Ladies and gentlemen, forgive me, but I need to take a moment to tear this man a new asshole; professionally.
Without getting into too much revealing detail, I have recently been exposed to John Gray in depth, and the experience has left me feeling much like most young women feel when an arrogant puffy-lipped man exposes himself in public right in from of them: ashamed, and mildly curious.
A little background; some of you may have hear of this man from the early 90’s, and he is the authour of the much-beloved by average people, much belittled by people in possession of actual facts, “Men are From Mars, Women are from Venus”. This was only the first; there have since then been 16 more, all as barely varied in content as they are in name, that consist exclusively of John Gray’s personal version of human reality, the unreferenced version: cue drum-roll:
Mars and Venus on a Date
What You Feel You Can Heal
Men, Women and Relationships
Mars and Venus in Love
Mars and Venus Together Forever: A Practical Guide to Creating Lasting Intimacy
Mars and Venus in the Bedroom
Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus Book of Days
Mars and Venus Starting Over
How To Get What You Want and Want What You Have
Children Are from Heaven
Practical Miracles for Mars and Venus: Nine Principles for Lasting Love, Increasing Success, and Vibrant Health in the Twenty-first Century
Mars and Venus in the Workplace
Truly Mars & Venus
The Mars & Venus Diet & Exercise Solution
Why Mars and Venus Collide: Improving Relationships by Understanding How Men and Women Cope Differently with Stress
Mars and Venus: 365 Ways to Keep Passion Alive
Venus on Fire, Mars on Ice – Hormonal Balance – The Key to Life, Love, and Energy
It is the latest installment in this epic saga of baseless neo-Christian pseudo-psycho babble that has irked me ire. If men are from Mar, and women from Venus, then this cheese is from the moon.
In his mind, John Gray is an authora-tay on the secret needs and desires of every man from every woman, visa vie what they want from each other, no matter who or what they are. Somehow, he was gifted this information on the basis of his Ph.D from Columbia Pacific University, an unaccredited correspondence university that was closed by court order in 2000, though he does apparently have a bachelors and masters in “creative intelligence” from either the Maharishi European Research University or the Maharishi International University. One of these is in Switzerland , while the other is in Iowa , so it seems he may have been deliberately vague as to which one, as the Swiss end has scads of European intellectual sex appeal, while Iowa conjures up images of an overweight, white Gandhi sporting mutton chops and meditating in a corn field.
So aside from the degrees we all hold by graduating the kindergarten of getting shit kicked out of us, entering the school of hard knocks, and eeking by with barely passing grades in the University of “this is my life?!”, the man has about as much right to pen books that have altered the lives of millions of couples as dentist has to lead a wildlife adventure tour through Namibia.
At least with the first book, he made a point of playing up his experience as a clinical therapist as the basis for his overly fixed opinions; in this latest installment, he’s all Science – he looked it up on the internet. You cannot get through 2 pages without coming across the kind of assertion that would make Stephen Hawking roll over in his grave, were he dead, could he roll.
There are only 6 different percentages used to expound the exhaustive critical examination of his data (this book has no reference section or bibliography, btw): 10%, 25% 40% 50%, 75% and 90%. For example “Men also have far greater stores of serotonin because they make it 50% faster and store 50% more”. And don’t forget the age old “research has proven…that women’s muscles have 75% more endurance power”. He even goes so far as to assert that women have 40% more connective tissue between the right and left hemispheres of the brain, meaning that our emotional female brain-parts communicate more fluidly with the cold calculating bits, making us more in touch with our feelings. He might as well have said that they extra tissue dampens left-right brain transmission, leaving women with only the flippant left to sort out their weepy, irrational lives. Anyhow.
Strangely enough, some of these outrageous facts are almost true. Men’s global brain synthesis, not speed or storage, of serotonin is 40-50% greater than women’s (1,2); however, to take that singularly impressive fact and electrify it by making it sound like men’s brains are serotonin-producing NAPA roadsters, takes all the credibility out of not only this one statement, but every similar statement in the entire book.
Similarly, while there are gender related differences in muscle endurance, which can be summed up basically with the statement that men go hard, women go faster, the different varies wildly depending on the muscle groups involved and the type of exercise being preformed, with no difference at all being observed in a number of scenarios. In one isometric contraction test, women had approximately 28% better endurance than men, largely due to women having better lumbar muscle endurance (3).
It’s almost like someone played a game of telephone with all his scientific information; which each degree of separation, the information became more outlandish and removed from its source.
As for the brain, as pointed out with so much eloquence by Ron Burgandy, women actually do have a brain a "half the size of a man", but we make up for it by having more grey matter: the bits that do all the thinking. Men in fact, have more white matter (connective tissue) in their melons, and more cerebral spinal fluid, hence greater brain volume – but it ain’t size that matters, its content (5). As for the connective tissue between the hemispheres, the corpus callosum, there is no 40% thicker, no nothing. Some of the substructures of the corpus callosum are thicker and/or more or less widely spaced visa vie men and women, and many of the notable differences can usually be attributed to medical conditions, like craziness (6).
You, Mr. Gray, can officially suck it.
1. Okazawa H, Leyton M, Benkelfat C, Mzengeza S, Diksic M. Statistical mapping analysis of serotonin synthesis images generated in healthy volunteers using positron-emission tomography and a-[11C]methyl-L-tryptophan. J Psychiatry Neurosci 2000;
25:359-70.
2. Nishizawa S, Benkelfat C, Young SN, Leyton M, Mzengeza S, de Montigny C, Blier P, Diksic M. Differences between males and females in rates of serotonin synthesis in human brain. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 1997;94:5308-13.
3. Brian C. Clark1, Todd M. Manini1, Dwight J. Thé1, Neil A. Doldo1, and Lori L. Ploutz-Snyder, Gender differences in skeletal muscle fatigability are related to contraction type and EMG spectral compression Journal of Applied Physiology June 2003 vol. 94 no. 6 2263-2272
4. Ruben C. Gur,1 Bruce I. Turetsky,1 Mie Matsui,1 Michelle Yan,1 Warren Bilker,1,2 Paul Hughett,1 and Raquel E. Gur1.Sex Differences in Brain Gray and White Matter in Healthy Young Adults: Correlations with Cognitive Performance. The Journal of Neuroscience, May 15, 1999, 19(10):4065–4072
5. Senem Turan Ozdemir, Ilker Ercan, Ozdemir Sevinc, Ibrahim Guney, Gokhan Ocakoglu, Elif Aslan, Cagatay Barut. Statistical Shape Analysis of Differences in the Shape of the Corpus Callosum Between Genders. The Anatomical Record: Advances in Integrative Anatomy and Evolutionary Biology. Volume 290, Issue 7, pages 825–830, July 2007
