Thundershowers, an original novella, represents one person's perception of relationships between women and men. The first-person narrator, Anna Slone, records her limited observations of married and unmarried couples while she pursues her own involvement with a man. She observes nothing admirable in any of the relationships between men and women in the story, and her own romance falls short of her expectations. The only nurturing love that she records passes between herself and two other women, her mother and a friend. Thundershowers is not meant to be a suggestion that all woman-man relationships are soulless or that real love can exist only between women. Set in a Colorado resort, the action focuses on several concurrent love-interests, including a faltering marriage, a traditional marriage, the engagement of two young lovers, a lighthearted sexual affair, and the short-lived but painful romance of Anna and a man whom she meets at the resort.

This master's thesis deals with the analysis of two popular psychological handbooks focusing on relationships between men and women, namely the book "Men are from Mars, women are from Venus" by American psychologist J. Gray, and the Czech equivalent "Why women can't understand men" by D. Gruber. The main research question of this thesis is how gender stereotypes are created in popular psychology literature and by what means they become naturalized. The theoretical starting point is both the influence of popular psychology on its audience as well as the introduction of the basic concepts in their relation to gender as an analytic category, gender order, gender stereotypes and mechanisms of forming and maintaining masculinity and femininity. Empirical research presents qualitative content analysis and discourse analysis of "Why men are from Mars", women are from Venus compared with the Czech book "Why women can't understand men". The research mainly focuses on how these two authors work with gender stereotypes about men and women and their forming of seemingly everlasting and universal gender binarism.