

Then again, perhaps Gray is a hermaphrodite, combining the best of Venus and Mars in his own body and therefore able to understand both?

In fact, gender is not the only determinant of personality. Serious (i.e. non-pop) psychologists who study personality disorders, for instance, will tell you that personality problems like narcissism transcend gender, for instance – a narcissist won’t exactly care for being ‘needed’ (Mars) or ‘cherished’ (Venus).

And more complex analytical frameworks than Gray’s – Myers-Briggs, for instance – don’t even bother to discriminate by gender in drawing its personality types and supplying insights about how we interact.

Mars is a better analogy for human personalities than Venus in that it contains a diversity of landforms, habitats and climates. Also bad for Gray’s model associating Venus with women is the fact that its atmosphere contains toxic sulfuric clouds. But of course the author doesn’t care about what Venus or Mars is really like, just as he isn’t interested in the complexity and diversity of our personalities – and how members of opposite sexes can be alike one another, and how each gender can contain a full spectrum of difference. A binary’s easier to explain, and to sell.

Then again, if Gray, Ph.D. embraced the full nuance and complexity of our personalities and relationship, he probably wouldn’t have sold 50 million pop psychology books. Predominantly to a female readership – and come to think of it, why do so many women buy this guff? Maybe they really are all from Venus.