I’ll Blame The Media

When I take a good look at all the stuff I’ve accumulated at my house that I don’t really have room for – things I juggle around, work around, should clean around – I always think, “what could make me believe I needed these things?” Instead of examining my own weaknesses, I’m going to blame our media.
These days, this “media” word has a meaning larger than life. The world becomes smaller as our information processes cover more and more territory in less and less time. We can be exposed to a vast amount of stuff in a very short time and most all of this “stuff” has a marketing strategy involved – sometimes blatantly obvious, sometimes hidden in the background, and all meant to lasso in the sale.
I’m not just talking about which Victoria’s Secret body mists my daughter and I picked out to share; these are marketed under the Gracie Allen strategy that the more you buy the more you save. Think about that; it’s impossible.
What about the concepts marketed by the media? Someone has a new idea for something, writes it down in a different way, and then the media gets hold of it. We have a few of these tucked around our house with our other stuff. Not a basic idea that’s been around forever, like “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”, I’m thinking of new visions like, for instance, the “Men are from Mars; Women are from Venus” theory .
I haven’t read John Gray’s book by that name, so I haven’t got all the facts behind it. Gray’s basic ideas are that there are different motivations for each gender. Each has a unique reaction under stress, a different approach to problem solving, and a unique way of using language. These all prove to be true in Mark’s and my case, and I guess I should be thankful that the Mars/ Venus concept offers an explanation for our differences, but it’s too easy to use Gray’s idea as an excuse, bringing it forward like a trump card.
His concept has become so widely accepted (thanks to the media), that my husband attributes many of our disagreements and upsets to this theory and would often be willing to leave things at that. That’s not good enough for me (spoken from my Venus point of view, of course).
I grant him that there are definite intrinsic differences between the male and female genders, but playing the Mars/ Venus card is an easy cop-out to let the dogs sleep. We are individuals first; then, somewhere down our list of traits (maybe not even second), our gender factors in. When sleeping dogs have a bone to pick, they need to wake up and bark a little. Maybe Dr. Gray should take his planets off the marketing shelf and send them back out to orbit the sun.