My primary contact with Dr. Laura Schlessinger has been in the back seat of a taxi.
For some reason, the cabdrivers of Chicago seemed to hold Dr. Laura’s radio program in nearly as high esteem as they do lite jazz.
Dr. Laura no longer graces the city’s airwaves, leaving passengers to an almost unadulterated diet of Kenny G. So I did not know she had a book out until I saw it on a best-seller list. Near the top of the best-seller list, in fact, meaning that thousands of people must be buying it.
The title alone–“The Proper Care & Feeding of Husbands” (HarperCollins, $24.95)–intrigued me.
I possess a husband who needs to be properly cared for and fed. We also have a children’s book titled “The Care and Feeding of Fish” that suggests a fish should be taken to dance class and fitted for formal wear.
Maybe Dr. Laura would suggest I do the same for my husband.
Alas, that was not to be the case. Much of Dr. Laura’s advice springs from a different sensibility, one best summarized in the quote that appears in the introduction, attributed to a man named, appropriately, John.
“Men are only interested in two things,” says John. “If I’m not horny, make me a sandwich.”
Understanding, perhaps, that to strictly follow his prescription would limit her to 100 or so pages of BLT recipes and tasteful line drawings, Dr. Laura expands upon this statement.
Don’t nag, she tells women. Don’t wear sweat pants. Don’t talk so much about your problems. Have sex whenever he wants. Let him spend as much time as he likes with the guys.
In Dr. Laura’s view, men are simple creatures. They just want some attention and their basic needs met. Women, on the other hand, are controlling, resentful shrews who oppress men and subject them to “gender abuse.”
This has happened, she believes, because of feminism, because every segment of our society has been infiltrated by women intent upon promulgating the “destructive anti-male subtext of the modern feminist agenda.”
The Taliban could only have longed for the power wielded by the American feminist.
Oddly, despite Dr. Laura’s castigation of women who attempt to control their spouses and exhortations that men need respect, she seems to view the husband as some sort of domesticated animal. Not as intelligent as, say, a pot-bellied pig. More along the lines of a slobbering Irish setter.
Indeed, on page 41, she compares men to puppies. During a television interview, she ventured further within the mammalian class and likened them to gerbils.
Just as you would reward your gerbil with gerbil chow for a particularly impressive gerbil feat, you can train your husband to perform those pesky household chores.
Having trouble getting him to take out the garbage?
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Ask your husband nicely–just once–to do it. Then, “Catch him just as he’s coming back from tossing the bag in the can. Give him a big kiss and tell him that it was a big help because it’s hard for you to hold the can lid with one arm and pitch a very heavy bag with the other hand.”
Why not throw in a swoon while you’re at it?
Writing about Dr. Laura is a little like taking on, well, Kenny G. Somebody who wants to buy a book by Dr. Laura probably already likes Dr. Laura and is going to like whatever she says in her book (and will send me venomous e-mail referring to this section as “Womyn News.”)
But what most aggravates me about Dr. Laura is that beneath the contempt and the hypocrisy and the wacky feminist conspiracy theories and that whole anti-gay business–all of which, understandably, is too much for many people to dig through–she makes a few good points.
We should treat our spouses with at least as much respect and politeness as we grant strangers. We should nag each other less. We should remember to thank each other for the work we do in our homes and on the job.
By “we,” though, I don’t refer, as Dr. Laura does, to the harridans who populate her book.
I mean us harridans and our husbands. Somebody make me a sandwich.
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Columns by Tribune staff reporters Steve Johnson and Louise Kiernan ([email protected]), who are husband and wife, appear in this space on alternating weeks.