“I can’t help but notice that the other reviews come along with a 5-star rating. There’s some justification to be done, I reckon. Although I think I can best sum up this book like this:
Amazing. Because the next time I feel like I might the the slightest bit of a chauvinistic asshole, I’ll just pick up this bad boy and open to a random page. I feel pretty moderate on most issues of the home life, but holy fuck, after this I wonder if people see me as buying bras for the specific purpose of burning them. I don’t have breasts, so I don’t really need a bra, but WHO CARES? I burn the bras!
I’ll just pull some direct quotes so you might know what I’m talking about.
What does every woman want?
“…a knight in shining armor who will treat her like a princess.”
What is the best analogy for a successful marriage?
A dogsled team. Granted, the husband is also a dog, in the case the lead dog, and yes, Todd acknowledges that he knows very little about sled dog teams half way through his overly long analogy, but the point remains. The best analogy is that you should just follow your husband where he leads, regardless of whether he’s leading you over a cliff or not.
What is the fundamental truth about women?
“Everyone knows that typically when a woman asks a question, and a man gives his opinion, the woman does the opposite.”
Who is responsible for Kerri Strug’s Olympic performance?
Her male coach, who yelled “You can do it.”
What should you do if you were home taking care of your 8 children (the number Todd has) and your husband comes home after playing a good game of golf?
“…ahhh and oooo about it. Take him on a date to celebrate.”
I have two absolute favorite sections.
“To your husband, communication means to talk…you know, “How was your day, dear? That’s fine. I’ll be in the bathroom until dinner.”
Um. How much shitting does one person need to do?
This is that classic, hilarious thing a standup does once in a while. They start strong, then say something like, “You know that thing where your eyeball just falls out of your head, and then all day you’re trying to…” and the audience is saying, “Wait, no. That doesn’t happen. Why are we trying to relate over something that doesn’t happen?”
You know how you spend about 14 hours a day on the toilet?
No! I think I take an average-to-above number of shits, and I would not estimate that I spend hours on the toilet every evening. That’s prolapse city, first exit on the Hershey highway. I’m mixing up a lot of poo and butt stuff, but I just want to say how happy the above passage made me. I squealed with laughter. Squealed.
Second passage I really liked:
“Now, you need the secret weapon…the sure-fire ingredient to loving your husband and getting him more involved. Here it is: Hang on his arm and tell him that his muscles are big.”
So fucking perfect.
Can I tell you something about men? I mean, we’re throwing wild ideas and categorizations all over the place, and I’d like to sneak in at least one of my own.
I have a theory about my personal body experience.
As a boy, I played sports. And I thought I was awesome at sports. This lasted until I was about 6 when I realized I was terrible at sports. At age 6. It didn’t take long for a young Pete to say, “Ah, shit. I am NOT good at this. At ANY of this. Other boys’ bodies seem to do things, such as leap and sprint, whereas mine is pretty good at handling large quantities of Surge, but not much else.”
I kind of think boys might be forced, through the lens of sport, to confront early on the fact that their bodies are worthless piles of goo. In cases where their bodies are goo, which is most. I suspect this is a gap that will narrow as well, and probably already has since I was a kid. But seriously, it didn’t take me very long to figure out that my body sucked and I’d better figure out some way to make people think I was cool.
If a woman kept complimenting my muscularity, even today, my first instinct would be to say, “…please stop making fun of me.” I would honestly think she was making fun of me. If a woman, after we were “intimate”, did as Todd suggested and said, “thank you for being a great lover” I would probably be forced to leave the room so I could pout about how bad I was at sex. Maybe even in the bathroom for several hours as I turned inside-out over the toilet.
Look, I think that most men, the ones who don’t have bizarre, weird shit going on like Todd, are pretty self-aware when it comes to their bodies and what they’re good at. I try and keep in shape, but saying, “Hey, have you been lifting weights?” (as suggested by Todd) seems like a ploy. Telling me I’m a “great lover” seems disingenuous too.
And what’s worse, that’s how it feels to ME. I’m not even married. If I were married and started hitting the gym hard, wouldn’t my wife know about it? Why would she be asking me?
Oh, maybe because I’ve been hitting the weights while my wife homeschools our EIGHT kids.
By the way, if I may for a second, Todd talks quite a bit how a wife should do this and that, and it amounts to an old school housewife who does EVERYTHING around the home that doesn’t involve a power tool. And at the same time, home schools your kids.
What does Todd do all day while his wife does all this stuff?
He quit his job to be a writer. By my math, that means he’s home and could probably, I don’t know, throw in a load of laundry, right?
Look, I know that if people don’t read this with any sincerity, it’ll be because they can say “Pete doesn’t have a wife or kids, and he’s not a huge fan of this God fella. This book is not FOR him.” And normally I’m a big fan of reading stuff intended for me. However, if you are in a relationship, you are a homeschooler, and you think this is good advice, holy fuck, GET OUT. Seriously. I don’t know if you’re in a weird pastoral form of life that shuns technology or some sort of facility that you’d find in a Resident Evil game, but GET THE FUCK OUT OF THERE! The things prescribed in this book are…they just aren’t right!
Let me talk just a bit about the kind of man presented in Todd’s book. Basically, we’re talking about the standard Man. Wants to watch football, doesn’t give a fuck about the family, and takes lots of shits.
I’ll give some advice to anyone thinking about starting a family: Do not start a family with a man who you suspect will be uninterested in your future, unborn children. Instead of forcing, coercing, and setting up an emotional Home Alone of tricks and traps to try and make an uninterested jackoff into a father of sorts, JUST DON’T GET IMPREGNATED BY A MAN UNLESS HE WANTS TO ACTUALLY HAVE KIDS. And not just have kids, be a father to them.
This book and Todd’s other books have a pretty high rating on Amazon. I suspect it’s a little like the way comic book movies used to be on IMDB.
There was this curious problem with comic book movies on IMDB, and the problem was that even the bad ones had a higher rating. They’d be up there, way outclassed by other things with the same rating.
The problem was that the only people who saw comic book movies, back when they were not cool, were comic book nerds. Who can be jerks in their own right, but also like to say things along the lines of, “I’m just happy to see it come to life” or to think that if something gets a high rating, more things like it will be made.
Todd’s books, I’m 100% certain the only people who read them are homeschool moms. Why would anyone else ever read them?
I did. And it was because I thought it would be hilarious. Which it was.
But also, kind of sad. Because this isn’t a goof. And this isn’t someone from outside writing a book about the inside, a Neil Strauss situation. This is someone who legitimately believes these things, and someone has married him, AND people out there read this stuff and agree.
I don’t want to make people feel more isolated. But if you’re in the situation Todd describes, and if you feel like he provides a way out…are you fucked? I think you might be fucked.
Hey. It’s 2014. In fact, the year isn’t relevant so much as the decade. The quarter-century even. And there are still a lot of people out there who legitimately think and believe this way.
So maybe it’s the rest of us who are fucked.
Scary shit, no?”