Men are still from Mars

American author Jon Gray's book 'Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus' has sold over 40 million copies worldwide. Picture / Alan Gibson

Researching an interview with Dr John Gray, author of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, says a lot about his popularity.

Only two of several dozen copies of his 1992 best-seller and other self-help books are not out on loan at the local library.

The American therapist, who is in New Zealand to speak to the Institute of Chartered Accountants, has built an empire on the idea that accepting gender difference is the key to successful relationships between the sexes.

Gray believes that fundamentally men are hunter-gatherers and women are nurturers, and problems arise when this "fact" is ignored.

Obviously, it is a theory not without its critics but, in the 20 years he has preached it, it has consistently struck a chord.

Mars alone has sold 40 million copies worldwide and been translated into 54 languages.

Only the Bible has sold more copies in the last decade.

Gray has written 15 other books, all variations on the same theme, including Mars and Venus in the Workplace and What Your Mother Couldn't Tell You and Your Father Didn't Know.

He has used the fortune he has earned along the way to create a self-help empire of tapes, seminars, and life and executive coaching centres.

He also owns spas, a natural sugar refinery, a nutritional supplements company and a biodiesel plant.

His work has made him a celebrity. He has appeared on Oprah and Larry King shows and worked with another self-help megastar, Tony Robbins.

It comes as something of a surprise then that in person Gray appears understated, if not downright dull.

Wearing a beige jacket and checked shirt, the pale 53-year-old exhibits none of the charismatic flamboyance of his mate Robbins.

But that is before he starts talking about how understanding the Mars/Venus dichotomy has worked for him.

"I'm healthier than I've ever been in my life. I have a libido of a 21-year-old. I have everything that you could want. I have a wife and three daughters. I've got the whole American dream thing. I've really got it," he says breathlessly.

He resists suggestions that men and women may no longer be so different now that their roles at home and in the workplace have changed.

"We are different. We are majorly different," he says.

Asked whether over the years he has revised, even slightly, his views about the sexes, he answers with the same unadulterated confidence.

"It's hard to change them when they're so accurate."

Now, he says, new research on male and female biochemistry supports his formerly "un-PC views".

His latest book, The Mars and Venus Diet and Exercise Solution: Create the Brain Chemistry of Health, Happiness and Lasting Romance, argues that men and women need different foods for fulfilment, reflecting his move towards science to justify his stance.

So do his ideas apply to homosexuals?

"I'm not an expert on homosexuals," he says, but adds that his books are popular among gays and that they come to his seminars.

He admires several self-help authors, including Daniel Amen, with whom he wrote the diet book, but is dismissive of others.

A recent best-seller for single women, He's Just Not That into You: The No-Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys, was "a little jaded".

Gray said women should not necessarily give up on men as that book suggested. "Often a man's into you, then he's not into you, then he can get into you again ... and then fall in love with you and marry you."