“Another exceedingly popular response to the heterosexual tragedy was simply to normalize it, and no book was as successful as spreading the word that men and women do not like each other as the psychologist John Gray’s 1992 book “Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus.” Grey’s book sold over 50 million copies and was the best-selling nonfiction book during the entire decade of the 1990s, facts that are tremendously significant given the book’s central and now familiar message: men and women are so different, so at odds, that they might as well be from two different planets. Gray confirmed for millions of readers that men and women do not naturally like or respect each other, and therefore they would need to learn to “fake it” for the sake of their relationships… It would be difficult to overstate the significance of “Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus” as a self help phenomenon that renormalized heterosexual misery for a new generation. This book- whose central message was that women and men naturally find each other difficult to tolerate, spawned six follow-up books, and was published in Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, Indonesian, Arabic, Sinhalese, and French. The book’s gender essentialism provided a reassuring counterpoint to the mounting feminist evidence that gender roles are alternative to the slow and difficult work of feminist social change… By the end of the 20th century, straight couples learned that women and men were from separate planets, with different languages, customs, and values. They learned that it is natural, or at least very common, for men to dislike spending substantial amounts of time in the company of their wives and that women should embrace rather than resist men’s desire for spaces of freedom from marriage. Straight women learned that they, too, could seek freedom by maximizing their sexual capital and relying on women friends, just like the ladies of Sex and the City. Straight women learned that they should stop trying to change the men in their lives and should focus instead on finding ways to meet their own emotional needs. To the extend that women do need to ask something of men, they learned they should do so with patient guidance and a hefty dose of gratitude.”
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