My nephew's wife just reminded me of something that really - REALLY - pissed me off many years ago before I was going to marry my first official fiance, Linwood. My brother Phil (now Mary's father-in-law) had his then new wife Jeanie give me this book called "The Total Woman" which I read with disbelief. I could not fathom that any woman in the late 20th century would read this book and believe a word of it.
How to please a man. How to run a household. How to be a perfect wife. How to be a happy woman 24/7. Good god amighty. It was the biggest bunch of crap I had ever read. That any woman in the 1980s would succumb to such utter ridiculousness just blew my mind.
I hated that book. I hated what it suggested. I hated that my brother's wife thought I might even consider behaving in such a way. And now, I hate it even more. After TWO marriages to complete idiots I know more about men than I ever wanted to know. How stupid they are. That one woman could "please" one man by giving of herself - giving UP her own identity - to make HIM feel special and important when his thoughts and ideas might be better than hers? Who ever bought into that idiology must be the ultimate of stupid.
Sorry, girls. I get it - let the man think he's smarter than you so he can bring home the bacon, let you fry it up in the pan. You get to be a "total woman" and be a mommy and happy homemaker, and decorate and clean, cook and shop with "his" money, and raise your children and sleep in his bed and be available at his beck and call. And when he doesn't like something you do or say, agree with him so he will feel the ultimate of important. Roll over and let him have is way with you so you can continue to be the happy housewife.
NOT.
Women are smarter than men. Women are more capable of coping than men. Women know how to make things work and do what must be done in this world better than men. Women know how to feel their feelings, share them, embrace them and get past the pain to improve their circumstances better than men.
I don't hate men - I find them very entertaining under many circumstances. I prefer them in social settings and I thought I could love the two that I married. But I could not love them unconditionally because they were stuck on themselves and couldn't see the forest for the trees. (There's a sexual metaphor that I won't pursue here... lol.) I'll just say that I enjoyed having sex with them and that they fulfilled my needs physically; emotionally, they did not. Nor did they meet my intellectual needs.
Ah. I hadn't thought about that stupid book in a long time until Mary wrote a passage from it on Facebook. Thanks, Mary, for reminding me about it. That book made me stronger than any stupid man ever could.
And no, I didn't marry Linwood. He was the epitome of the stupid men for whom that book was written.
His view of women was that they were door mats. Couldn't marry a man who treated women that way, much less his own mother. Wouldn't. Couldn't. Didn't. Kept the ring, though. According to Judge Wapner (who Linwood happened to admire), an engagement ring as a Christmas gift was not necessarily returnable. That was smart on my part. I paid attention. So there.
ReplyDelete