Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus
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Peter. Michael. What do you know about a book called Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus? Let me guess. Women Be Shoppin'. The book. You know, as famous as this book is, and as much as the title sort of makes it clear what it's about, I don't really know anything about it. This is, according to some sources, the best-selling non-fiction book of all time. Hmm.

Other than the Bible, but then you get into the whole thing about Bible fiction. Yeah, yeah. This book was published in 1992. It basically came out without any splash. Nobody noticed it. The author, John Gray, had published two self-help books before to no acclaim or notice whatsoever. And then a year went by and then he was featured on Donahue.

And then the book ended up on the New York Times bestseller list for 200 weeks. Whoa. There's also a bunch of like as a book, this has more just weird spinoffs. So there was a syndicated TV talk show co-hosted by John Gray and Sybil Shepard. There was a Las Vegas show. There was a board game. There

There was a CD-ROM with, quote, role-playing and punchy graphics, according to USA Today, that cost $49.95 in like 1990s dollars. And then according to John Gray, this book was such a big deal that judges used to require couples to read it before allowing them to divorce. Oh, my God. So who knows if that's true? I mean, we'll get into John Gray's relationship with the truth. But like, this was something that was really popular. And

The context of this book is also like a weird wave of gender essentialist books that came out in the early 1990s. So there was a really famous one that used a lot of scientific research called You Just Don't Understand. There's a book called Brain Sex. There's one called Sex on the Brain. There's one written by Sacha Baron Cohen's cousin called The Essential Difference.

There's one called Why Men Don't Iron. And then the best one that I found was one called If Men Could Talk. Good Lord. Gender essentialist cinematic universe. Ha ha ha.

Just as off-putting to me as the Marvel one, frankly. So, okay, you did something very smart and useful in our episode about The Secret where you walked me through the emotional experience of reading the book. This is what we're going to do for the entire episode. I'm just going to walk you through what I was thinking, what I was learning as I was going through this book, roughly chronologically.

Okay. So the full title of the book is Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, A Practical Guide to Improving Your Communication and Getting What You Want in Your Relationship. Okay. Improving your communication and getting what you want seem like two different things, but okay. We're already finding some tensions.

So I read the, I think it's like the 20th anniversary edition of this book. So it starts with a preface by John Gray where he lays out like what he was trying to do and the purpose of the book. He says, the same issues that would frustrate me 23 years ago in my relationship with my wife, Bonnie, are the same issues that occasionally come up today.

Fortunately, perfection is not a requirement for creating great relationships.

Bonnie, reach out if you need help. I think one of the challenges of covering these like self-help books is oftentimes they start with like a nugget of truth and wisdom. Right. So the idea that like to be in a successful relationship, you have to understand where the other person is coming from.

Seems totally fine to me. What he lays out in this preface is that basically this is just a guide and like a way of seeing the world that is going to help you more effectively communicate with your partner and really find out what they want in the relationship. This is about pleasing your partner and making sure that you're the kind of partner that they need. So I'm reading through all this and I'm like, this actually kind of sounds okay. Right. Well intended. Yeah.

Right. And it's like a sort of gender essentialist thing that like I really don't subscribe to. But also like I don't subscribe to like the Myers-Briggs personality type indicators. And like that's a way of looking at the world that like seems to help people. Yeah, sure. We then get into the introduction to the book. We're in the text of the book now. He then gives us the...

the story that inspired the book. So I'm going to send this to you. It's a little long. A lot of the excerpts are a little bit long in this episode because like you sort of can't believe what he's saying at many points. And like no one would believe me if I paraphrased. So we're just, we're going to have to let John tell the story. All right.

A week after our daughter Lauren was born, my wife Bonnie and I were completely exhausted. Each night Lauren kept waking us. Bonnie had a difficult delivery and she was taking painkillers. She could barely walk. After five days of staying home to help, I went back to work. While I was away, she ran out of pain pills. Instead of calling me at the office, she asked one of my brothers who was visiting to purchase more. My brother, however, did not return with the pills.

Consequently, she spent the whole day in pain taking care of a newborn. I had no idea that her day had been so awful. When I returned home, she was very upset. I misinterpreted the cause of her distress and thought she was blaming me. She said, I've been in pain all day. I ran out of pills. I've been stranded in bed and nobody cares. I said defensively, why didn't you call me? She said, I asked your brother, but he forgot. What am I supposed to do? I can barely walk. I feel so deserted.

At this point, I exploded. My fuse was also very short that day. I was angry that she hadn't called me. I was furious that she was blaming me when I didn't even know she was in pain. After exchanging a few harsh words, I headed for the door. Then something happened that would change my life.

Bonnie said,

As her tone shifted, she said, Right now I'm in pain. I have nothing to give. This is when I need you the most. Please come over here and hold me. I walked over and silently held her. She wept in my arms. After a few minutes, she thanked me for not leaving. That day, for the first time, I didn't leave her. I stayed, and it felt great.

I marveled at how easy it was for me to support her when I was shown the way. So... Emotional triumphs. This is a story about how he needed it explained to him that when five days after a difficult birth, his wife...

Begging for painkillers was upset that he should hang around rather than just leave. And blowing up at her for being upset. It was then as she was being held in my arms that I thought women are really from Venus. Are you kidding me? First of all, this dude's brother sucks. Meanwhile, John is at work.

five days after the birth and returns home and she's upset and he's like, what are you fucking blaming me? And also like he's a self-help guru at this time. He doesn't have like an office job. This isn't like his paternity leave is too short. He chose to go back to work. I was at the office writing drafts of my next awful self-help book while my wife suffered at home.

Chapter two, leaving your wife when she's at her most vulnerable. It's also fascinating to me because this is a story where he basically is like led begging and screaming to an epiphany. Right. This isn't like I realized that like I had to be more emotionally mature. It's basically him being extremely immature and his wife being like, hey, I need you to fucking nut up and like understand what I need right now. She literally explains it to him like-

Yeah. When I'm in these situations is when I need you the most and you always leave. And he's like, huh? Right. It's not really a revelation. It's literally his wife being like, hey, here is like the bare minimum of communication and support in a loving relationship. And then he's like, I should write a book about this insight that my wife gave me. He's like going to his guy friends the next day being like, have you ever supported the woman in your life?

I had a crazy revelation yesterday. She shouted at me to see things from her perspective. And when I tried it, it was lit. Just curious, when your wife's in physical and emotional agony, what do you guys do? Do you leave?

So with the thudding lack of self-awareness that we will see throughout this book, he then describes how like this epiphany is what led him eventually to write this book. He says, how had I missed this? She just needed me to go over and hold her. Another woman would have instinctively known what Bonnie needed.

But as a man, I didn't know that touching, holding, and listening were so important to her. By recognizing these differences, I began to learn a new way of relating to my wife. I never would have believed we could resolve conflict so easily.

So this is it. He has the epiphany. And then he does some sort of table setting where he basically establishes his credibility, right? So you're reading this book and you're like, well, who is this guy, right? Right. So he says, after this epiphany with Bonnie, he spends the next seven years doing research to, quote, help define and refine the insights about men and women that I've included in this book.

So this leads him on a path of discovery. He mentions that he's a couples counselor. So the book is based on all the work that he did after his epiphany with Bonnie and the fact that he's counseled hundreds of relationships.

The rest of his evidence is that he's given couples seminars to more than 25,000 participants. So he's also drawing upon the insights that he's gained from those. And as far as data, he says that 90% of the participants say that this sounds true to them. And then, don't get ahead of ourselves. And then he gets to the thesis statement of the book. So this is like the book in a nutshell.

Okay. Yeah.

Let's just get on with this. So that's the intro, right? So he's laid out the epiphany that started the book. He's laid out the thesis for the book. At this point, I was still like,

Okay, some cracks are showing, but like it seems like his heart is in the right place. He wants to make relationships better for people. Ultimately, the epiphany that like my wife needs support in these moments is like a true epiphany. So it led him to the correct conclusion. So I'm like, okay, like maybe there's other sort of clueless people that will find this guide useful for navigating cluelessly their relationships. Yeah, it's a very sloppy and maybe problematic way to

to approach empathy, but if it allows people who otherwise wouldn't to see the other perspective, then there's a utility there, right? Exactly. So I'm like, okay, fine.

So then we get to chapter one of the book, which is called Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. The weirdest thing about this book is that, like you and me, we look at the title of the book. It's obviously a metaphor, right? But in the book, much of the quote unquote evidence is like actual alien species. What?

So almost all of chapter one is this like extremely try hard metaphor of like the men were raised on Mars and for thousands of years they lived on Mars. And then they like look through their telescopes and they can see Venus. And then they're like, oh, the people on Venus, they're different from us and they need us. So they travel to Venus. And you're like still going on the Mars and Venus stuff, huh? We're on page like eight, nine, ten. Like, OK, Mars.

Still doing this. And he's not really like saying anything particularly insightful about it. He's just like really hammering home this like metaphor. This is the lore. The lore of men and women. The lore. Exactly. And then, you know, Earth is between Mars and Venus. So eventually they go to Earth and they're like compromising. But then over time they've forgotten that they're from Mars and Venus. And then you're like, all right, we're on like page 25. It took you that fucking long to lead me to like, all right, men and women are different. Fine.

Okay. Okay.

Women mostly communicate because they want to share emotions, build rapport, deliver support. And this is kind of at the heart of what he sees as the problem with a lot of modern relationships is that men and women simply have different objectives in their communication style. Don't react. We're going to do a little role play. We're going to do a little role play. Okay. I'm going to send you a little script here. He's giving us a script for...

One of the main problems that men do when they have conversations with women is they go into like advice mode. He calls it Mr. Fix-It. So you're going to be Tom. I'm going to be Mary. All right. Narrator voice. Mary comes home from an exhausting day. She wants and needs to share her feelings.

Okay, so I'm Mary. There's so much to do. I don't have any time for myself. You should quit that job. You don't have to work so hard. Find something you like to do. But I like my job. They just expect me to change everything at a moment's notice. Don't listen to them. Just do what you can do. I am. I can't believe I completely forgot to call my aunt today. Don't worry about it. She'll understand. You know what?

You know what she's going through? She needs me. You worry too much. That's why you're so unhappy. I'm not always unhappy. Can't you just listen to me? I am listening. Why do I even bother? I hate you, Mary. I added that last part, but I thought that's what Tom would say.

So you see the pattern here, right? She's trying to like emotionally bond. I had a bad day and he's like, well, then you should quit. Okay. It's a little annoying when somebody basically like fast forwards to the part where they just like bark tedious advice at you. I've heard this sort of stereotype before that.

that women will articulate their problems because they want to be supported and men will cut to the solutions. Right. I don't really view this as a particularly gendered thing, mostly because my wife would be Tom in this conversation. Yeah. I'll be like, I don't, I think this might be cancer. She'll be like, go to the doctor. Just go to the fucking doctor. Right. And I'm like, I don't want to go to the doctor. I want you to tell me that it's not cancer and that I'm being crazy. Yeah.

He also weirdly like in the transition to like the solutions script, he also says that like women never offer solutions when someone's talking. It's just, I mean, come on. He's like, your wife might be confused because she's never gotten advice from a woman before. Women just go to each other with their problems and the other woman starts crying and then they cry together. And that's every conversation. Exactly.

It's the last scene of Mayor of Easttown. Just went on their knees, just crumpling to the floor. Wow, what a reference. So now we have to do like the good script. So essentially his only advice to men in this entire book is,

is this. Do not immediately go to Mr. Fix-It bullshit. Like, when your wife is telling you about a problem, she needs emotional support. She needs you to reflect her emotions back to her. She doesn't want you to, like, tinker with it and fix it. So...

This is the script of Tom and Mary again, but this is like they fix their problems and this is how it's supposed to go. This is good, Tom. This is good, Tom. So get in a good Tom headspace. All right. So Mary comes home from work again. She says, there's so much to do. I have no time for me. Hmm. Sounds like you had a hard day. They expect me to change everything at a moment's notice. I don't know what to do. Hmm. I even forgot to call my aunt. Oh, no.

She needs me so much right now. I feel so bad. You are such a loving person. Come here. Let me give you a hug. Tom gives Mary a hug and she relaxes in his arms with a big sigh of relief. She then says, I love talking with you. You make me really happy. Thanks for listening. I feel so much better.

Patronize your wife until she loves you. Just like, hmm, oh no. To be clear, when I took a deep breath and relaxed on the exhale, that's because it

It says Tom takes a deep breath and relaxes on the exhale. Yeah, I removed some of the stage directions. It also said like Tom furrows his brow and says, oh, no. So you're supposed to be emoting with me, Peter. So, again, it's like this is not bad advice. Right. Reflect people's feelings back to them. Listen closely. Right. But it's like it's kind of amazing to me that he can't come up.

with any examples of this that are more than just going, hmm, oh no, Tom's not offering any insight. Yeah. Oh, it sounds like the same thing happened to you last week. Or like, oh, your boss has been like such a frustration for you this month. Something to indicate that he's actually invested in this problem. Right. Do you want to talk more about it? This is when I started to lose confidence in the book. It seemed okay at the beginning. Like I was willing to sort of like give it a chance, but like, I don't know, this is like very specific or very helpful. Yeah.

Then we get to the section on women's communication styles. So he says, when a woman is stressed, she instinctively feels a need to talk about her feelings and all the possible problems that are associated with her feelings. When she begins talking, she does not prioritize the significance of any problem.

If she's upset, then she's upset about it all, big and small. To feel better, women talk about past problems, future problems, potential problems, even problems that have no solutions. The more talk and exploration, the better they feel. She's not immediately concerned with finding solutions to her problems, but rather seeks relief by expressing herself and being understood. By randomly talking about her problems, she becomes less upset. This is the way women operate. To expect otherwise is to deny a woman her sense of self.

Women be talking. Women be talking. Women will feel stuff and then they're going to want to yap about it quite a bit. I also, this is another pattern that we see throughout the book where he's very clearly talking about his wife here. Right. Like he's saying something very specific, right? He's like, when women are upset, they just talk about fucking everything at once, right? Past, present, future. They can't distinguish. They bring up, oh, and my mom is sick and work was bad and the dog isn't home. Right.

And you just have to let them talk and like tire themselves out. It's like you're just talking about your wife who like seems to have anxiety. Right. This is not remotely universal to women at all. And like I also know men that do this when they're stressed out. Of course. I do this when I'm stressed out. Women will always say things like, John, I hate you.

John, you never listen. You're the worst husband on earth. So then he gives like weirdly specific advice about this. He says that when you're telling a story to your husband, you should like skip to the end first because like men get bored if they don't know where the story is going and you're like building suspense. But like men don't like it when you're building suspense. Yeah.

That also just seems like something you want to tell your wife, but you're giving us advice. I understand the desire to simplify complex things, right? Yeah. Everyone wants that quick solution. You want to be able to say...

Oh, my partner is doing that thing. What's the button I press to fix it? But some things are just complicated, you know, and like you can't simplify them. It'll only dilute your understanding. And I think like relationships, gender dynamics, they fall into those categories. Right. Right. You can't treat your spouse's behavior differently.

Like it's something your pet is doing. A lot of his advice in this book sounds like dealing with a difficult co-worker or something. Where it's like, okay, you're forced into a situation with this person. You have to come up with a strategy for like how to manage them. Yeah. You know, he has this advice throughout the book where he's like, try to remember things going on in your wife's life. Like if she had a doctor's appointment, ask like, how did the doctor go? Right. I mean, am I... Like you should not need to be told like, by the way, when your wife...

When your wife is ill and goes to the doctor, you're going to want to follow up. And a lot of this stuff just comes across as like, do you...

Do you like this person? But then, okay, then we get to the part that like made me leave the book and go to Google. So his advice to women after establishing all of their communication problems, they just talk about everything at once, is women oftentimes give criticism in a way that is accusatory. There's this fundamental mismatch where she thinks she's saying something innocent, but he sees it as an attack on him. So he then lists...

The fucking list in this book, Peter, he every list has like 10 to 20 more items than you need to like understand the concept. So he then lists a bunch of phrases that women say and the way that men are interpreting them. OK, so I'm not going to send you the whole list for the love of God, but I'm going to send you three examples. Shit. OK, so.

We never do anything together anymore because you are lazy, unromantic, and boring. We never go out. That's what he hears. We'll circle back. Uh,

What she says, this house is always a mess. What she means, today I feel like relaxing, but the house is so messy. I am frustrated and I need a rest. A man may hear, this house is a mess because of you. I do everything possible to clean it up. And before I have finished, you have messed it up again. You are a lazy slob and I don't want to live with you unless you change. Clean up or clear out. House is a mess. What she says, I want more romance.

What she means. Sweetheart, you have been working so hard lately. Let's take some time out for ourselves. Would you surprise me with flowers sometime soon and take me out on a date? I love being romanced.

Good lord. John needs therapy more than anyone I've ever seen in my fucking life. Your wife's like, I want a little more romance. Did your ex fuck you better? Is that what's happening? Yeah.

I was going to make exactly that same joke. Oh, don't fuck you like Todd does, huh? I mean, good Lord. You know, but it's funny that there is something to this. Like when someone sort of like expresses a frustration, you don't want to take it too personally, right? It's something you can work on together. But...

These sort of like she she's going to say we don't go out that much. You're going to hear that you're a fucking loser. You're the laziest piece of shit on earth. But that's actually not what she's saying. It's like no one who has a healthy relationship with themselves think that thinks that that's what she's saying. Dude. And also keep in mind, this entire thing is a list of advice to women. Right.

This is not advice for men. Like maybe don't jump to like deranged conclusions without understanding first what she means. Right. What do you mean, sweetie? Right. That's not his advice. That's not the framework for this. The framework for this is women need to not say things that trigger all of these sub deranged understandings in their husband. So he ends this chapter.

By saying, the answer is that she should definitely not offer criticism or advice unless he asks. Instead, she should try giving him loving acceptance. This is what he needs, not lectures. As he begins to feel her acceptance, he will begin to ask what she thinks. Oh, my God. Just clean up a little bit, dude. Like...

Have sex with your wife. This this harkens back to the initial anecdote where, you know, he returns to his bedridden wife in pain, lacking painkillers.

who's upset and immediately is like, oh, so you're mad at me? This is what I was just about to say. Like this totally recast the opening anecdote. Right. It's, you know, the idea that that is her fault in some way. It's just so obscene. Bro. So, okay. So the first phase of me reading this book was...

Was like, whatever. Sure. I don't know. It's getting a little more iffy. The second phase of reading this, I was like, all right, who is this fucking guy? Yeah. So then I start Googling around to figure out who John Gray is. So he's born in Houston in 1951. His dad is an oil man. His mom runs a bookstore. Okay. And when he's a teenager, he goes to a transcendental meditation seminar. Okay.

and gets really into transcendental meditation, yoga, all this kind of 60s woo-woo stuff that was bouncing around at the time. He ends up becoming essentially the executive assistant or like the right-hand man of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the guy who's like...

Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah.

He says that during this period, he attained bachelor's and master's degrees in the science of creative intelligence at something called the Maharishi International University. Oh, yeah. No, I've got degrees from there, too. Yeah, exactly. The Peter Lawboy University. Yeah.

So this university, there's one in Switzerland that is not accredited. There's also one in Fairfield, Iowa, which is accredited, but people have reached out to the university and they don't appear to have any record of John Gray ever attending. So it's not clear that he ever got his bachelor or master's. He also has never been a licensed couples counselor.

In the paperback edition of Men Are From Mars, he says that he's a member of the National Academy for Certified Therapists, which does not appear to exist. He also says that he's a member of the American Counseling Association, which offers memberships for $189 on their website. So anyone can be a member of that. Yeah.

When he was done traveling around with this yogi guy, he moved to San Francisco and started offering couples counseling. That part is true. However, there's a weird loophole, or at least there was at the time, in California law where you don't need a license to practice couples counseling if you're a religious instructor.

Right. So the idea is that like priests can give couples counseling without necessarily getting licensed because it's under like a spiritual framework. Yeah. So because he's this kind of quasi religious guru, he's able to give couples counseling advice. But it's not clear that it's like couples counseling. I think it's like meditation counseling. He never is specific about what the nature of the counseling is. And throughout the book, one of the weirdest things about the book is he says he's been a couples counselor for seven years.

There's like maybe two or three examples of couples in this book. So after three years of like being this like yogi transcendental meditation guy, he links up with another self-help grifter named Barbara DeAngelis, who offers like relatively legit couples counseling or these kind of seminars for couples. They're only married for three years.

And I don't know what happened behind the scenes, but what we know is he basically rebrands, right? At the time, he's like this guy with a ponytail. He's like a yoga meditation woo-woo guy, right? After a couple years with her like kind of air of legitimacy –

He rebrands himself as like Dr. John Gray, right? So I don't know if it's at her suggestion or what, but he eventually gets a PhD from something called Columbia Pacific University, which is a distance only degree granting institution that was shut down by court order in the year 2000. Fully

just like a like grifter you and I read some of the court documents it basically seemed like it was just a box ticking exercise the authorities found that four of their PhD students had been granted PhDs after less than a year of study one person wrote their PhD on Spanish literature in Spanish and it was judged by four instructors who didn't speak Spanish like they got a good grade and

You just basically buy a degree from this place. And then when people have pushed back on him about this, I'm like, oh, it kind of seems like you have like a fake PhD. He then points them to the fact that he was granted an honorary degree from some university in Illinois after he gave a commencement speech. He's like, oh, that's why I'm allowed to put PhD on the titles of my book. Yeah.

An honorary degree is not a degree. This university that gave him an honorary PhD doesn't even give PhDs. Like, you just don't have a PhD, dude. I do want to point out before we move on, you're saying that he used to be a little bit bohemian, but now he's bourgeois. Yeah.

What does that make him, Michael? He's wearing a vest. He's going to bakeries. And also, what is fucking amazing to me is this is not like a secret. So I found out most of this from a 1994 L.A. Times article. Like at the height of his fame, it's called something along the lines of

John Gray's unconventional path to the bestseller list. And it just lays out all the various frauds that he's committed. Yeah, but it does it in this way that it's like, that's weird. Right. He says that he earned that money from business. But if you look at the records, he actually robbed it from a bank. Right. Unconventional. It doesn't reach the obvious conclusion to this that like he's doing this cynically. Like it's

It's not like he thought it was a real PhD when he signed up and like, oh, no, it's not a real school. He did this so that he could take on an air of legitimacy and give people advice and sell books to people. The ways in which our culture coddles grifters. It's amazing. Oh, my fucking God.

We can debate how fair it is to blame somebody for what they did after their book was published. But it is notable that like he has been a just nonstop grifter since this book hit the big time. So in 1997, he sets up something called the Mars and Venus Counseling Center where he allows people to be certified Mars and Venus counselors. Sure. So this is a guy without a license.

To practice, who's now selling licenses to people. He's been selling dietary supplements through his website since fucking 2005. In 2019, he gets a cease and desist order from the FDA for making health claims like this can cure Alzheimer's and shit. He did some extremely bleak

autism grifting in the early 2000s where he said you could treat autism by taking 102 degree baths. What? Not 101, not 103. They have to be 102 degrees and that will help your kids get over their autism.

The only artifact of this in the book, like, because I was expecting this sort of pseudoscience stuff to come up in the rest of Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. I don't really know if this is to his credit, but he doesn't really do any, like, the female brain pan shit. Right. It's not a – there's no biological analysis. Yeah. He's not even really trying, which, like, I'd rather have that than a bunch of pseudoscience, so, like, fair enough. Yeah. But in the book, he does say –

Some women who avoid dealing with negative emotions and resist the natural wave motion of their feelings experience premenstrual syndrome. There is a strong correlation between PMS and the inability to cope with negative feelings in a positive way. In some cases, women who have learned successfully to deal with their feelings have felt their PMS symptoms disappear.

How is this? This is so sexist that it's turning me a straight white male into like a raging feminist college student. You're burning a bra next to your laptop right now. Oh, my God.

I was wondering how much of this book is just like men are rational and women are emotional. Is that a big part of it? This is like the rest of the episode, Peter. So to get back to the book. So I'm only a third of the way through the book by this point. And I'm like, oh, this this is just some random guy. Hmm.

Right. It's not clear that he was ever really a couples counselor. Right. He's been giving these fucking seminars, which I think are just full of the same grifty bullshit. Like he's talking at people. He's not really getting experiences from people. Right. He's not gathering data or anything. So essentially, the entire book is just like him working through his own shit. The only example he cites in the book over and over again is himself saying,

Uh-huh. Okay. Yeah.

He says at one point when he comes back from his cave and his wife is upset, he explains, I needed some time alone. It was only for two days. What's the big deal? Oh, my God. What the fuck? Two days. Two days.

He is 41 years old when this book is published. He has three kids. I mean, I don't mean to state the obvious here, but perhaps the reason that your spouse is not retreating for days on end is not because they're a woman, but because they cannot. Right. I love the idea of him writing this book as like a

A defense against Bonnie. 100%. He's carrying like a six pack into the room, the room with the TV. And Bonnie is like, John, please, we haven't talked in days. And he's like, cave time. Sorry, still in my cave. This book, the only interesting thing about it, because it's like thuddingly repetitive, is it ends up being this like almost accidental biography of him. So like the tension that he's dealing with is that he obviously loves his wife, but

But he also, he was a, he was a transcendental meditation yoga guy for nine years. Like he needs solitude. And when he has problems, when he's challenged, he wants to run away from things and go meditate for two days or whatever. That's his like conflict management style. And he's like, he says this in interviews. He doesn't say it in the book.

But it's like, yeah, based on his background, he runs away as soon as he sees a problem. And he like he's terrified of having to actually like remain in this relationship and actually address a conflict. He wants to run away, wait two days, come back, pretend like everything is normal. Right. But instead of realizing that he has these patterns that like really aren't very healthy or adult, he comes up with a whole world view.

of like, no, no, no, no, no. This is how men are. Yeah. I'm doing this because I'm a man and the problem with women is they're always telling men not to go to their caves. Right. Every single thing in this book is just like him dealing with his own shit but not dealing with it or processing it. It's justifying it. Right. Maybe I've got this wrong. I was conceiving of it as...

He's directing the book toward Bonnie as an excuse. But maybe the book stands between himself and a recognition that he could improve himself. Right, right. He retreats into like, I actually can't improve myself because this is just man stuff. All men do this. Right. And women have to understand. The other accidental biography thing in this is there's a bunch of like weird oblique references to parenting and upbringing. Right.

He says,

And then this is like 30 pages later. He says,

But it didn't happen that way for most of us. Instead, we spent 18 years learning unsuccessful communication skills. You know, I do wonder whether gender dynamics when he was growing up were so bad that this book is like a positive step, even if you can look back at it and think like, wow, this is essentialist nonsense, right? But at least the premise of like,

People have reasons for their different behaviors, and you should try to understand those. Right.

That in and of itself is progressive enough that it's a vast improvement upon what was there before, right? I don't know. I think that's like the tension that he's struggling with in this book, right? Because I think he grew up just like hating his mom and being like, my mom is this horrible shrew to my father. And this has like helped him understand what he perceives as his mother's behavior, right? He's like, oh, well, she did this because she's a woman.

Right. Yeah.

He like it's funny that this is a book that is essentially about at its core some level of self-awareness. Right. But this dude has fucking none. None. Exactly. It's wild. So also. OK. So the next sort of section, as I started thinking about like the project that this book is engaged in, I started Googling like John Gray women. Yeah. OK. This is from a 2014 interview.

The reason why there's so much divorce is that feminism promotes independence in women. I'm very happy for women to find greater independence. But when you go too far in that direction, then who's at home? I was like, that's not great. What's the next tab I have open? He gave an interview to an Australian newspaper because he was like doing a book tour there or something. And they asked him about Julia Gillard, who was the prime minister at the time.

And he does this whole thing that like she's too masculine and the reason she's turning off voters is her masculinity. I mean, obviously, he knows nothing about Australian politics and neither do I, honestly. But like this is his theory for why this happened. And then it says – this is from the article. It says, Dr. Gray also said the perception from the electorate that the PM was a liar would be hurting her chances. Quote,

Good lord. Yeah. It's like, of course. Fucking you lifelong fraud. Yeah.

This is like a trope that I've heard so many times that like women are lying when they're putting on makeup. It's the most bizarre shit ever. It's so weird. Because A, you'd have to be a complete schmuck to like look at a girl with like, you know, heavy eyeshadow and be like, is that real? But also like,

OK, like what do you don't do your hair? Suits are fake. It's all fake. Working out is fake. It's so stupid. And I like can't process it as anything other than a manifestation of just like pure hatred for women. And again, it's like maybe it's unfair to judge this 1992 book from what he said in 2013. But it's like these ideas are everywhere in this book.

He has this whole thing that men need to feel appreciated and women need to couch their requests and concerns in a way that acknowledges that like he's doing his best. So he has this whole thing about, you know, men need to go to their caves. And the following chapter is about how women's emotions come in waves. He gets to this point where he talks about the fundamental contradiction of what happens when a man wants to go to his cave.

And a woman needs support because she's at the bottom of her wave, right? A woman needs support when she's feeling bad. In one of the other only like specific examples in this book, he says there was nothing wrong with Harris's need to be alone, nor was there anything wrong with Kathy's hurt feelings. Instead of arguing, he could have told her something like this.

I understand you're upset, and right now I really need to watch TV and relax. When I feel better, we can talk. This would give him time to watch TV as well as an opportunity to cool off and prepare himself to listen to his partner's hurt without making her hurt feelings worse. In hearing this suggestion, Kathy said, If he gets to be in his cave, then what about me? I give him space, but what do I get? What Kathy gets is the best her partner can give at the time.

By not demanding that he listen to her when she wants to talk, she can avoid making the problem much worse by having a huge argument. A huge argument caused by him. Caused by him. Do not irritate the cave-dwelling male. The cave-dwelling male. What the fuck? I mean, the basic approach, like the tips directed towards women are like,

A, leave me alone. B, tell me I'm a good boy. Totally. That's it, right? And you're literally weighing like her need for emotional support against your need to just completely disengage from her. And to like fucking watch TV. He's not specific about like what her problem is or what she's going through, but it's like, yeah, I had a really bad day, sweetie. Can we talk about it? And you're like, I really need to watch TV though. Yeah, come on. Come on. Like he never deals with the fact that

Some of his advice is fundamentally incompatible. And he never tries to form a compromise of like, OK, listen to her for 15 minutes. Right. And then be like, sorry, I really I also had a long day. I really need to disengage. Is three days too much cave time? What about if like her problems are severe? Right. Someone in her life is terminally ill. Is the cave acceptable in that situation? I would like to see the outer boundaries of the cave.

And this is another super dark theme that goes throughout the book. He keeps complaining about women trying to change men. Even though Bonnie has successfully done it many times, making him a much better person, even though he still sucks. She's basically trained this guy like a fucking seal. Yeah.

So he says the biggest problem in relationships occurs when a woman shares her upset feelings. And as a result, a man feels unloved. Yeah, yeah. That's that's the biggest problem in relationships for sure. The biggest problem. I know. The biggest problem is that my wife is upset and I do not like the way that she's expressing it. That's he says the most frequently expressed complaint men have about women is that women are always trying to change them. Hmm.

Later in the book, he has a list of mistakes women commonly make. One of them is she tries to change or control his behavior by sharing her negative feelings. Parentheses. It is OK to share feelings, but not when they attempt to manipulate or punish. Yeah, that's not something that you're inferring because you are in desperate need of therapy, John. John.

This is someone who has basically conceded that he takes the smallest comment as like an unbelievably aggressive critique, right? Right. And what he's basically expressing here, it's like an age old misogynistic belief. Yeah. First of all,

The idea that somebody would ask you for some form of support and you would immediately leap to, oh, are you trying to change me? Yeah. It's like, well, yeah. Right. Like I would like you to behave differently. But casting every single one of those requests as some sort of existential threat is just like a huge escalation. And on this thing of like she's sharing her upset feelings to manipulate or punish you.

Right. Right.

And to express this as something that men should look out for, right? Like, is she telling me she's sad because she's really sad? Or is she trying to change me? That is just like rank-

He's written an entire book that's dedicated to, like, protecting his ego. That's, like, the whole book. And this leads into the next section. So, like, the next phase of my engagement with this book, once I realized what the project of the book was, right?

was like, is any of this correct? Like, is he on to anything? So chapter 12 of the book is called How to Ask for Support and Get It. He says one of the main problems in relationships is that women often feel unsupported. And one of the main reasons that they feel unsupported is they don't know how to ask for support. So he starts the chapter by saying, she assumes that if her partner loves her, he will offer his support and she won't have to talk. She

She may even purposefully not ask as a test to see if he really loves her. To pass the test, she requires that he anticipate her needs and offer his unsolicited support. This approach to relationships with men doesn't work. Men are from Mars, and on Mars, if you want support, you simply have to ask for it.

I like the implication that women do respond well to demands and resentment. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, the whole book is how to coddle his demands and resentment. Right. So like, and so at least he's consistent. The fact that he has like not been adequately supportive is a given here. Obviously. Remember when I said that his advice to men is like kind of weirdly generic and

And his advice to women is extremely specific. He says one of the most common mistakes in asking for support is the use of could and can in place of would and will. Could you empty the trash is merely a question gathering information. Would you empty the trash is a request. What? I was seeing this. I'm like, this is like a weird, a weirdly specific thing. And then he spends pages on it.

delineating exactly what he means by like the specific wording women have to use to get men to support them around the house. So again, this book has a bunch of like extremely filler-ish lists. He then includes

17 quotes from men describing why they hate it when their wives ask could or can. This is like the most research he did for the whole book. Yeah. What shit do you hate the most about your wife? So I am going to send you four of these quotes. Oh my God. All right.

When my wife says, can you change Christopher's diaper? I think, sure, I can change it. I'm capable and a diaper is a simple thing to change. But then if I don't feel like doing it, I might make some excuse. Now, if she asked, would you change Christopher's diaper? I would say, yeah, sure.

And do it. Inside, I would feel like I like to participate and I enjoy helping raise our children. I want to help. I want to help, just not enough to respond when you say could rather than would. Yeah. So I would like to pause because first this reminds me of like, were you ever in like elementary school and you'd ask a teacher, like, can I go to the bathroom? And they were like, I don't know. Can you? And it's like, shut the fuck up and let me pee while using colloquial speech, please. Yeah.

But also I just I love this like this book where like this premise spoken or unspoken is basically like men are rational beings and women are touchy emotional freaks. And it's also like, by the way, even the slightest shift in the way that you speak will cause me to lose my fucking mind and like question my entire role in the relationship. Yeah.

Okay, next one. Next one. Just this last week, my wife asked me, could you plant the flowers today? And without hesitation, I said yes. Then when she came home, she asked, did you plant the flowers? I said no. She said, could you do it tomorrow? And again, without hesitation, I said yes. This happened every day this week, and the flowers are still not planted.

I think if she had asked me, would you plant the flowers tomorrow? I would have thought about it. And if I had said yes, I would have done it. If only she had asked differently. Are you fucking kidding me? I wouldn't have behaved like a lazy piece of shit and agreeing to do something for my wife and just not do it. It's actually her fault that I didn't plant the fucking flowers when you think about it. Normal adult stuff. When I say, yes, I could do that, I am not committing myself to doing it.

I'm just saying that I could do it. I have not promised to do it. If she gets upset with me, I feel like she doesn't have a right. If I say I will do it, then I can understand why she's upset if I don't do it. Shouldn't ask could. Hey, can you take Katie to her recital? Yeah, I could. I have the ability to do that. I have car keys. Like, is that what you think your wife was asking you? You fucking piece of shit.

You know how human conversations often consist of just walking up to people and asking them about their abilities? And I'm like, Peter, can you swim? And you're like, yes. And I'm like, thank you for that information. Okay. God damn it. All right. This is... Last one. Last one. When I hear a could you, I'll immediately say yes. And then over the next 10 minutes, I will realize why I'm not going to do it and then ignore the question. But when I hear a will you, a part of me comes up saying, yes, I want to be of service. And then even if objections come up later in my mind...

I will still fulfill her request because I have given my word. Keep in mind, these are all being marshaled as advice to women. These are the worst people on earth. My wife is asking me for a simple favor and I am just going to be unbelievably obnoxious and pedantic about the specific ways in which she asked me. Just plant the fucking flowers, take out the trash. Like, my God. And by the way, I totally...

with procrastination on this shit. Like, that's not it. But you can't, like, rationalize it away as, like, she didn't ask me right. Exactly. She didn't treat me like a special boy. Be an adult. Be like, I agreed to it, but then I got tired. Yeah. And I didn't do it. I want to do it and I know that I should and it would be better for everyone, but I'm lazy. Yeah. I can't manage my priorities. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's how it is. So,

This section of this book is so bad that there's an entire academic article about it. Hell yeah. Hell yeah. So for this, I read a book called The Myth of Mars and Venus by Deborah Cameron, which was really interesting. And she describes what's going on here as tactical misunderstanding. The basic premise is that

Much of what we convey in our speech is not in the literal meaning of the words, right? A lot of it comes from the context in which it's being said. So the example that she uses in her article is when she was growing up, mom would set the table and they'd sit down to eat and then dad would go, do we have any ketchup? And obviously what he means by that is I would like some ketchup. So mom gets up, she goes to the kitchen, grabs the ketchup, comes back to the table, gives him the ketchup, right? Yeah.

But she noticed that when she, the child, said, do we have any ketchup? Her mom would say, oh, yeah, it's in the middle cupboard. Basically implying she has to go and get the ketchup and bring it to the table. Right. So that is an example of tactical misunderstanding. Her mom is basically pretending not to understand what the meaning of the words are.

Right. She's pretending to take it literally. Yeah. Because in the hierarchy of the family, the mom considers the father to be sort of higher than her on the hierarchy. And she is willing to serve him. Yeah. Whereas the kid is lower than her on the hierarchy. So she's going to pretend like, oh, I guess you were just curious about whether or not we have any ketchup. Right. This is something that we all do all the time.

Right. We all speak in ways that are not congruent with the literal meaning of our words. And we all deliberately decide how to interpret other people's speech, depending on what we feel like or what our place in the hierarchy is. Right. So when men are doing this, they are very deliberately. Right.

misinterpreting these phrases. That one guy literally fantasized about a world where she had used the word would instead of could and was like, I think I would have. I definitely would have done it. Absolutely would have done it. I actually did a decent amount of reading on like the actual differences between men and women in communication styles. And this thing about tactical misunderstanding is a really good example of the ways that what we think of as

men and women and how they're different are actually reflections of existing hierarchies. People higher than you on the ladder are able, they have the ability to be like, oh, I don't know what you mean by that and sort of make you, the subordinate person, spell out your requests. It's basically this way that people in power treat every request by their subordinates as if they're asking for a favor. They're basically casting themselves in their own marriages.

in this role of like any support that I give, she has to direct me. And if I acquiesce to her request, it's basically me doing something nice for her. So I want to be thanked for it. I want to be asked in this perfect way. It's something extra that I'm doing.

So this entire interaction is 100% about reestablishing a hierarchy of the home in which men are able to be delegated to, but women are fundamentally the project managers. And they have to ask for any aspect of support that they need under every circumstance. It's hard not to look at these questions.

from these guys and see that they're rationalizing something that they don't quite understand. Yeah. They don't have a good explanation for why they don't do things when they're asked. But here's Gray, John Gray coming around with this framing of like, what about this would versus could thing? Right. And they're like, yes.

That's it. Because they, you know, they can't confront the sort of reality that they are, in fact, treating their wives as they are, as if they were subordinate or at the very least just being fucking lazy. All of this reminds me of a fight that a friend of mine had with her husband where she asked him to empty the dishwasher and he was like, oh, why are you always nagging me about this? And his kind of pitch to her was, I want to empty the dishwasher as like an act of love to

you, right? I want to do it because I want to do it. And it's something kind. And when you ask me to do it, it takes away the kindness and generosity. And it just feels like I'm kind of ticking a box and I don't get to feel like a husband who's like doing his duties, right? So you're, you're robbing me of this emotional satisfaction that I get from emptying the dishwasher. Yeah. And her response to this was like, okay, great. But you feel like

emptying the dishwasher two or three times a month, and it needs to be emptied 20 or 30 times a month. I get that you want to be doing this because it satisfies you. I would also like that. But the dishwasher needs to get emptied. The point of emptying the dishwasher is not to serve your emotional needs. It's to refill the dishwasher. And I do understand that when someone's telling you to do something, it's not emotionally fulfilling to do it. I get it. There is a shelf.

that I have been meant to put up for about a year and a half. Oh, Peter. Well, I don't think it would look that good. My wife disagrees. But I totally understand that like push and pull where it's like,

If you're going to do it, you would want to be doing it on your own terms. But on the other hand, it's like the reason that it needs to be done is not so that you can feel better. The reason that it needs to be done is because it needs to be done. Right. Right. Except in the case of the shelf, which I really don't think needs to be put up.

I'm glad we've reached the part of the book where you're recognizing yourself. You're like, well, if she had said, would you put up the shelf? Some people retreat to a TV cave. My cave is just not putting up the shelf. And I've been there for a year and a half.

So, I mean, to get into some of the actual literature on gender differences, most of the studies on gender differences in communication, it seems like they do find differences. Like on the question of do women talk more than men? It seems like in the sort of meta-analyses that women do talk slightly more than men. But these things are very situational. In the Myth of Mars and Venus book,

She says,

Questions are often used as opening moves in a conversation rather than being straightforward requests for information. Questions like how was your day or who was at the party are invitations to talk about a certain topic. One reason why the women in Fishman's study asked so many questions was that their partners often passed on several proposed topics. By not responding or responding very minimally, men signaled that the women should propose another line of questioning they were interested in discussing.

Once women had offered them a topic they were interested in, they often did most of the talking. But they did not regard it as their responsibility to initiate conversation or find something to talk about. They left it to their female partner to do what Fishman called interactional shit work. So even on what seems like a simple question of like, do men talk more than women? It's like, well, in these studies, they're finding that men and women talk roughly the same, but...

women talk more in a way of like fishing around for topics. And then once they find a topic, he then does more of the talking. This kind of shows up in all of the studies on this is that like oftentimes you do find differences. But once you drill into the differences, it's like, oh, it's actually really situational. Yeah, that's really interesting. I think that I guess I never thought

That like women talk more? Me neither, actually. That's just never really... Maybe that's because I like to talk. And so the idea that it's a female thing would not compute in my brain. Do you just use the phrase, excuse me, a man is talking and they talk a lot less? I'm mansplaining here. I'm in my talking cave. Please be quiet.

But so there's also something called the gender similarities hypothesis. Okay. One of the researchers on this says a much better way to think about gender differences is that men are from North Dakota and women are from South Dakota. Are there differences if you really look for them? Sure. But there's actually much more similarities if you look for them. So one of the examples...

that she uses is there is actually data that shows that men are less likely to share personal details in their friendships. That I believe, yeah. But when you actually look at the specifics, most men reveal personal information about themselves to their friends, and most women reveal personal information about themselves to their friends.

But the minority who don't reveal personal information is like slightly larger among men than among women. OK, there's a gender difference there on average. But the most accurate way to talk about that is that most people reveal personal information to their close friends. That's interesting, too. You know, there's a couple of levels to this because you can identify all sorts of differences potentially between men and women. But then the next level question is immediately, well, is that

Just socialization. Right. Right. I mean, there was there was a study a few years ago that I'm probably going to misremember a bit, but that tried to map male and female brains. This was a big deal at the time.

Because they found that there were some sort of average differences, you know, the size of certain features in the brain. But there were no truly definitive distinctions. No singular feature you could point to and be like, that's a male brain. Right. Because there's just too much variation in both cases. And even that, you know, whether or not certain types of brain activity might be influenced by socialization can, you know, is sort of up in the air. I would think that a huge chunk...

of any differences we're seeing are socialized. Well, I mean, reading all this stuff, I actually sort of concluded that, like, I'm not actually married to the idea that, like, there's no differences between men and women. Yeah. And I'm not married to the idea that, like, there are differences between men and women. In essentially every domain...

There are more differences within men and women than there are between them. So in this great meta-analysis, they found that almost all the studies of gender differences find less than a 10% difference. Most of them find less than 5% differences. And people are not only their genders, right? So if you have a person in front of you and you're trying to figure out how talkative they're going to be,

it would be really reductive to be like, well, you're a woman, so you're going to talk more, right? Because there's no such thing as like a woman. It's also a Protestant, a middle class, a raised in the South, a college educated. There's all these other traits that also theoretically would make somebody more or less talkative. And so at a certain point, rather than doing this like eight dimensional calculation of like,

okay, she's white, so she's going to talk more, but she's a woman, she's going to talk less. Like, you can just treat people as individuals and in 10 minutes of a conversation, you can be like, oh, this person's a little bit more talkative than average. Right. So, like, at the end of the day, you're still going to have to treat people as individuals and move forward on that basis anyway. So, like,

I think it's great to study this stuff. I think it's really interesting. But ultimately, it's really not that useful. And even if you drill down to like the biological level and you're looking at like the brains, right, you can say, OK, there are median differences between male and female brains, but there are also areas where they overlap, right?

Such that you can hold two beliefs at once, right? One, there are median differences to gender exists on a spectrum. Trans people are real, etc. Right. You don't need to hold on to this binary of there are.

There are differences between men and women or there are none. It's all fake. Right. But at the same time, it feels unnecessary where it's just like, just try to be nice. Treat people like people. I mean, this kind of gets us to the last section of the episode. I mean, there's more of the book to talk about. He has like a whole kind of advice, really bad advice toward the end of the book. I can read it on my own while I'm just sweating out my autism in my hot bath. Okay.

There's nothing – I mean, we can easily dunk on this stuff. He says –

you should organize your relationship as like a point system. Yeah, that's healthy for sure. Whatever it, you know, qualitatively, it's like, okay, we all sort of hold other people in esteem. This doesn't have to be that bad. And then he actually lists the actions and how many points to award. Oh, hell yeah. It's like, okay, fuck this guy. I mean, I was, I was deep in like, fuck this guy territory by the time I got to that part. How many points do you lose for disappearing for two days on your life? Yeah.

Well, it depends on how she asked. But then to get into the sort of legacy and the aftermath and the impact of this book, it comes as part of this huge wave of men and women are different bestsellers that we had throughout the 1990s. Yeah. Almost every single author of every one of those books talked about it as like forbidden knowledge. So John Gray in interviews said,

He said, oh, you couldn't even talk about men and women being different at that time. And then I came out and said this controversial thing. He described this and the other authors described this as basically a reaction to the excesses of feminism. Because the feminist movement says that men and women are identical in every single way. And so what we're doing is we're reclaiming the idea that men and women are actually different.

And like no feminist says, like no one says this. First as tragedy, then as farce. Yeah. Except the farce, I guess, then repeats for 30 more years at the very least. This is like the Ben Shapiro thing of being like, oh, men are taller. You can't even say that anymore. No one was saying this in the first place. Right.

But it is interesting to me that this book finds popularity in 1993, which is after what is perceived to be the year of the woman. There's an infamous time cover because in late 1991, we had the Clarence Thomas hearings in Anita Hill. And in the 1988 and 1992 elections, we had unprecedented numbers of women elected to Congress. Right.

And so in the early 90s, there was this huge spike in the visibility of gender equality as an issue. And this book, and I think a lot of these other books, are part of a backlash to that. You know, reactionary talking points sort of repeat themselves over time. And when you look back,

It always looks a little more absurd. The idea that in the early 1990s, you couldn't talk about the differences between men and women. Are you fucking kidding me? Finally, we're talking about it. Finally. It's like, no, what actually happened was that it's been like 10 minutes since someone mentioned that maybe we're talking about the differences between men and women the wrong way. Right. And you're freaking out. I mean...

This is a podcast about the most harmful books of the last 50 years. And the harm of this book is very difficult to track, right? Because what it's basically doing is it's repackaging this idea that has been floating around the culture and like many cultures for hundreds of years.

as some sort of forbidden knowledge. And it's packaging it in a way that is very digestible. I think it's like easy to look at the book in and of itself as sort of trivial, like giving tips to middle-aged dorks who don't know why their spouse is grumpy. But it is part of this architecture of gender essentialism. And once you believe that there are these very clean and specific delineations between male and female behavior, it becomes harder to accept that

Right. Right.

trans people aren't real. And also, as soon as you start thinking about this stuff, it immediately motivates you to argue that we should go back to a time when there were clearer roles for men and women. Right. Because if men and women are fundamentally different, it's like, well, then she should be in the kitchen and he should be working. Right. It immediately takes you to another thing we see in health grifting all the time, which is like we used to be this great traditional society and like we've fallen from that. Right. We have too much blurred lines between men and women and all this stuff. Right. And, you know, the irony being that

Right. Right.

instead of just taking a single sociology class.