I once bet my boyfriend he wouldn’t remember something that I said a year later.
I lost that bet. I also nearly spilled a strawberry daiquiri all over his side of the bed, scared the cat, and generally made a fool of myself on that long ago Saturday morning. It was only the second time I’d ever made a bet with him (two words: blue lobsters) and it was assuredly the last.
Before anyone gets the impression that I’m a weekend boozer or have a fetish for oddly colored sea creatures with large clacking claws, let me assure you that neither is true. However, I do love terrible books, and it is entirely due to one of these that I made and lost that bet. We laughed about it often, and even now, years after we broke up, it’s still one of my happiest memories of that relationship.
It also was not my fault. It was all because I’d read and mocked a fine example of one of the most common, and in some ways silliest, of self-help books: the relationship advice manual.
Don’t pretend you haven’t seen them, shelved neatly beside the likes of Wendish Women Never Count Calories or Vandal in the Corner Office: Ten Management Tips from History’s Greatest Barbarians. They’re there, written by psychologists and social workers and housewives who only want you (yes, you!) to find the Man of Your Dreams, Give Your Woman 10,000 Orgasms a Night, and Stay Married for Your Next Ten Incarnations. Whether you’re having trouble getting a date, keeping a boy/girlfriend, hapless in bed, or trying to keep your marriage fresh despite the Adorable Little Trots – whoops, wrong diary! children bursting in at the worst possible time, there’s an advice book for you.
Some of these precious tomes offer sensible counsel. Others suggest techniques that might have worked for the Anatolian cliffdwellers but are not necessarily applicable to 21st century America. Most are in print for, at most a year or two before fading, forgotten like last year’s mulch, into oblivion. Others are as forgettable as that tattoo with an old lover’s initials that appeared mysteriously after a night of dubious pleasures on a street where most of the inhabitants seem to have ignored the local smoking ordinances.
There’s nothing quite like a really bad advice manual. Not only can reading one warp your thinking about relationships, it can wreck the one you already have. If you’re really, really unlucky, you can end up desperate and dateless for the rest of your life, or at least until you decide that no, you don’t want to unleash your inner Jason or Medea when dealing with a former spouse. Relationships are easy enough to trash as it is.
Tonight I’ve unearthed three wonderfully awful relationship manuals directed at women. One is for the woman in search of a husband, while two are for the already married. Their contents may seem quaint, or silly, or terrifying. Their messages vary, and their writing style veers from folksy to turgid to matter of fact. But all offer one thing above all: Relationship Advice So Bad It’s Good.
Any Woman Can! by David Reuben, MD – David Reuben first came to prominence with an earlier book, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex…But Were Afraid to Ask! Although best known today as the inspiration for a Woody Allen movie, this book was a huge bestseller in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The combination of frank talk, accurate information, and breezy, humorous prose was a winner, and imitations and knock-offs soon flooded the bookstores. Reuben, a psychiatrist with a distinctly non-Freudian bent, produced this sequel two years later, pitching it specifically to the “sexually marooned woman.”
By “sexually marooned,” Reuben meant women who were “unwilling or unable to fulfill [their] destiny as a full-fledged female and thereby enjoy a life of gratifying sexual experiences.” And despite the immediate thought that a man lecturing women on sex cannot end well, the book is something of a surprise. There’s a great deal of accurate information about sex, including an early and welcome debunking of the Freudian belief that there is a difference between clitoral and vaginal orgasms, plus anatomical information about the clitoris, the assertion that multiple orgasms are a woman’s birthright, and a forthright statement that slut shaming, discrimination against unmarried pregnant women, and shunning of sexually active single women are wrong.
All of this is surprisingly refreshing, and even though some of the case histories are less than realistic (did the airline worker really run into the father of her baby and marry him after the birth?), a woman seeking advice on sex could do much worse. So why is it a Book So Bad It’s Good?
Behold these pithy quotes:
If a woman wants to make herself indispensable to a man she can pull out all the stops and unleash the ultimate weapon - milk.
The girl who gives her man a back-rub after a hard day at the office does more for herself (and him) than a whole week of afternoons at her hairdresser.
Most women don’t know this but they can fight off an attacker at least ninety percent of the time with hardly a risk to themselves. All they have to do is appear to cooperate until he exposes himself. If the lady then takes his testicles in her left hand and smashes them as hard as she can with her right fist – one or twice – he will lose all interest in sex.
Relationships with married men are like piecrusts, made to be broken.
The whole book is like this: good, accurate, often sensible advice, and then something completely out of left field. The section on milk is particularly astonishing, as Reuben states that since male babies are nursed, men become fixated on milk for life, and thus a woman wishing to marry a particular man should make sure to serve him coffee with cream, dairy-based meals, and plenty of ice cream so she becomes associated with milk. One is forced to wonder if David Reuben was revealing a bit more about his own particular kinks than he’d intended, and if so, why.
What a girl was supposed to do if her boyfriend was lactose intolerant remains unclear.
Fascinating Womanhood, by Helen Andelin – Helen Andelin, devout Mormon, housewife, mother of eight, and wife to Aubrey Andelin, believed strongly that the best way for a woman to have a strong and happy marriage was for her to be the best possible helpmeet and housewife. Her books, Fascinating Womanhood (for the unhappily married) and The Fascinating Girl (for teenagers wishing to become unhappily married), sold millions of copies beginning in 1963 and are still in print. Fascinating Womanhood classes were all the rage in the Mountain West during the early 1970s, partially in response to Second Wave feminism, and are still regularly taught in many parts of the world (particularly Japan, curiously enough).
More than just marriage advice, Mrs. Andelin provided an entire blueprint for living. “Angela Human,” her ideal of womanhood, was a Domestic Goddess who was religious, submitted to her husband except in the face of actual physical danger, and ultra-feminine in dress, makeup, and demeanor. She was supposed to keep a clean and well managed home, with obedient, all but invisible children, and tell her husband frequently that she could not exist without his masculine strength, preferably while sitting curled on his lap. Above all, she should remain childlike and saucy at all times, even when angry; quarrels were best resolved by stamping one’s foot and mock-beating on one’s husband’s chest while shaking one’s sausage curls and crying, “How could you be so mean to a poor little girl like me? You’re just a big meanie!”
To help the aspiring Fascinating Woman achieve such laudable goals, Mrs. Andelin provided examples drawn from history and great literature such as Mumtaz Mahal, beloved wife of Shah Jehan, or Deruchette, the “bewitchingly languorous” heroine of Victor Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea. These women had managed to catch and keep men who all but worshipped them, and the aspiring Domestic Goddess only had to do likewise to be so blessed. That Mumtaz died giving birth to her fourteenth child at the age of only 38, or that Deruchette was fictional, was irrelevant. What woman wouldn’t want a monument to her memory like the Taj Mahal, even if she wasn’t alive to enjoy it?
That this frequently required the Domestic Goddess to lie about her motives, her skills, and her emotions was nothing; the Fascinating Woman’s ultimate goal was a man who would keep her in a gorgeous home crammed with expensive goodies like new dishwashers, frost-free refrigerator/freezers, and wall to wall carpeting, and what was a little manipulation compared to the latest and greatest stainless appliances? If putting a little rick-rack on a sweatshirt meant freedom from chopping wood or doing yardwork, so what? Goddesses are above such nasty, mucky, sweaty work anyway! And if hubby resents being lied to, isn’t it worth it for that brand new self-cleaning oven and dinner out at the country club?
So successful was this vision of marriage that Mrs. Andelin’s husband, Aubrey, a dentist, eventually wrote a book on the masculine side of Fascinating Womanhood, Man of Steel and Velvet, which despite the name is not about a successful career in bondage porn. And though the Andelins are now in the Celestial Kingdom, sealed for time and all eternity, their empire continues, with Fascinating Womanhood books available on Amazon.com, at Barnes & Noble, or through their website. It just goes to show that bad advice springs eternal for Men of Steel and Velvet laughing gently as their saucily adorable wives shake their curls, stamp their feet, and do their best imitations of Shirley Temple to get that brand new side-by-side stainless steel frost-free freezer.
The Total Woman, by Marabel Morgan – Marabel Morgan, a former beauty queen, also advised marital submission, but from evangelical point of view, not Mormon. Her breezy, folksy little book has a list of Scriptural references about love, proper behavior, and the ideal woman, and it’s no surprise to learn that her book was a smash hit in the burgeoning 1970s evangelical Christian community. Morgan was also much less literary than Mrs. Andelin, with no references to French novels or Mogul queens. Her literary voice is that of the good friend at the kaffee klatch, the neighbor who takes you aside in the grocery store and calls you “dolly” or “hon,” the church lady who only has your best interests at heart. It’s almost endearing, except that the advice is so silly that one wonders how Morgan and her agent kept a straight face.
Some of Morgan’s advice is straightforward and sensible: make a list of tasks to be accomplished. Play to your strengths. Don’t nag. Praise your mate. But some is distinctly, shall we say, less than straightforward. Among the gems one can find in this slim little book:
Start dinner as soon as the breakfast dishes are done, to avoid scrabbling frantically at 4:30 in search of something to throw together.
Change the sheets in front of him, making sure to spritz them with cologne while telling him to hurry home from work that night.
Take a bubble bath approximately an hour before your husband is due home from the office so you’ll be clean and sweet-smelling when he arrives.
Call Hubby at work and purr “I crave your body.”
Show your husband how much you admire him by stroking his arms and murmuring about how muscular he is.
Persuade him to shave by telling him that his stubble is too strong for your tender skin.
And of course there’s the classic: meeting your husband at the front door wearing a costume of some sort, perfumed and powdered and smiling. Morgan describes her own first experience with this, when she met her husband wearing pink baby doll pajamas (remember those?) and white go-go boots:
My quiet, reserved, nonexcitable husband took one look, dropped his briefcase on the doorstep, and chased me around the table. We were in stitches by the time he caught me, and breathless with that old feeling of romance. Our little girls (!!!!) stood flat against the wall watching our escapade, giggling with delight. We all had a marvelous evening together, and Charlie forgot to mention the problems of the day.
That’s right: she met her husband at the door in a sexy costume in front of their children. The mind boggles at the thought of what else the little girls saw during that “marvelous evening.” Even better is a later passage averring that the children “will love your costumes. It makes life exciting. Can’t you just imagine Junior on the sandlot telling his friends, ‘I’ve got to go now, guys. Got to see Mom’s outfit for tonight.’”
Indeed I can, and if someone can tell me a way to expunge that image from my brain, I’d really appreciate it.
It’s hard to believe that anyone took chapters like this seriously, but a lot of women, both evangelical and secular, did. The book sold by the case, Marabel Morgan became a frequent guest on talk shows, and feminists practically had a stroke as Total Womanhood joined Fascinating Womanhood as a popular alternative to consciousness raising groups. And even though the book it doesn’t actually advise wearing Saran wrap (that was a reader's idea), only sexy costumes (some very sexy, like mesh stockings and an apron, or gypsy beads and a few strategically placed bangles), the idea that Marabel Morgan said that housewives should meet their husbands wearing nothing but what they could find in the kitchen drawers became a part of American folklore.
It’s also what got me into trouble all those years ago. I’d mentioned The Total Woman to my boyfriend, and after we finished laughing I jokingly said that no man would ever do that for a woman, especially the Saran part.
He grinned and said I was wrong. I grinned back and said that he probably wouldn’t remember our conversation in a week, let alone in a year. He arched an eyebrow and said only, “Wanna bet?”
One year later I was wakened by him nudging my shoulder on a beautiful fall morning and offering me a daiquiri. I turned over, reached for my glasses, and there he was in all his glory, cut crystal punch cup of reddish liquid in hand, wearing nothing but a gentle smile, a transparent plastic loincloth, and a strategically placed maraschino cherry.
I’m not sure the cat ever recovered.
Now that I’ve embarrassed myself in the service of bad books, it’s your turn, fellow Kossacks. What bad advice have you gotten over the years? What well-thumbed compendia of advice have ended up on your nightstand? Is Saran wrap or aluminum foil sexier? Deruchette or Marabel? Pour yourself a punch cup of Mr. Boston’s best daiquiri mix and gather ‘round….