What Planet Are We On?
Transformationalist Riane Eisler and marriage counselor John Gray speak about the changing face of partnership
Nearly everyone has heard of John Gray’s book Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. It has been on The New York Times bestseller list for four years and ha sold ten million copies worldwide, more copies in the past decade than any other book except the Bible. It has also spawned controversy in the psychological community and the public. People either love Gray’s theories or despise them, but they haven’t ignored them. Gray, a psychologist, and one-time Transcendental Meditation monk, appears regularly on the national lecture circuit and spreads his message via television talk shows and infomercials. Last year he produced his own Broadway show. This June he’ll publish his eighth Mars-Venus book, Mars and Venus Single Again, for divorced couples starting over.
John Gray is considered a relationship guru. The point of view he articulates is that men and women come from separate attitudinal planets and that the key to successful relationships is to respect the differences between the sexes. Men need appreciation and approval, he says, while women need love and caring. Men get into relationship trouble when they blame, rescue, or run from feelings. Women undermine their relationships when they act like shrews or martyrs with sudden mood shifts, complaining, or advice-giving, or not asking directly for what they want.
Riane Eisler, a cultural historian, is also a relationship expert, but she speaks from a very different perspective. Author of a ground-breaking book on the evolution of male-female relationships, The Chalice and the Blade, and the more recent Sacred Pleasure, Eisler argues that attitudinal differences are not determined by gender but are a product of cultural values – what she calls “the dominator ethics of power and control” versus the “partnership ethics of empathy and cooperation.” Her work has influenced creative thinks in fields ranging from anthropology to art, environmentalism, economics, psychology, religion, and women’s studies. She contends that we need to focus our attention not on communication exercises of the type Gray prescribes but rather on social changes that will equalize the balance between women and men – and invite true partnership to the planet. “If we view our relationships only with the Mars-Venus stereotype,” she says, “there is an important dimension missing: our capacity as human beings to move beyond where we are stuck in dominator kinds of behaviors.”
We hoped that engaging Gray and Eisler in conversation would generate a definitive turn-of-the-millennium discourse on sexuality and spirituality. At the very least, we expected verbal fireworks. After all, these influential authors seemingly are from different planets. Gray, with his emphasis on personal stories, is a therapist, a devoted dad, a schmoozer – and very much a guy. Eisler is a scholar, an activist committed to social change, a doting grandmother – and a longtime feminist.
But during their two-and-a-half hour conversation in Gray’s Marin County living room, the two were surprisingly conciliatory. Gray downplayed their differences and used Eisler’s dominator-partnership language from the outset. When Eisler challenged Gray it was with elegant civility. Their conversation flowed along on parallel tracks, smiling and mellow, like afternoon tea. Finally, a firm common ground emerged in their visions for the future: the need to create new and positive messages about sex and spirit, not only for men and women, but also for boys and girls.
Riane, in your books you talk about dominator and partnership models of human relations. What exactly do you mean by these?
Riane Eisler: By “dominator” I mean relationships based on ranking, control, exploitation, and pain. By “partnership” I mean those based on equality, empathy, and pleasure. When I talk about these models, I’m not only talking about a one-to-one relationship within a social and cultural context that supports, or impedes, ways of relating – be it in the bedroom or the boardroom, be it in our intimate relations or our international relations. So many of the problems women and men have today stem from patterns that are institutionalized in the culture. The whole social infrastructure was created for dominator relationships, not for partnership.
John, in your books you make some assumptions about the different roles of women and men. In your view, who makes the rules?
John Gray: In the partnership model we’re talking about sharing. In the old model, the dominator model, the male was dominant in the work world, but the woman ruled the roost to a certain point. The wife would go: “The plates need to go here, the children should eat this way, we need to go to church on Sunday.” The man would become passive and sit back while she did all that. And then any time the lion roared, she would go, “Oh, we bow to the king,” and she would become submissive to him. But there was a clarity that there was territory in the home which the woman ruled and the man didn’t attempt to gain control over. Nor did he want to gain control over that, because he was exhausted from his work world.
And women were exhausted from all that housework – especially when they also worked outside the home for less money than the men. Riane, it seems to me that whether you’re a woman or a man, dominator is an unhealthy way to be.
Eisler: It’s unhealthy for both the person who dominates and the person who is dominated, because neither can achieve full humanity in that relationship. We have incrementally changed that system. And it hasn’t only been women, you know. All along there have been men who have realized that they also don’t get what they need. Because in a dominator relationship men can’t have a close, intimate relationship with their children or even their wives for that matter, because they have to be on guard. If you’re going to be in control, by golly, you’d better be on guard. But, also, you get heart attacks and ulcers – as if you’re on an express train to no place.
Gray: But women have to learn how not to be the dominators in the personal relationship. Like when a woman criticizes a man: “Don’t eat those potato chips. It’s not good for your heart.” There are so many ways that women just assume a man should do what they say. It’s like taking for granted that he should leave the toilet seat down. If he does it, she should think, “What a great husband, he leaves the toilet seat down.” It’s a gift, it’s showing my partnership in the relationship. And a woman has to realize that you can’t just put your rules to everything in a household. If you do, the man will let you do it, but he’s not in partnership with you.
Eisler: As long as the assumption is that one of us has to dominate and the other one has to be dominated, there’s going to be this constant jockeying for control. The woman will do it more subtly because in the dominator script it’s a given that the man has to be the winner. So she wheedles and manipulates and, like some of those books say, shows up at the door in Saran Wrap instead of saying, “I really think we should do this, this, and this.”
Gray: And what I would say is that a woman has to learn how to give criticism to a man.
Eisler: OK, I think you’re right. But I also think it’s very important for men to learn how to accept criticism from women.
If we’re going to change these old communication patterns more than superficially, we have to change our patterns of thinking. Riane, in your books you suggest ways to rethink the broad social issues that impact on our relationships everyday.
Eisler: Well, here we get down to the nitty gritty. A lot of the struggle is with rewriting our life scripts. And so we are in the midst of what we call the revolution of consciousness, which I think is to a large extent the consciousness that there is an alternative to the dominator model. For instance, if we want to have more time for family, then we have to look at how the workplace is structured. It was structured for a society in which a man was basically an automaton who was serviced by his wife so that he could spend his life working. And now we need to redesign that.
Gray: From my focus, the business world, the social structure, is slowly being changed as men and women create intimate partnerships of equality in the home. And from that place we go out into the world. You can’t politically create change unless those politicians are doing it at home. What will create transformation in this world is when the decision makers make decisions from their heart, from their soul. If I’m not loving my wife – the woman who’s my soulmate – if I’m not loving my children who came from me, how can I be making decisions from my heart?
Eisler: That personal focus is also very important to me. The relationship with my husband (David Love, author and cofounder of the Center for Partnership in Pacific Grove, California) has been enormously sustaining to my life. He believes in me and my work, he really cares, and I feel the same about him. Once we experience that partnership, imperfect as it still may be, when we know that’s possible, we also begin to see it’s possible in other spheres.
Gray: As long as we look at differences form the point of view that one has to be better than the other, we will have that dominator rule. But if I were to put today’s man and woman a long time ago in a savage cruel world, I can see why they split the way they did. Woman pregnant with a baby; guy wants to take care of her so he goes out and does his thing.
Eisler: But see, the story we’ve been told about the savage cruel world is one that we really need to re-examine. If you read archeological records of the Stone Age, it is a fascinating eye opener about how the social construction of sexuality was very different from the Cave Man cartoon. For instance, there are a lot of sexual images in the cave art of the Stone Age, and there isn’t a single one linking sex with domination or violence. You see sacred sex imagery – marriage in the context of a sacred story. And the sacred story is not only about procreation. It’s about pleasure. Now that’s hard for us to understand, although there is within the new age movement this yearning for what I call resacrilizing intimacy, sexuality, touch. We think this is a new idea, but it’s really very ancient.
Both of you write extensively about sexuality, albeit from different points of view. What’s your opinion: Is it possible to have great sex in a dominator society?
Eisler: Well, if we define great sex as a relationship where there is a human dimension and a spiritual dimension, the I would say, categorically, no. Is it possible to have intense sensations sexually, intense desires sexually? Yes, you can have that under any circumstances.
Gray: Absolutely. The more dominating a man is – it’s because his only way of finding connection with what he’s missing in his life is concentrated in his sexuality, instead of going to his heart and his mind for illuminated inspiration.
Eisler: And not only that, he has confused his yearning for sexual pleasure with his socialization that to be a real guy, a real man, he’s got to dominate.
Gray: Then he has to go score. This happens to a lot of single guys today. So much of their time is wasted. They don’t want anything more than just a physical night, and they’re very lonely inside. To a man who’s not integrated – spirit, mind, emotion, and body – when he gets turned on, it’s like he has no brain at all. If you just have sex physically, personal growth is not possible. Sex is a feeling of “I want.” And if you can’t have what you want, you experience enormous frustration. And then when a man doesn’t know what to do to get what he wants, that’s when he reverts to violence. If men start understanding: Why isn’t it happening? How do you make it happen? Then they don’t have to react in this violent way.
Riane, I know that you see the problem of sexual violence as more broad-based than men lacking the skills for sexual satisfaction.
Eisler: The social cues to men are to link sex with violence. Not only personal violence but what I call the eroticization of violence and domination. Not only sexually, but also an authoritarian kind of backlash.
Such as . . . ?
Eisler: Such as the kind of thing we’re seeing today, when, for example, people put the rhetoric from the religious fundamentalist right at the opposite pole from the rhetoric about absolute freedom of speech and pornography. They’re two different ways of maintaining the same kind of relationship where one kind of person dominates and particularly where men sexually control women. All of these violent images are not just in porno, you know, they’re all around us. Again, the old Cave Man cartoon. That’s not part of the sexual revolution: that’s part of the dominator sexual counter-revolution. And it is just as regressive as the oppressiveness towards sexuality that is being preached from the other side.
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