Men and women are from earth, fool pt. II

This is the second part of a series in which I enthusiastically rinse Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus and its well-documented grifter of an author, because so many people have recommended, or worse, tried to teach me stuff from this stupid book. In the first part, I started out with the intention of going through chapter by chapter, but this thing has so much absurd content in it that I realised I might have to zoom out a bit, or I’d never finish.

So in this part and the next part, I cover the book a little more thematically. I’d say, read the first part if you want to see (1) the amusingly transparent extent of John Gray’s various frauds, and (2) how easy it is to see that whatever Gray says about men and women much more reflect Gray’s psyche than actual men and women. But rather than spend more time doing that, as much fun as it was, and since so many others have got there first, I thought that now I’d look more closely at Gray’s men and women, because it’ll make you equal parts amused and furious, plus I think it’ll do a much better job of stopping you from asking me about this book. I promise that no matter how into gender roles you are, you will not want to relate to Gray’s extraterrestrials.

¶Traditional roles might be sexy, but certainly not in this book

First, I want to flesh out a little why I think this book is popular enough for people to be bothering me with it. I think it’s useful context, but this bit is the same as the next article, so if you’re coming from there, or you just want to get to the fun part, you can skip it.

Gender essentialism is very clearly getting trendy again. Instagram and TikTok feeds abound with Jordan Peterson- and Andrew Tate-esque commentary on the meaning of being a man. For some reason this isn’t so surprising to me. People have been complaining about the feminisation of all of the things for ages, so that we have a bunch of antsy men wondering what they’re supposed to be doing isn’t that shocking. In fact, like Sebastian Junger noticed in his book Tribe, it’s one of the reasons young men join the military—a lot of the kids in my platoon were trying to find manhood in one of its last traditional bastions. So, I guess one lazy solution to this is to try to bring those bastions back? I don’t know, I’m not a sociologist.

A little more surprising is a similar spike in content around modern takes on traditional female roles, like MomTok, or other trad-wife and SAHM communities. I don’t know if this is new, of if I’ve only just started noticing it, but it seems to be everywhere these days. Although, maybe this also isn’t that surprising. After all, as I am apparently fond of pointing out, life is worse. If I was a girl, I might want to hand all this nonsense back to the people that caused it too.

It’s interesting to me, whatever the reason for it, because although there are trivially obvious differences in anatomy between males and females, there’s a huge amount of disagreement about how that plays out in behaviour. It’s also impossible to distinguish this from the influence of social norms, and there’s plenty of contention about what those mean for behaviour too.

The upshot is that there’s a lot of appetite for content that tells these aspiring men and women what they’re supposed to be. And my advice to those people is to pick any book but this one, because this one is an embarrassment. Half the last article is a litany of John Gray’s various frauds, and the other half outlines all the ways in which John Gray highlights what, from his own framing, I can only assume are some rather blinding insecurities.

¶Gray’s sets up his ‘Martians’ as paragons of masculine virtue

In this article, I thought it’d be fun to really beat you over the head with his insecurities, because he does it to anyone who reads his book. I read his book, so now I think you should suffer. Fair’s fair.

After his introduction, Gray gives us a little overview of his plan for us. If we stack these together, we start to really get a sense of Gray’s impression of men:

In chapter 2 we will explore how men’s and women’s values are inherently different and try to understand the two biggest mistakes we make in relating to the opposite sex: men mistakenly offer solutions and invalidate feelings while women offer unsolicited advice and direction.

So far, perhaps not that controversial. If we’re gender essentialists, maybe we suspect that men and women do have inherently different values for whatever reason—biological, social, whatever. It’s not a leap to assume this would lead to some miscommunications, and indeed, it’s the reason I read this book in a positive light a decade or so ago. Of course, this is the chapter I cover in great detail in the previous article, so if you’ve read that you might be more skeptical, but let’s just take this at face value for the moment.

In chapter 3 we’ll discover the different ways men and women cope with stress … [men] pull away … [women] feel an instinctive need to talk.

Now, we’re starting to see a theme emerge. To Gray, women are this kind of overfull cup, spilling their feelings into the lives of their stoic male counterparts. Women talk about their stress, and offer unsolicited advice. This is because women “value love, communication, beauty, and relationships” and specifically, “To share their personal feelings is much more important than achieving goals and success”. In contrast, men “value power, competency, efficiency, and achievement”.

To Gray, for men, these values are best manifested alone. In this chapter, by pulling away to their ‘caves’ to manage their own stress, and in the last chapter, failing to recognise the feelings of their partner because they assume the only reason to share feelings is to solve problems that can’t be solved alone.

[in chapter 4] Men are motivated when they feel needed while women are motivated when they feel cherished … When a man does not feel needed in a relationship, he gradually becomes passive and less energized … When a woman does not feel cherished in a relationship she gradually becomes compulsively responsible and exhausted from giving too much.

So, you see, all this busy feeling work these women are doing is unwelcome because it makes men feel like they aren’t useful. As a result, I guess, the men just quit? Meanwhile, apropos of their femininity I suppose, women feel ‘compulsively responsible’ and ‘exhausted’. It probably has nothing at all to do with the men ‘pulling away’ and ‘becoming passive’. And even when it does, to quote from the chapter: “Instead of blaming a man for giving less, a woman can accept and forgive her partner’s imperfections, especially when he disappoints her”.

Sharing feelings, it would appear, is not the solution to interpersonal problems, for Gray’s men. It’s an imposition. Better, instead, to ignore it, or at least deal with it quietly on your own.

¶Gray’s ‘Martians’ are actually fragile as hell

In chapter 5 … how men and women speak and even stop speaking for entirely different reasons … [women] express feelings … [men] express information

Yes John. We’re clear. You’re unenthusiastic about feelings.

But, perhaps there’s something to this. Perhaps what Gray is really talking about here is the idea that women are socially trained to be more fluent in the language of interpersonal relationships.¹ Maybe Gray is just pointing out that men aren’t as good at this, and need more support to do it. Perhaps, if we skip to that chapter for some examples, we’ll find some very reasonable illustrations.

So when women say “We never go out” and men reply “That’s not true. We went out last week,” or when women say “Everyone ignores me” and men reply “I’m sure some people notice you,” or when women say “The house is always a mess” and men reply “It’s not always a mess”… yes… it seems plausible that Gray is talking about an idiot.² Because to Gray, it is obvious in that these kinds of interactions:

You can see how a “literal” translation of a woman’s words could easily mislead a man who is used to using speech as a means of conveying only facts and information.

But I am suspicious, because Gray also points out that when she says “Nothing is working”, he will reply “Are you saying it is my fault?” and when she points out “I want more romance” he will respond with “Are you saying I am not romantic?”. Is Gray talking about someone who fails to have a basic social understanding of human communication? Perhaps. I’ll return to this later. But, to me, this is starting to veer toward the kind of passive aggression we see in people who are rejection sensitive. The same kind of people we might expect to get upset about the unsolicited advice in chapter 2, and become ‘passive’ when they don’t feel ‘needed’, or when the woman fails to “accept and forgive her partner’s imperfections, especially when he disappoints her” as they did in chapter 5. Let’s read on to find out.

¶Gray’s ‘Martians’ are actually just quite classically poorly attached people

In chapter 6 … [we discover how] A man gets close but then inevitably needs to pull away.

Gray’s point here is that men are like rubber bands. To “fulfill his need for independence or autonomy”, he will pull away, and “When he has fully stretched away, then instantly he will come springing back”. Gray’s women then fuck this up because for some unaccountable reason they find it confusing. Like ‘Maggie’ who:

could not understand why he had suddenly pulled away. She told me, “One minute he was so attentive, and then the next he didn’t even want to talk to me. I have tried everything to get him back but it only seems to make matters worse. He seems so distant. I don’t know what I did wrong. Am I so awful?”

Yes Maggie, you fool. What’s wrong with you? Surely you can see that “By running after him, she was preventing him from ever feeling that he needed her and wanted to be with her … By trying to maintain intimacy she had prevented it.” That’s how intimacy works, right? You avoid it until it works? Certainly John would have us believe all men are labouring under this assumption. Indeed, more generally:

If a man does not have the opportunity to pull away, he never gets a chance to feel his strong desire to be close. It is essential for women to understand that if they insist on continuous intimacy or “run after” their intimate male partner when he pulls away, then he will almost always be trying to escape and distance himself; he will never get a chance to feel his own passionate longing for love.

This certainly sounds like a normal and healthy relationship cycle, and not at all like the antics of someone who compulsively avoids engaging with their feelings. Someone who might interpret any and all attempts by their partner to get close and improve their life together as a threat to their ego, and manages this by initially engaging in passive aggressive power-plays to ameliorate the acute instances, then running away whenever this becomes untenable as a strategy. But, then, finding that they’re incapable of redressing their discontent by themselves, because the core issue here is that they feel unworthy and unlovable, ‘snap back’, realising that they “suddenly cannot live without her … feeling again … his desire to love and be loved” (emphasis mine). It doesn’t sound like that at all.

I want to make it clear, at this point, that I recognise that I haven’t engaged with Gray’s advice yet. I just want us all to be on the same page about his framing of what ‘normal’ men are like. I really cannot highlight enough how this manifests on almost every page of this book. Let me show you one of his ‘Martian/Venetian Phrase Dictionary’ translations. This is, to be clear, representative of several pages of these:

“Everyone ignores me” translated into Martian means “Today, I am feeing ignored and unacknowledged. I feel as though nobody sees me. Of course I’m sure some people see me, but they don’t seem to care about me. I suppose I am also disappointed that you have been so busy lately. I really do appreciate how hard you are working and sometimes I start to feel like I am not important to you. I am afraid your work is more important than me. Would you give me a hug and tell me how special I am to you?”

If he stopped here, we might do what we did before and assume Gray is just talking to an idiot.² Someone who hears the kind of absolutist statement that literally everyone has expressed in a moment of frustration, and is puzzled. Like, instead of hearing someone say “shit’s fucked” and automatically thinking “hm, obviously they don’t mean that all shit is fucked, because that’s not how people think, so I wonder what particular shit they might be referring to here”, this person thinks “Wow, that is an inaccurate statement if I’ve ever heard one. I should take a moment to correct them, and point out that it would be nigh-impossible for all shit to be fucked. For example, just the other day, there was some undeniably un-fucked shit. Ye gods, what a pickle it would be if all of the shit was fucked!”

That, to be clear, is how Gray is trying to frame this, right? To remind you, Gray wants us to understand “how a ‘literal’ translation of a woman’s words could easily mislead a man who is used to using speech as a means of conveying only facts and information.” But Gray doesn’t stop here. Gray wants us to be very clear about what he thinks the average guy is puzzling over here. He’s referring very specifically to the kind of man who:

Without this translation, when a woman says “Everyone ignores me” … may hear “I am so unhappy. I just can’t get the attention I need. Everything is completely hopeless. Even you don’t notice me, and you are the person who is supposed to love me. You should be ashamed. You are so unloving. I would never ignore you this way.”

This guy isn’t missing the point because he’s hung up on the literal meaning. This guy isn’t interpreting anything literally. This guy’s linguistic analysis is even more complicated than the hypothetical ‘woman’ Gray describes! Only this time, instead of desconstructing this normally, they’ve gone off in some other, terribly depressing direction.

¶Outro

Maybe Gray is really talking about Martians, because he’s certainly not talking about ‘men’. He actually just, in excruciating detail, outlines the varieties of experience for the poorly attached. Needless to say, this is not something women are immune to. In fact, it’s such a prominant feature of the psychological landscape that if Gray wasn’t such an obvious charlatan, I’d wonder how he didn’t notice these are basically textbook excerpts.

The full impact of this doesn’t really land until we explore what Gray thinks of women, as we’ll do in the next article. But, you can guess from the little we covered in the last article: he uses the eminently reasonable requests and suggestions of any romantic partner as framing for a ‘woman’ who is emotionally demanding and almost maliciously wounding.

The upshot is that, for Gray, these troubled men are to be protected, though perhaps they could fix some things around the margins. But Gray’s women should abandon their hopes for a normal relationship, stop trying to help these men live a less painful life, and instead simply accommodate their absurdities.

And so, my advice to those curious gender essentialists is this. If you find yourself, like I once did, connecting with this material, then you need to ask some very delicate questions of yourself. What is it, in you, that reminds you of the emotionally troubled men that Gray describes? Or, what is it about your partner that makes you think that your reasonable requests are unreasonable? I think that the answers to those questions are the only valuable advice this book could possibly hold. Because it is, really, a very shit book. Whatever the case, please stop talking to me about it.