What planet are women from again?: A look back at the biggest 1990s relationship book
A cosmically weird way to talk gender relations
In the 1990s, you couldn’t swing a Skip-It without hitting a copy of Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. The bestselling self-help book promised to share the secrets to a successful relationship, predicated on the fundamental differences between the sexes.
Published 25 years ago in 1992, the book swept the talk show circuit, marketed as a “primer for understanding and communicating with the opposite sex” and a “manual for loving relationships.” By the end of the 1990s, it had sold 6.9 million copies and was the highest ranked work of nonfiction. Demand was such that Mattel introduced a MAFMWAFV board game. There was a Broadway play of the same name, themed valentines, infomercials, calendars, a magazine, and a CD-ROM with role-playing and punchy graphics that cost $49.95.
The book’s premise is utterly simple: Men and women are different. Learn how to speak one other’s language and save your relationship. But author John Gray goes one step further with the book’s namesake metaphor. Men and women might as well be from two separate planets, men on Mars and women on Venus. Imagine, writes Gray, that one day men invented space travel (emphasis added) and visited the Venusian damsels. Soon they discovered how different they really were — men were born self-assured leaders, and women emotional talkers — and forgot how to communicate.
Twenty-five years later the sexism of such a project seems downright laughable. Take this gem, written by Gray: “In an unspoken language the Venusians communicated loud and clear: ‘We need you. Your power and strength can bring us great fulfillment, filling a void deep within our being.’” In case that slipped past you: Women need men to complete them.
The book isn’t just loaded with stereotypes of men and women; it depends on them. Millions of people devoured the simple, packaged promise that men and women could be “figured out.” After all, as women entered the workforce in the 1980s and as divorce rates soared, Americans worried the traditional marriage was at stake. Meanwhile, the AIDS crisis created fear around queer relationships. The book hooked an audience eager for black-and-white answers.
Georgia Hall, from Springfield, Virginia, heard about Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus from her mother. The 22-year-old told USA Today, “I’ve been dating this guy for five years, and I’ve never understood why men need their space until now.”
It was the relationship bible of the 1990s, the same time pop culture triumphs like Friends and Sex and the City made a killing unpacking the psychology of the heterosexual fuck buddy. Could there be a more silver platter? [Chandler voice]
Now, John Gray isn’t what you would call a scholar. Born to a wealthy Houston oilman and a bookstore owner specializing in metaphysical literature, Gray studied transcendental meditation under the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi for nine years before leaving to “do his own thing.” In 1979 Gray moved to San Francisco, took computer classes, and had a ton of sex. “My relationships and having sex — and making money — are just as important pieces of the pie to me as my spirituality,” he told USA Today in 1994.
Gray married his first wife, relationship consultant Barbara De Angelis, in 1982, the same year he received an unaccredited Ph.D. by mail. The couple toured and gave seminars touting the secrets to happy marriage — until they divorced two years later. Gray’s credibility suffered, but by then he had learned the lucrative art of marketing.
When he married his new wife Bonnie in 1986, he was ready. He filled MAFMWAFV with examples from his new marriage, how much he had learned once he submitted to her Venusian whims.
Gray (or his editor) couldn’t have predicted the book’s runaway success, but they clearly prepared for the criticism with a number of defenses. Women’s lib was founded on the belief that men and women are essentially equal, after all. But Gray argues in the book’s introduction, “It sounds fine to say men are [his typo, not mine] women should be the same, but it is unrealistic and will actually make things worse.” Men and women act differently due to innate “instincts” and “brain and hormonal differences,” he asserts. “About 10 percent of women will relate to being from Mars. This is often simply a result of being born with higher testosterone levels.”
It was pseudoscience, an oversimplification of complex gender roles. The book cites no peer-reviewed studies and few cultural issues that impact gender behavior, such as female sexualization in the media, workplace discrimination, or the LGBT community. It is solely based on Gray’s years of “experience.”
Meanwhile, Gray’s celebrity status was selling out speaking engagements. “Martha makes the sheets, we make sure people lie in them,” Gray told Newsday while surrounded by chortling Mattel executives.
The approach may have flown in the ’90s, but it soon curdled amid the millennium’s girl power and identity movements.
This past week, I read Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus in a state of bemused rage that something so reductive could have gotten so popular.
Gray says men need to let women be irrational and hyperbolic, and women need to let men ignore them and retreat to their “caves” to problem-solve. He even lists activities women can distract themselves with if their man needs alone time. No kidding, one of them is shopping. As a self-professed relationship counselor, some of Gray’s advice reeks of psychological game-playing. Hard-to-get is a big one. “If you break the silence you lose your power,” when asking him to do something. Or “If you want to motivate him more, then gently and gracefully stop giving more.”
But, oh god, sometimes I related to the book’s prescriptions. Reading it felt like peeking at your horoscope despite its broad inaccuracies. Every few days (or pages), something is bound to speak to you. In the margins, I scribbled notes like “This is me!” or “Nope, I would never do this.” I jotted my husband’s name several times in the margins.
In general I related more to the women’s side of things — the need to actively support friends, the unpredictable emotional swings — but I’m also strongly independent and tend to be in denial about my own problems, two traits Gray ascribes to Martians. (Normally I ascribe my traits to introversion, not gender.)
By the time I was halfway through MAFMWAFV, I had softened to the grating gender stereotypes. As a woke millennial, I had trained myself to replace mentions of “man” or “woman” with the word “person.” See here: “It is a mistake to expect a man [or a person] to always be in touch with his loving feelings just as it is a mistake to expect a woman’s [or a person’s] feelings to always be rational and logical.”
But if everyone did that, we wouldn’t have a book. And Gray wouldn’t have amassed his empire. In 1997, Gray opened Mars and Venus Counseling Centers, where clients paid a one-time fee and monthly “royalty payments;” the scheme was criticized as a way to franchise therapy. In 1998 he published Men and Women in Management, and in 2002 a book called Staying Focused in a Hyper World, which he told USA Today was about “non-drug solutions for ADHD.” He claimed attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder “is the primary cause of divorce today.”
Then in January 2017, Gray published a new book: Beyond Mars and Venus: Relationship Skills for Today’s Complex World. It’s a whole new set of rules for today’s woke relationships and relaxed gender roles. As usual, Gray has impeccable timing. Americans now spend $549 million on self-help books every year.
That doesn’t mean it’s a must-read. At best, you might jot your partner’s name in the margin. At worst, it’s a masochistic hate-read that makes you feel even more alone.
