Mars and Venus

Posted on February 2, 2004 in College Gender Partnership

I haven’t been all that impressed with the communication skills of fans of John Gray’s much ballyhooed Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus: A Practical Guide for Improving Communication and Getting What You Want in Your Relationships. All too often, I’ve heard the lines whispered between compulsive gossips as a put down of men, of women who don’t like the traditional roles (feminists).

I am not from Mars. I live on Earth with my wife, other women, and other men. This is where we coexist and no amount of New Age synthesis of bad astronomy (astrology), bad corporate style mysticism (e.g. the Transcendental Meditation movement), and bad pop psychology is going to convince me that we’re limited to being the paper mache idols that degree mill-made “Ph.d” Gray erects.

Web based social critic Kathleen Trigiani defines one of my problem with Gray’s patriarchalism very nicely:

Standards of masculinity vary from time to time, from culture to culture. However, masculinity always defines itself as different from and superior to femininity. For example, gay men and househusbands exemplify “subordinate” masculinities in our culture. They’re not considered “real men”.

Who is John Gray or the men and women who echo his book title (perhaps without quite understanding what he is getting at) to tell me who I am? Early on, I recognized that feminism wasn’t against me. I could more readily make a satisfying place within it than within the black briefcase toting and pink frilled dress culture that so often looks away from its repressions of the human spirit. John Gray says “We can’t change. We’re stuck in our archetypes and you just have to get used to it.” I say “We have lots of room for diversity. Celebrate that. Celebrate those who engage in it, who make themselves unique.”

What Trigiani says about women also applies to men like me: “In the theory of hegemonic masculinity, it’s no mystery who gets society’s difference dividends. True, women may get a few consolation prizes, but it’s like getting a teddy bear as opposed to getting shares of Microsoft stock.” I hear from women and a few men that they admire my wife and I for making our choices, but I hardly get rewarded it for me. Women say that they like sensitive, caring, and open-minded men: they reward the John Gray’s of the world, however, and they attack those who I feel have responded most sensitively and most constructively to the way I want to exist in the world, namely the feminists. The men behind these mainstream women, of course, nod approvingly as their “girls” support the status quo.

“I am not a feminist,” say all too many women I know, with an inordinant amount of pride. Just what the hell do they mean by that? The feminists I know do not require that you sleep with another woman to gain membership. They do not demand that you get no enjoyment from having sex with men. They do not demand that you hate men or feel that you are superior. Feminists speak for the whole human species, I have found. When they find men who are oppressed (the overwhelming majority of them), they speak up for them, too. They stand for loving families and good marriages such as that which developed between Martin and Bella Abzug. Martin supported his wife’s legal and political career (as my feminist wife, Lynn, supports my life as a writer). When she passed the bar, he called her the greatest lawyer he’d ever known. When she was elected to Congress, he called her the country’s greatest representative. When she retired, he called her a great living statesperson:

The public may have hated the late Bella Abzug’s liberal politics, aggressive personality, and outspoken feminist activism, but it could never deny that she and Martin had a fulfilling marriage. Some readers may wonder what the stories of Betsy, Harold, Bella, and Martin have to do with M/F gender roles. They prove that couples can “do gender” without turning it into a Mars and Venus charade, that they can express interdependence without falling into patiarchal norms.

I interviewed Bella Abzug when I was in college. The school newspaper editor who sent me to do the job was disappointed: I didn’t succumb to his norm. I didn’t place myself as the male ERA-hating antagonist. She saw that I was nervous. Her words were softly spoken and true. I walked away feeling like a person. I have never, ever forgotten her kindness nor the kindness of many other feminists that I have met.

There was no top and bottom. There was no Mars and Venus. There were two people — a young man and a middle aged woman who had a conversation in the case of Abzug. I found her superior company to the frustrated maids who have given up trying to be anything except a spouse. When I went looking for my own life companion, I kept what I liked about Bella Abzug in mind and I searched and searched until I found a woman who shared her commitment to personhood in a society strangling its best and brightest with sex roles.

This essay should not end without a mention of the gender traitors of my own sex, the men who allow themselves to be screwed by our contemporary oligarchy. I have seen too many men drive themselves to the grave, trying to be the “I can carry it all” breadwinner by being the slave of another man. It has been the feminists who have understood best that today’s men are being screwed. The women who bitch and complain about their working class husbands because they have not delivered them homes in gated communities, fancy cars, and monthly trips to Paris haven’t a clue. They are the spokespersons and enforcers for powerful men who don’t care about any of us.

We live on the planet Earth, unseparated except by our attitudes. The wisest of us don’t allow our existences to be dominated by simplistic mythologies. We live to live.

---

Two excellent rebuttals to John Gray, including information about his dubious educational background and links to the transcendental meditation cult:

• Out of the Cave: Exploring Gray’s Anatomy — Kathleen Trigiani
• Rebuttal from Uranus