Abstract
Relationship self-help advice often blames women for relationship difficulties and endorses relatively traditional gender roles. Its appeal to female consumers is thus somewhat puzzling. This paper uses critical feminist discourse analysis to explore two Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus relationship self-help texts. Both these texts construct gender as a set of natural dichotomies, claim that women and men are fundamentally different in relationship needs, and hold women responsible for maintaining relationship harmony. Thus, they reproduce a discourse that historically has been oppressive to women. However, like all texts, these afford multiple readings. I argue that their rhetoric may be deployed to voice dissatisfaction with inequality and to encourage change in a partners behavior. By affording openings for marital negotiation, these self-help texts and others like them may undermine the ideology of fixed gender differences in relationship orientation and may serve to hold both partners accountable for maintaining marital satisfaction.
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