Gender, Lies and Phil McGraw

Here are excerpts from Dr. Phil’s runaway bestseller, Relationship Rescue, in his individual letters to men and women. I have edited them for the sake of brevity, but nothing is out of context. What you see is what you get.

First, the letter to women:

“Speaking personally and to blow the whistle on my brethren, we men don’t get it! … It doesn’t matter why; what matters is that we just don’t get it. The really stupid stuff we do, and, more important, don’t do, comes from ignorance and from… a bizarre set of priorities…”

“… we measure success very narrowly… from a huge financial perspective. We lose sight that you need love… This caveman mentality… we seek to control by intimidation… to hide our fear and doubt.”

“… that doesn’t mean in our own fumbling, bumbling way that we don’t care.”

And now from the letter to men:

“… if the lady in your life went to the trouble… to buy this book, you could be in a lot of trouble, buddy. … I want to give you a wake up call here.”

“You can continue to blame her for whatever has happened in your relationship. But in the end, that dog won’t hunt–and you know it. Is it worth it to avoid a chance at happiness because you… hate to admit you’ve got a lot of improvements to make? … (Y)ou can use this book to find out how you went off course in your life… to find out how to get yourself out of that ditch.”

Translation: Ladies, it is as you have always known. Nothing bad in your relationship is your fault. It’s him. And men, the problem is you, stupid.

In Phil’s world, all troubled relationships are pairings of highly enlightened women with Neanderthal idiots. He doesn’t actually have to believe it. He just has to be a little smarter than his audience to sell it.

This is the guiding principal for success in the massive junk psychology market. The strategy is to target women who are unhappy in relationships because they are generally the ones more open to buying professional advice. If these women start out knowing they contribute to some of their own difficulties, Dr. Phil and others will help them get over that–for little more than the price of a good cappuccino.

Now multiply the cost of that cappuccino by, say, ten million.

I don’t have a problem with him having a #1 New York Times bestseller, or ten of them, but I do think that fiction belongs on the fiction shelf. The consequences of peddling this stuff as reality are just too great.

Blanket exoneration is a cheap sell. But what can we expect from someone who makes his living off the anguish of people at the most vulnerable points of their lives?

With the moral foundation of an Enron executive, he sells snake oil packaged as solutions. He appears to listen to peoples problems, but what he really hears is cha-ching. That’s the sound a man’s head makes when you sucker punch him on national television. All this is delivered with an endearing hint of Texas drawl to jeering crowds of angry women; with the finesse of a schoolyard bully. Just watch his show.

Some will say he takes some shots at bad women, too. I figure Phil would be the first to point it out.

But I’ll tell you something, Phil. I’m and old Texas boy, too. And I know the difference between a stallion and a show pony. Trotting out the occasional female misfit and calling it balance is like puttin’ a daisy on a turd and sayin’ it don’t stink.

Everything people need to know about Dr. Phil’s message is in the letters he wrote to men and women respectively.

Read over those quotations again and ask yourself one simple question. Do you believe that the picture he paints of men and women will help anyone build a good relationship or repair a bad one? If you really think the answer is yes, your boat has drifted a long, long way from shore. I can only suggest you start rowing with everything you’ve got. If finding solutions to relationship problems is contingent on believing that half the partnership is never right and the other half is never wrong, then we can all hang it up. There will be no solutions.

Never.

Most married couples enter therapy blaming each other with pathological fervor. The only reason many are there to begin with is because they fantasize the therapist will take their side and help them beat up on their partner and set them, by god, straight. The first challenge of many therapists is to put that kind of nonsense to a stop. That is, if the therapist doesn’t subscribe to McGrawist theory. Most do.

This explains why so many men are resistant to marriage counseling. It’s a rigged game and they know it. Psychotherapists play to their consumer base as much as talk show hosts, and that consumer base is as female dominated as the audience on Oprah.

In Phil’s letters to men and women, as in the greater body of his work, he doing what they all do, singing to the choir and passing the basket. And in securing their loyalty, and subsequently their money, he undermines them by undermining one of the few undeniable realities in bad relationships:

People don’t need help finger pointing. They need help to stop it.

In all honesty, I know many men who think this lop-sided understanding defines what is wrong with their relationships in the first place. Our good old Texas boy Phil knows it, too. But those men don’t buy his books; their wives and girlfriends do.

What’s more alarming is that so many women are taken in by it. It seems to be an accepted absolute in advertising to women that you must tell them exactly what they want to hear. Make of it what you will, but advertising tells us much more about people than psychology ever did.

To some degree this is true with everyone. After all, Kobe beef is a tough sell to a vegan, even at ground-round prices. Still, it is more than revealing that so many millions of women are so desperate to believe that what they have been told about men is true that they will pay even the most obvious of charlatans to do so.

And Charlatans these people are. As I mentioned earlier, Dr. Phil and others play on women’s anger, and not just from their relationship problems. They are, quite simply, just hitching a ride on the past forty years of open misandry in this culture. Remember Dr. Phil saying that “men don’t get it?” You have heard that before. It is a feminist mantra, used to spread the notion that men who disagreed with them were stupid or insensitive or both. And while heartily untrue, it was fairly catchy as far as sound bites go, and it has remained in use to this day.

Do you think that Dr. Phil chose to use that particular expression accidentally or out of coincidence? Not on your life. It was an intentional broad swipe at men, designed to broadcast to his female customers that they are blameless and superior. Exactly what he knows they want to hear.

I am no expert on relationships, and never claimed to be. I am not convinced that anyone is. But I know calculated BS when I see it. And I know that a relationship in trouble needs two mature adults invested in solving problems, whomever those problems belong to. Sometimes they need help with this. No shame in it. The only real shame is when people seek help and end up counting on a huckster disguised as prophet.

Paul Elam is the editor of A Voice for Men