Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, Self help books are from Hell

You will almost certainly heard of a best-selling book called “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus”. It purports to be a guide to help men and women get along with each other, and it did so largely by exhorting men to hack off their genitals and bow in slavish worship of the superior sex. Naturally enough, it is one of the biggest piles of rancid goatshit ever to stain the pages of literary history. Even for the self help industry (which I have heard some ladies I know refer to as “brilliant; they’re really good for training the boyfriend!”) this book surpasses all other contenders in terms of trying to take away our poor quality 70’s TV buddy-cop shows, and place men firmly at the bottom of the social pile.

And do you know what the worst of it is? A man wrote it. No, this wasn’t some Dworkinesque fun-free lady intent on conditioning her future husband to enjoy ‘Sex in the City’ who was scribbling away. It was another man who did this. What on earth, I thought, could have driven him to collaborate on such a grand scale? Had he been promised better rations and access to an Xbox 360 in the Brave New World he was helping create? Well, what better way to try and get into somebody’s clearly disturbed psyche than to read his misguided words? I hope you all appreciate this; I read the bloody thing so that you don’t have to. Donations for my recuperation will be gratefully received…

The Introduction

And before we even get that far, things are looking bad! A glance at the acknowledgements tells it’s own terrifying story: nearly every person he thanks is a woman! His wife, his three daughters, his mother, his sisters…oh my GOD, the poor bloke has obviously been brainwashed!

As for the intro proper…well, it was the standard explanation of why any disagreement between a man and a woman is inevitably the fault of the testicle owner. Naturally enough, my urine began to boil freely and I had to take a break before continuing. So once I had bleached my eyeballs and scraped the dirt from my brainstem, I was ready to continue my journey

Chapter 1 – Men are from Mars, women are from Venus

The eyeball bleach was, however, required almost immediately I turned the page. Not that there is anything horrifically wrong about this chapter. Assuming that is that you don’t find reading stuff that treats you like a retarded Disney child offensive. Jesus…this is the kind of twee bullshit that is usually found in the Mr Men books…a lot is said about imagination, but one question does remain unanswered. If men and women are from two different planets and survived perfectly happily, then why didn’t we just stay on Mars and watch the lesbian show through the telescope? Astronomy would have replaced watching football as the number one activity for the average man…

Chapter 2 – Mr Fixit and the Home Improvement committee

It seems that women prefer to reflect on their troubles, whereas men will always try and offer a solution. According to this, our number one ambition is to try and solve women’s problems when they tell us all about them. He seems to be missing the point. The reason that we come up with solutions to their problems is so that they will shut the fuck up with their endless complaining (oh dear God, sometimes I think that half of my life has been spent listening to women ranting about what their stomach looks like, with a degree of self importance not seen since Razorlight released their last album, “I’m Fucking Great Me; Look at my skinny jeans”) and leave us to contemplate who we’d rather shag if we had the choice between Cheryl Cole and Kirsten Dunst.
The book seems to be working on one fatally flawed assumption: that we have hidden depths to our characters that women can unlock if we modify our behaviour. Trust us, we really are as shallow as our beer fixated ‘façade’ suggests.

Chapter 3 – Men go to their caves and women talk

Finally, a chapter that seems to have some sort of grounding in reality! Men, we are told, get withdrawn when faced with a lot of stress. Perhaps this is the first in a series of coded messages to the female world at large. “When you nag the fuck out of us, and we go quiet that means you’re stressing us out and could you please SHUT UP!”
Alas, this does not seem to be the case. All too soon, the writer (perhaps having been bitch-slapped to within an inch of his life by his agent upon reading this section. His female agent…) returns to the approved party line. It seems that we should learn to talk more. Well, allow me to let any women reading this on a little secret; we can talk until our throats are dry. We just don’t want to talk to you. Your musings on what shade of aubergine would look best on the kitchen wall are very sweet. But I’d prefer to discuss how to shoot down the helicopter on the last mission in Grand Theft Auto IV with my mates. You get interested in my world, and I’ll get interested in yours, ‘kay?

Chapter 4 – How to motivate the opposite sex

A delightful series of pages entitled “How to Motivate the Opposite Sex”. 17 pages in all, which is 16 and a half too many. This is what he should have written:

Men: For fucks sake, don’t stare at her tits too obviously. And tell her that she looks beautiful at least once a week. Women like that kind of shit.

Women: Stop nagging about tidying up and housework. Yes, we would live in a pigsty if we had to, and no we don’t care what other people think if they saw the state that the living room is in.

As a side note, the insistence on stretching the whole “different people from different planets” metaphor to explain everything is starting to make me feel cancerously ill.

Chapter 5 – Speaking different languages

Oh for fu…now it seems that men and women speak different languages from each other! Unless your girlfriend retailed at £69.95 and was imported from Manila, this is bollocks. I personally can understand every word that gets shat from a woman’s mouth. Equally, they understand my semi-coherent headspew about why £15 million for a football player is money well spent. What we both seem to have a problem with is why we’re trying to spoil a perfectly good relationship by opening our mouths and making noise that neither one of us wants to hear. Unless you really do care about the intricately layered trifle of nonsense that is laughably referred to as the plot to Eastenders, or unless she has a deep and abiding interest in Steven Gerrard’s mystifying loss of form, stick to screwing each other. It will mean less hassle in the long run for both of you.

Chapter 6 – Men are like rubber bands

Men are NOT like rubber fucking bands! Men LIKE rubber bands, yes. Ask any man about this and he will wax lyrical about the first time he felt the joy of flicking a loop of brown rubber across the classroom, and into the unsuspecting face of the faux posh kid who’s mummy won’t let him mix with the boys from the council estate.
The only way this could remotely be considered true is if you are a woman. To them, men are indeed like rubber bands: to be stretched and twisted according to whatever passing whim they may have. To ensure I wasn’t brainwashed by this piece of feminist subterfuge, I hammered some nails into a plank of wood after I had finished it. With the sweat of manliness upon me, I continued reading.

Chapter 7 – Women are like waves

Only like the waves of nausea that creep over me every single time I hear two women discussing yeast infections.

Chapter 8 – Discovering our different emotional needs

This is a missed opportunity. He could have broken free of the mental chains his extended female menagerie has undoubtedly placed on him. He could have said that our emotional needs can pretty much be addressed by a selection of Playstation 3 games and the occasional viewing of a David Attenborough documentary. Instead, we get told that there are 12 different types of love and that we have to master all of them before we can be considered to be an evolved human being. Talk about overcomplicating an already difficult issue…
For the record, Men don’t have any trouble saying the words “I love you”. It’s just that it’s difficult to say it with a straight face when your girlfriend has just spent the previous half-hour making grunting noises interspersed with the occasional plea to be fucked. Why do you think men prefer to shag with the lights off?
Oh, and there is a mention of men as “Knights in shining armour”. That is the first recorded instance, and I hope the last, of a man using this ladywrong phrase.

Chapter 9 – How to avoid arguments

Have a sex change. Show me a world where men and women don’t argue and I’ll show you a world where one gender is completely under the control of the other. These days, men and women can be more or less equal. But they’re different. So they’ll disagree. And argue. And what’s more, no arguments mean no post-argument sex. I rest my case.

Chapter 10 – Scoring Points with the opposite sex

Oh, the poor bastard. It seems that this man has spent his entire married life with a woman who follows him round with a clipboard giving him marks out of ten depending on how much his every action shows his love for her. What in the name of Joseph’s underused cock is it with the female desire to give a point score to every aspect of a relationship?! If you’re happy, then enjoy it. If you’re not, then tell us. But please, whatever you do, stop acting like a judge at the Olympic Husbandry finals. If you want point scoring, then go watch Torvill and Dean. Otherwise, go and bitch about us to your friends in the pub toilets. You’re good at that.

Chapter 11 – How to Ask for support and get it

Or to put it another way, how to allow your girlfriend to dictate every aspect of your life. From what kind of clothes you wear to what kind of music you listen to; rest assured that your woman will want to change it all! I mean really, are there any women left in the world who don’t hear the sentence “Can I ask your advice?” as “Can you stick your nose into my affairs to an intolerable degree whilst making me feel like an emotionally stunted and inadequate little turd?”
Now, I’m not saying that there isn’t a place for emotional support in a relationship. That place is in the pub with our mates. Any advice can be sought at around 15 minutes before closing time, and you can be safe in the knowledge that all of you can pretend that you can’t remember the specifics of whatever it was thanks to excessive drunkenness!

Chapter 12 – Keeping the magic of love alive

This can be achieved by ignoring every single word of advice that the previous 11 chapters have given. Live your own lives as best you can. Make sure that you spend lots of time doing the things you want, and not compromising your ambitions in order to keep the peace. And always make sure that you both do whatever makes you happiest. That way, when you get together with your other half you will have plenty to talk at each other about whilst totally ignoring whatever the other person is saying.