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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.
What about sexual attraction and desire? What differences do you see between men and women?
Gray: Men start down in the sexual center and go up. Women start in the head and move down. Men will tend to be physically attracted to start with. They may think they’re interested in her, they may feel affectionate towards her, but they’re really just thinking, how can I get her into bed? A woman will tend to find something more personal that she’s interested in getting to know, that then generates affection in her for him, that then creates desire in her.
Eisler: But see, this is really very basic to what we started to talk about, which is the social construction of masculinity and femininity. Women are brought up to focus on relationship, and so it is part of the dimension of sexuality for most women. And after a while, I think, women bought the masculine model of the one-night stand as being “Oh, this is sexual liberation.” Well, was it? Or was it simply stepping into an inappropriate role? Men, however, have been socialized that relationships are not really the most important thing. The most important thing is to get what you want, including . . .
Gray: Sex.
Eisler: Including sex. And so both start with an approach that’s inappropriate to what they want and need.
Gray: It’s very clear to me that when men hunger for sex, what they’re hungering for is connection. And beyond that, they’re looking for the connection with the feminine. Because their own work world keeps them so far away from the feminine, that to love a woman, connect with her, you actually go into her world.
Eisler: I think both women and men have this yearning for connection. An underlying theme of Sacred Pleasure is that this yearning has been distorted by the straitjackets of the gender stereotypes.
Gray: I believe that sex should be shared with someone you truly cherish, not on just a physical level. And the longer you love someone, the more real the experience is. I’ve known my wife for 18 years, and you can’t fathom what it can be until you have gone through those stages and gotten there. I remember once about five years into our marriage, right upstairs in the bedroom above us, making love with her, I said, “this was just fantastic. This was as good as it was in the beginning.” And she had no response. And I said, “Well, wasn’t it as good for you?” And she said, “John, it was much better.” So, my reaction was, “What, were you faking it in the beginning?” She said, “The sex was great in the beginning, but now this is five years of being married. You’ve seen the best of me, you’ve seen the worst of me, and you still desire me, you still passionately adore me. That’s what makes it great.” And I have to say, this is a gift from a woman to a man. I wasn’t aware of that until she said it. And from that day on, I became aware that what made sex great is how much love I could feel while we’re having that experience.
Eisler: For me, there have been tremendously altered states in sexuality where I suddenly understood the rhythm of the seas, the rhythms of the oceans, how everything somehow was a part of the whole. The spiritual dimension of sexuality doesn’t mean that you don’t touch. You know, people have this idea that spirituality is disembodied.
Gray: And you can’t just achieve that by meeting somebody and trying some spiritual exercise in bed. It’s not going to work, and people are going to become disappointed and disillusioned.
So far, you’ve been talking only about heterosexual relationships. What about men and men, women and women? John, are you thinking of writing a book called Mars and Mars or Venus and Venus?
Gray: No, I can’t write that book because I’m heterosexual. I’d feel like I was being an expert on people from another planet that I’m not relating to. However, Men Are from Mars is a big bestseller in the gay community in San Francisco, I’m told.
Eisler: I write about gay and lesbian relationships in Sacred Pleasure, even though my work, too, focuses primarily on heterosexual relations for two reasons – because I personally understand them better but also because historically, the social construction of heterosexual relations has influenced everything, including the social construction of reality of gay and lesbian relations. So if we are going to deal with those internalized obstacles to relating to one another in partnership, it doesn’t matter whether it’s homosexual or heterosexual.
Another subject both of you write about is spirituality.
Gray: Well, I was a celibate monk for nine years. For 12 to 18 hours a day I focused on my spiritual discipline – hatha yoga, body purifications, breathing exercises, meditation. And at a certain point, I had my peak spiritual experience. For me it was angels singing for weeks, and I could have just left my body and gone to heaven. But my brother was a manic depressive and was having another episode, and I had a choice – I could keep meditating or I could help my brother. And that’s where I started coming into the world to study psychology.
Eisler: And in terms of the spirituality as I envision it in a partnership society, what you did when you decided to help your brother was a very spiritual thing.
Gray: That was my revelation as well. All that spirituality was to help me experience heaven. And then you find out when you get to heaven that we came from heaven and that what we’re supposed to do on this planet is to bring heaven here. The real spiritual life is where you live a life filled with love and purposefulness, and bring the higher values into this world. Now I don’t need to have visions, I don’t need psychic powers, I don’t need astral travel. I’ve been there, done that.
Eisler: I, too, have had peak experiences. You know, times that you go without sleep. What I have concluded is that that dimension and that sense of connection with the Divine is really part of the human yearning for connection. It’s not separate from the yearning for connection with a loved one, be it a lover or a child. For me, some of the most profoundly revelatory states have been touching my daughter’s little hand when she was small. Or looking at my husband as we are getting older together. So what I’m trying to explain is anew view of spirituality. A spirituality involving everything in our daily lives – how we relate, how we love.
Gray: Spirituality is a living life in harmony with others, in partnership with others, with the planet, with the opposite sex. We find God within us, then we find god through serving others, through being in the world. There are many ways to get to that place. It’s not only the priests who are connected to god. We can be connected to God.
Eisler: It has helped me to reconceptualize God as not only male. To think of the Goddess. Because when you think of God the Mother in the stereotypical nurturing role of the mother and God the Father in the punitive role, you begin to see how in a dominator model God the Mother just doesn’t have much of a place.
Gray: Whenever I say God and I say “He,” my daughter always says “She,” and I go, “OK.”
Eisler: I think it’s important for people to know that we can change. The change for both women and men to become full human beings may be rooted in very ancient traditions, where women were priestesses as well as men being priests. Women weren’t morally disenfranchised, which is what you are if you can’t be a priest – you can’t say this is right or wrong. It’s important for us to reclaim those traditions not only because they’re fascinating, but because they ground us and they give us a sense of empowerment, both women and men.
What do you see happening today that gives you hope?
Eisler: I see that there’s a tremendous amount of movement towards partnership and tremendous resistance, both in intimate relations and everywhere – socially, economically, religiously and so on. But I also look at the last three hundred years and I see that, well, we couldn’t have had this conversation three hundred years ago because we would have been considered heretics. This is a time of crisis but it’s also a time of opportunity. With rapid technological change, people have been able to challenge entrenched traditions of domination. The challenge to the tradition of men dominating women and children in the so-called castles of their homes is hardly separate from the challenge to the so-called divine right of kings to rule. Or for that matter from the challenge of slavery or to racism – all forms of domination.
Gray: I think changing our intimate relationships is exactly how society will be changed.
Eisler: It’s a threat to the system for people to learn how to relate in partnership because then they carry that expectation into all areas of life with them. But by the same token, it’s also much more difficult for people to relate in partnership as long as they don’t have the social support.
What’s our task for the future – our task for now?
Eisler: I think we need new stories about what it means to be human. We need to explain to young people, like John’s daughter, that we have made progress in the last three hundred years. Because a lot of what’s happening to kids is that they’re presented with this hopeless, cynical picture of human relations, where everybody’s out for themselves and people who aren’t are just a target. We need different stories about family values. We need to tech that dominator families are dangerous not only to the people who live in them but to the whole society.
Gray: My next project is to help people develop new parenting skills. It’s called Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, and Children Are from Heaven. The thought of creating a peaceful negotiation without the threat of violence is really impossible unless you’ve raised children in a nonviolent way. I’ve raised three, with no violence, no manipulations, no threats. They are the most incredible kids. And I didn’t want to write this book till they were grown up so I could observe the outcome.
Eisler: And we need to do something in the schools to make them more gender balanced, and to make what I call “partnership literacy” part of what children are taught. I’ve been working for the last two years on a curriculum development guide which 8incudes emotional literacy, spiritual literacy, racial and multicultural literacy – all from a partnership perspective. I want my granddaughter to have a different way of imaging who she is. I want her to have some of the prehistoric images of women as people who are really important and powerful and whose bodies are honored and sacred. And boys need it, too.
Gray: I’m taking a program into the schools to reach parents and teachers. We’re trying to change the impact of the media and TV presenting the idea of sex with no consequences that is enormously overstimulating the youths of the world.
Eisler: Absolutely. We also need a change from the heroes whose violence make them sexy. I have been speaking for a long time about the Disney World attraction with pirates chasing women to rape them. I’ve been telling parents to write letters saying, “This is not how we want our children to se sex when they’re little kids.” Disney finally responded, but it’s such an inappropriate response. They now have it so the pirates are chasing the women for food.
Gray: You should be very proud of that! You made a difference!
Eisler: I made a difference, but they have only gone from A to A-and-a-half. But the point is that change is possible. We can even move a monolith like Disney to respond in some ways. And parents can do that. We all can, once we become conscious.
Gray: That’s where I think our two approaches are so resonant.
Eisler: I think we’re both working for the same goals, and with some of the same sense of spirituality that we want to see in the world.
Gina Ogden, Ph.D., is the author of Women Who Love Sex: An Inquiry into the Expanding Spirit of Women's Erotic Experience and the producer of the video Women Who Love Sex: Creating New Images of Our Sexual Selves, both of which are available from Womanspirit Press. Check out her web site at www.womanspirit.net
Reprinted with permission.