Venusians, Martians, Clams and Crowbars!

Ok, I just checked the most recent blog entry and wondered where I am going with this. That's the fun of writing without a goal, but doing so just for the pleasure of it and meandering a bit. As a blogger, I have to deal with the consequences the next day, and make it work somehow.

So yesterday, the scenario I was alluding to was very loosely based on what I would imagine the author of Men are from Mars (why don't we send them back there) and Women are from Venus was intending to convey to his target readers. I have not read that particular book, but liked the concept of males and females being set apart from each other, and having to find inroads to adapt, and understand each other as if they were a foreign species sharing common territory. John Gray, the author of this book, seemed to make a great success of his ideology and millions of people bought his book to find out exactly what was going on between the sexes. The irony seems to be this: the more that people research these topics and address these concerns through seemingly intellectual channels, the greater the chasm is created between the sexes. Currently the divorce rate is soaring, and one cannot predict where this trend is going. My question is this: can self help books be secretly destroying all that is moral and good in the world? Are these books actually creating an impossible expectation for all those beleagured men and women out there who are trying to make it work?

Other authors have climbed onto the lucrative self help bandwagon and put ink to paper to create yet another aptly entitled book Men Are Clams, Women Are Crowbars: Understand Your Differences and Make Them Work by David Clark. So now we have Martians, Venusians, Clams and Crowbars in our lexicon of images to consider, and scratch our heads and ask ourselves ... "Why isn't this working?"

This latest book by Clark has a very interesting cover. It shows a photograph of a clam being pried apart by a crowbar, and I had to take a second and third look at the title... okay I see the "men "are the clams and the "women" are the crowbars. That's much better! My first instinct was to configure the image and the title a little differently and it shocked me at first. I am sure the great cover and title help to sell this book and make people take another look at what is inside.