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by Leslie Strom
My friend the ever-witty Marcia Tapp, once asked me if could write an article on Good and Evil. I told her that I probably couldn't. I'm not a terribly deep thinker, and when I try, I go off on tangents like why I hate crossword puzzles with misspelled elements, and why donut holes aren't an actual by-product of the donut-making process.
I recently found myself in the library specifically perusing selections on relationships. (New guy. New decade. Leave it at that.) The library had plenty of pop-culture stuff from the 70s. I needed to know if things had changed lately,* so I headed for Amazon.com and some big-ass book stores and collected a stack of volumes so embarrassing that I had to purchase them by mail, peruse the bookstores in other neightborhoods, and hide the volumes in my sock drawer when I got them home.
Not that the quest wasn't worthwhile, but here is where I found examples of Good and Evil and what the Road to Hell is Paved With and everything in between. "The villagers", I said to myself, "must be warned!"
So here are my reviews of the books I read (or at least perused and then shoved back on the shelf), sorted by The Good, The Benevolent Empires, and The Bad. There's also a short follow-up bit on The erotic, and how surprisingly dull the Western interpretation can be.
(* The fundamentals of what make a good relationship and good sex haven't changed since the 1970's., or the 1870's for that matter. You might keep that in mind if you're worried about being behind the times. Fashion simply doesn't apply.)THE GOODWho really knows about how and why relationships work? These guys do, without getting instructional about it. In these books there's a sound observation for just about any kind of human behavior from sane and thoughtful authors.
The Moral Animal - Why We Are the Way We Are by Robert Wright
Wright takes a Darwinist approach to explaining behavioral evolution and uses the life of Darwin himself as example. It's accessible and readable scientific writing, and if you read this wonderful book first, you can move on to other lightweight distilled pop-therapy volumes and smile knowingly when you pick up (and put down) The Rules, Son of The Rules, and other pandering and pedantic manuals.
***** I give this book five stars for saving me time, embarrassment, money and confusion. Wright's book will give you a foundation to understanding humankind in general, which is what I think most of us are really looking for, anyway. It also has the added advantage of being useful when dealing with other cultures, which the other books can't claim.
Savage Love by Dan Savage
He's sensible, smart, honest, queer, arrogant and his mother loves him. Heterosexual women love him. Political lesbians don't. He makes perversion respectable. He knows a lot about all kinds of sex, is informative and funny. He does his homework. He does... well... everything.
Selections from his popular sex advice column are organized by topic. It's not so much about relationships as it as about honesty and the mechanics of sexual relationships. The book is raw and not for the very proper, but man, will you learn a thing or two. If coyness is a problem, get this book, and be coy no more.
**** Four stars - healthy perspective, some big ideas, and some big laughs.
They started off with good advice and built self-help syndicates.
Light His Fire : How to Keep Your Man Passionately and Hopelessly in Love With You by Ellen Kreidman
Ellen Kreidman ran an infomercial for some fairly expensive tape programs last year. I was impressed with her style and called to find out more about her product line. She has a course for women, one for men, one for individuals, a one-off introductory videotape, and some very affordable paperbacks available from on-line book stores. The videotapes are about $120 a set. The little books are more like $6. Needless to say, I got the books.
She has a web site with a bizarre live chat room, and some "free samples" which represent her material well. Her books Light His Fire and Light Her Fire aren't sold there, but the tapes are.
I put Ellen Kreidman on the top of the heap of well-meaning, effective and useful relationship book authors. She's also obviously qualified; just look at her. She has a successful marriage. She's probably fun to have lunch with. Hell, she's probably fun to have sex with, not that I want to know the details. She's no Dan Savage, however, and has a puppyish mainstream appeal that will work for most heterosexual middle class North American women and men. She gives enough detailed direction so anyone can take action, but has a decidedly gooey way of talking to her husband. On her it's cute. On most anyone else it would be creepy.
**** I give these books four stars. They're useful, specific, but really really tame. I'm sure the Tupperware and Mary Kay set will find her books revolutionary, just as the rest of us will find her advice engaging.
Mars and Venus on a Date : A Guide for Navigating the 5 Stages of Dating to Create a Loving and Lasting Relationship by John Gray
The guy is out of control, you can tell from the title. He is what's good AND bad about pop therapy. He's both maddening and insightful, but mostly maddening. The good part is that he has managed, with his Venus and Mars model, to explain men to women and men to women, and for this most Adults of the Western world should be grateful. However, he should have stopped there and left us to adapt the information for ourselves. It was a bad move on his part to digress from his popular lectures and tapes (where he's surprisingly effective as a speaker and performer) to write specific books on dating and a dismally unsexy book on sex, so bad that I didn't even bother to mock it in my sex books reviews.
Two things are very apparent in his works: He's a professional therapist, and he's a guy which means he has a built-in, inescapable guy agenda that may not show at first. I think he does a better job explaining things to men than he does explaining things to women. If you wonder about his empire, have a look at his web site which oozes shimmering pictures of the rosebud-lipped Gray himself.
In his latest book Mars and Venus on a Date (yadda yadda yadda) he tries getting specific. I suspect he has found a need to provide exact actions and words to say to people with - pardon my cheap shot - absolutely no imagination at all, like men. I found the following review on the Amazon.com web site, and I could not say it better:
Moronic. Whatever credibility John Gray had is shot with his inclusion of a list of 101 places to meet your soulmate. I thumbed through the book at a co-worker's desk and couldn't believe what I was reading. (Neither could she.) Most of the suggestions are so preposterous that I could read them verbatim at Open Mike Night at a comedy club and bring the house down. Some gems with my comments in brackets:
"If you're a woman in a restaurant, go to the rest room repeatedly so you can catch the eye of men." [And hope that a convention of urologists is in town?]
"If you don't attend a church or synagogue, go to the one where there are the most eligible people." [Hey, who's got the best babes, the synagogue or the Episcopalian church?]
Finally my favorite of the list I've read so far:"If you go to a bar and drink alcohol, go to a place where they don't serve alcohol. Your soulmate might not drink." [As opposed to 'If you don't do crack, go to a crackhouse because your soulmate might be a crackhead.']
I wish I were making these up, but I'm simply not that clever.
- Mark Ricci (docsman@hotmail.com), September 12, 1998
The book was so idiotic I gave it to my friend Jean who was bewildered, though found some of it insightful in the first three pages. Ignore the specifics, consider the generalities would be my advice.
* I give this particular book one star. ***I give Gray himself three stars. Gray isn't a complete loss, but the book is duplicitous, simplistic, insulting, not real useful, and very badly written. The guy does better work... check out the Powertalk interview with Tony Robbins... a coupla white guys sitting around talking. It's excellent, useful, and funny as hell.
Secrets About Men Every Woman Should Know by Barbara De Angelis
She's way sexier than John Gray , she dispenses similar advice, and she's been divorced a bucket of times, once from John Gray, once from magician Doug Henning. She knows more about failed relationships than Ellen Kreidman does.
In this book the secrets about men aren't things a man would consider a secret. The secrets are things like men need to be in charge, men don't like criticism... Hey. They all know that. And if life were fair and I got to be in charge and coddled, I could be a man. Something that Kreidman and De Angelis agree on is that men like to be treated like boys but that women shouldn't mother them. Gray likes to treat women like girls. It's all rather revolting, and I'm not sure what their motivation is, but I suspect some kind of world domination.
She's still kind of angry and she talks like a therapist, which makes her dogged efforts at making things better a little bit missionary and overly earnest. Nonetheless she gives good workable advice to women.
**** I give her books four stars. She gets down to brass tacks (brass tacks are important to this reviewer) and doesn't waste the reader's time, which is worth a lot.
Here's my conclusion about these books:
- If you read a bunch of them one after the other, you'll forget who you are for about three weeks before you assimilate the more workable advice. If you're the slightest bit out of the mainstream in lifestyle or personality, this material could be brutal on your self-image. It nearly made me schizophrenic, and the downside (like schizophrenia isn't enough?) is that my old personality has returned and anyone new is going to get it both barrels. Pity the man...
- I'm not sure closely following anyone's advice, which amounts to concession (especially if you're the only one with the book) will lead to any kind of satisfaction.
- How many concessions can you make in the cause of understanding and harmony before it all adds up to falseness? (Ten. I counted them.)
These authors are simply NOT well meaning. They are, however, very funny in their deep calculation. It's like watching a chicken try to escape a sheepdog: The chicken is very earnest but ill-equipped to really figure it out beyond some frantic scrambling that looks for a moment like it's getting somewhere. Eventually the sheepdog will catch up with the chicken. The Rules women are funny in spite of themselves. The Code guys are deliberately funny while dispensing a vile and shallow philosophy guaranteed to keep their male readers unfettered and socially arrested while exacting a little gratifying revenge. Both books of advice on manipulating the opposite sex are extremely effective which makes them scary.
The Rules : Time Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right by Ellen Fein, Sherrie Schneider
All I can visualize when I think of the women who wrote this book is Janis, a character on the tv show "Friends," Chandler's annoying marriage-minded girlfriend he simultaneously can't stand and can't resist. Women readers who adhere to The Rules will in all likelihood get the results they expect, because from a behavioral Darwinism standpoint, they're pushing all the exact right buttons in exactly the right order. (See The Moral Animal). From a karmic standpoint, I think these women will never be pleasantly surprised by the universe for the rest of their lives, now that they've discovered the Great Mysteries of Life are just a series of operant conditionings. They may mistakenly "Capture the Crotch, Brain and Income-Producing Potential of Mr. Right," but the heart is another thing. God help the poor betrayed man who wakes up one day to discover the reset button on his chase response. Or reads the following book...
The Code : Time-Tested Secrets for Getting What You Want from Women Without Marrying Them! by Nate Penn, Lawrence Larose
How on earth does a volume of Neanderthal advice from some losers make it into a book store like Barnes and Noble? The answer: Backlash. Someone's GOT to fight the malpractise of behavioral Darwinism, and here's the book that tells a guy how. It may have been written as a satire, but it sells well enough to suggest that someone may be taking it seriously. They've read The Rules, thank you very much, and they're not going to be pushed around any more. The men are stampeding the other direction.
From Amazon.com: This is the infamous response of Penn and Larose, two single guys, to The Rules (infamous in its own right). These commitment-phobic Nineties gentlemen, whose motto can best be expressed as "Trick them before they trick you," teach you how to get into a relationship ("Bite the buttons off her blouse the first time you make love") and back out again ("Bite the buttons off her blouse every time you make love"). Stop that Rules girl in her tracks -- no more lonely Saturday nights just because you called her after Wednesday!
Here's my conclusion about these books:
- As it says on horoscope call-in numbers that cost you $3 a minute, these are for Entertainment Purposes Only. Any illusion of actual relevance should be ignored.
- People in the 90's are so hungry for guidance on relationships that these books sell very well.
- I recommend getting a hobby. Everyone, just get a hobby.
- Except the writers of these books, who should get a different hobby like stamp collecting.
- Readers of these books, take Joni Mitchell's advice from her sister and "get yourself a charity." and forget all this warlike strategy.
- Read to the blind. Something nice from Tennessee Williams, maybe.
Had enough grief yet? I didn't think so. Here's more on Sex Manuals in Relationship Hell.
Here's a summary of the burning issues by volume.
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I'm not endorsing these books (except The Moral Animal, which is remarkable) but if you simply must, you can order most of them (and any other books) through our web site by clicking the pictures of your favorite book title, or by clicking here: