An Analysis of What to Expect When You're Expecting: From Patronizing Prose to Panicking Premises

I’ve been working on an article about how American cultural products often associate pregnancy with fear.  Toward the end of this piece I analyze the widely acclaimed What to Expect When You’re Expecting, which is often touted as “the pregnancy bible.”  To date, it has sold more than any other contemporary pregnancy self-help manual with over 14.5 million copies in print, it has been a perennial New York Times bestseller, and it has been classified by USA Today as one of the top 25 most influential books of the past 25 years. Because this text is so popular, and because I find it extremely problematic, I thought I’d share a few of my thoughts here.

What to Expect is formatted in a way that aligns with its recurrent motif of fear.  Every chapter highlights childbirth concerns as the book weaves its way through the nine months of pregnancy.  According to the article, “What Not to Fear When You Are Expecting,” the text focuses on “invisible killers lurking” beneath the female readers’ ignorance.  The first chapters well showcase the book’s focus on the hidden dangers of pregnancy and are dedicated primarily to the risks that the pregnant woman is confronted with on a daily basis throughout her pregnancy.  From the numerous examples the authors list, it is clear that the book portrays the unborn child as one who is infused with endangerment and the mother to be as one who needs to be aware and responsible.  Ironically, the first chapter of the 4^th edition of the text attempts to mask the book’s emphasis on worst case scenarios.  (This may be in response to some of the criticism the earlier editions of the book received.)  Consider this passage from “Chapter One:  Before You Conceive” of the 4^th edition of What to Expect When You’re Expecting:

So you’ve made the decision to start a family (or to grow that family you’ve

already started).  That’s a great – and exciting – first step.  But before sperm meets egg to create the baby of your dreams, take this preconception opportunity to prepare for the healthiest pregnancy – and baby – possible.  The next steps outlined in this chapter will help you (and dad-to-be) get into tip-top baby-making shape, give you a leg up on conception, and get you to the pregnancy starting gate with all systems go.  If you don’t get pregnant right away relax and keep trying (and don’t forget to keep having fun while you’re trying!).  If you’re already pregnant – and didn’t have a chance to follow these steps before you conceived – not to worry.  Conception often sneaks up on a couple cutting out the preconception period altogether and making those preconception pointers pointless.  If your pregnancy test has already given you the good news, simply start this book at Chapter 2, and make the very best of every day of pregnancy you have ahead of you.  (Murkoff and Mazel 2)

Although the authors begin by deemphasizing the possible risk factors of unsafe behavior during the first few weeks of pregnancy, the rest of the text is devoted to policing women’s behavior throughout each of the three trimesters.  While the content of this opening passage is not overly upsetting, the tone which it takes on is.  It is laced with the overly enthusiastic second person pronouns common to the self-help genre but it also is laden with childish clichés and a conversational tone that undercuts the text’s authoritative status.  Examples of this language use include:  advising parents-to-be to get into “tip-top baby making-shape” and “get a leg up on conception” so they’re at “the pregnancy starting gate” with “all systems go” (Murdoff and Mazel 2).  And, of course there is the reminder that couples should enjoy themselves while trying, which seems like advice that would stem from women’s magazines rather than a supposed medical-esque self-help text.

“Chapter 4:  Your Pregnancy Lifestyle” really begins the heavy doses of fear, listing a range of everyday concerns that pregnant women have.  Although the authors want to make it seem as if they are downplaying some of these issues, it could be argued that the inclusion of each and every one of these issues itself could be considered fear inducing.  Consider this passage:

Of course you’re expecting to make some adjustments in your everyday life now

that you’re expecting (good-bye baby-tees, hello baby-on-board tees).  But you might also be wondering just how drastically your lifestyle will have to change now that you’re living for two.  How about that pre-dinner cocktail – will it have to wait until post-delivery?  Those regular dips in the hot tub the gym – are those washed up, too?  Can you wipe your bathroom sink with that smelly (but effective disinfectant)?  And what’s that you’ve heard about cat litter?  Does being pregnant really mean you have to think twice about all those things you’ve never given a second thought to – from letting your best friend smoke in your living room to zapping your dinner in the microwave?  In a few cases, you’ll find, the answer is an emphatic yes (as in ‘no wine for me, thanks’).  But in many others, your expectant self will be able to continue doing business – and pleasure – as usual, with maybe just a side of caution (‘honey, it’s your turn to change the cat litter – for the next nine months!’).  (Murkoff and Mazel 68)

The marriage of fearful content and adolescent prose is troubling in this text.   The authors talk down to their female readers using infantilizing language that is insulting to the prospective mothers’ intellect.  The overly flowerly descriptions of the conception also seem problematic.  In the excerpt below from chapter one the authors write about how the “sperm meets egg to create the baby of your dreams” (Murkoff and Mazel 2).  In a passage from “Chapter Six:  The First Month,” Murkoff and Mazel go as far as to personify the sperm and egg with truly juvenile phrasing:

Week 2.  Nope, still no baby yet.  But your body isn’t taking a break this week. 

In fact, it’s working hard gearing up for the big O – ovulation.  The lining of your uterus is thickening… and your ovarian follicles are maturing… until one becomes the dominant one, destined for ovulation.  And waiting in that dominant follicle is an anxious egg (or two, if you’re about to conceive fraternal twins) with your baby’s name on it – ready to burst out and begin its journey from single cell to bouncing boy or girl.  But first it will have to make a journey down your fallopian tube in search of Mr. Right – the lucky sperm that will seal the deal.  (121)

In this excerpt the egg is feminized and described as “anxious” and eagerly seeking out her “Mr. Right – the lucky sperm that will seal the deal.”  The patriarchal language is quite obvious as is, again, the overuse of idioms such as “seal the deal.”  The immature description of the woman’s body as “gearing up for the big O – ovulation” appears in text as a cheap, and not altogether humorous, double entendre leading readers’ minds to the sex act, orgasm, rather than the conception process the text purports to be medically explaining.  The romantic asides about destiny and Mr. Right also remove this text from the realm of health studies and launch it back into fairy tale fiction.

I began this research with a slightly cynical attitude, already predisposed to pick apart pregnancy self-help books such as What to Expect When You’re Expecting.  In order to see if I was perhaps projecting my own cultural frustrations onto this much read text, I decided to analyze the customer reviews of this text housed on Amazon.com. My desire to tackle this endeavor was compounded by the fact that out of all the studies directed toward parenting/pregnancy manuals, none specifically analyzed consumer reactions to these texts.

As of October 2010, Amazon.com had 250 reviews of What to Expect When You’re Expecting.  The average rating was 3.6 out of 5 stars, with 56 customers dissatisfied enough to rate it Amazon.com’s lowest rating of one star.  Thirty six reviewers actually alluded to the fearful content within their reviews and often in the title of their post.  Titles ranged from:  “Really Unhelpful and Alarmist”; “Scary!”; “Don’t READ THIS WHEN YOU'RE EXPECTING!!!!!!!”; “This Book Will only Serve to Scare You!”; “Read This if You Like Having Meltdowns”; “Scare Tactics”; “What to Expect From this Book? Expect Terror!”; “Want a Terror-Filled Pregnancy/Birth? Read this Book”; “Inaccurate, Misleading, and Full of Fearful Messages”; “Scary for 1st time Moms”; “What to Fear When You're Expecting!!”; “Expectant Mothers - Stay Away!”; “What PROBLEMS to Expect When You're Expecting”; “Great Book for Hypochondriacs, All Others STAY AWAY!”; “Alarmist”; “Condescending and Horrible”; “Designed to Scare You”; “DO NOT READ THIS BOOK ALONE”; “How to be Constantly Scared while You're Expecting”; “Fear Mongering at its Worst”; “Everything to Fear That Probably Won't Happen When You're Expecting”; “Are You a Paranoid Freak who Hates her Body? Then this Book is for You”; and “May Cause Mothers to Worry Excessively.”

The critique of the text, quite obviously, did not end with the review titles alone.  One poster stated: “This book represents to me the worst in our alarmist culture [concerning] medicalized pregnancy and birth.”  Another remarked:  “This is the WORST book to read if you are pregnant. It feeds into the fear culture that unfortunately surrounds birth today.”  Some of the longer posts – housed on the following table – go into more detailed critiques.  Interestingly, the most critical comes from that not of a pregnant woman – the book’s target demographic – but from that of a husband of a pregnant woman.  Altogether, the array of passionately negative reviews suggest that scholars are not wrong to critique these self-help books.  However, it would be misleading to not note that, despite these very strong posts that criticize What to Expect When You are Expecting, the vast majority of the ratings and posts were more neutral or positive, accounting for its overall rating of 3.6.  This fact in itself is telling.  That so many readers do not react negatively to fear-invoking, patronizing prose indicates that this has become somewhat of the norm for “pregnancy bibles” such as this one.  It also suggests that the readers consuming these texts are not doing so with a critical eye, which itself could be viewed as problematic. 

Customer Reviews for What to Expect When You’re Expecting from Amazon.com

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Consumer Rating (out of 5 Stars): 1.0		Date of Review: 3/21/2009	Title of Post: “So Condescending!”
Review:  This book assumes that pregnant women are idiots, and talks to them accordingly. It's full of cutsey [sic] language, puns, and linguistic tics that drove this English major up a wall. In terms of content, it contributes to our culture's position of "better safe than sorry" when it comes to kids - kids and pregnant women must be protected from anything and everything that might be the slightest bit upsetting. It does not provide any information on the research behind their advice, assuming that the pregnant woman is too stupid or lacking in self-control to make an informed decision for herself upon being presented with the facts, relying instead on making across the board recommendations on all kinds of things for which there is no scientific basis. I also hated that the miscarriage section had a big disclaimer warning pregnant women not to read it unless they actually had had a miscarriage, because the knowledge alone that miscarriage could happen would be so emotionally devastating to her that she couldn't handle it. After doing some research on my own and finding out how inaccurate and unnecessary many of their claims are, I find I no longer trust the book at all. I would not recommend it.
Consumer Rating (out of 5 Stars): 1.0	Date of Review: 11/07/2008		Title of Post: “Read This if You Like Having Meltdowns”
Review:  To make a long story short, after getting about 120 pages into this book, I called my best friend nearly in tears. I told her I was reading the book, and before I could go into details, she said "oh for goodness sakes, don't read THAT! It's all about what you can't do and what can go wrong." Turns out that three other friends of mine echoed the same sentiments with no prompting. This book is a great way to make a (probably already nauseous) pregnant woman even more miserable.
Consumer Rating (out of 5 Stars): 1.0	Date of Review: 11/13/2008		Title of Post:  “Revised Title:  What PROBLEMS to Expect When You’re Expecting”
Review:  After reading this book, I am amazed there are any successful, healthy pregnancies at all. This book has kept me on edge for the entire duration of the pregnancies with its monthly list of complications. I would have definitely been happier with a book that outlined all of the things that you personally can do to ensure a healthy pregnancy, and focus less on possible complications which are beyond your control!!!
Consumer Rating (out of 5 Stars): 1.0	Date of Review: 05/31/2008		Title of Post: “To All Expecting Fathers…”
Review:   Guys ... consider this a warning; this will be the worst book that your significant other can read and will make your life utterly miserable for the next nine months. It's been over four years since I had to deal with this series’ 3rd edition and I still can't stand the sight of it.  It may have been intended as a self-help guide, but its alarmist tone and condescending attitude leads this to act more as a bible for every worst-case scenario imaginable. After spending a few hours perusing this book's contents, your wife, girlfriend, whomever [sic] will become so overworked and paranoid that every little ache, pain, and irritation will become a sign of the baby being born with a forked tongue and three heads. The diet your partner will be instructed to keep is impossible for any human being alive to follow. She will be told to try and avoid ... damn near everything it seems like.  I was also incensed that after reading up on the author, all of this "wonderful" information was being brought to me by someone with NO MEDICAL BACKGROUND. If I'm going to want advice on dealing with pregnancy issues, wouldn't I want to consult an expert (i.e. someone with a degree)? Murkoff is no more an expert then I am ...   I'll be blunt, WTEWYE seems to be an EXTREMELY popular gift for someone who's pregnant for the first time and it's probably unavoidable. I came into three copies without any effort at all. I'm not going to stand here and pretend I know of a better source for information either, because (outside of ... oh I don't know ... a doctor) I don't. All I know is that if THIS is the definitive volume on the pregnancy experience, then God help us all.    I absolutely guarantee you, someone your partner knows WILL buy this for her. Your mission is to "lose it." If you're already stuck with it and you can't hide it or burn it, at least do your best to temper its pages with as much perspective as you possibly can…. Batten down the hatches and break out the antacid my friends, it's gonna be a long nine months.
Consumer Rating (out of 5 Stars): 1.0	Date of Review: 12/20/2008			Title of Post: “UGH!!! This is a Book to Avoid”
Review:  This is the WORST pregnancy book I have read during my 3 pregnancies. I am not generally an anxious person, but this book gives you lots to be anxious about. If you want to know every single thing that could go wrong during a pregnancy (regardless of how rare it is) then you might like this book. I have also found the other books in this series to be of a similar tone and in some cases to contain inaccurate information.
Consumer Rating (out of 5 Stars): 2.0	Date of Review: 2/13/2009			Title of Post: “DO NOT READ THIS BOOK ALONE”
Review:  This book scared the crap out of me! I have always heard that it was a pregnant woman's "bible", so when I found out I was expecting it was the first book I bought. After the first night of reading it I was a mess. I felt like no matter what I did was wrong and that I was going to end up doing permanent damage to my child. I was so afraid of eating the wrong thing, drinking too much sugar, moving the wrong way that I stopped eating and sleeping. Finally, my husband hid the book and told me to trust my body and my instincts. Amazingly, he was right.

In this article, and others, I am often drawn to Susan Faludi’s argument in her book, Backlash, that the 1980s can be viewed as a time of backlash directed toward feminists for the successes of the women’s movement.  Although two decades have passed since Faludi’s initial theorization, I find myself arguing that the cultural climate remains eerily the same.   I would argue that the period of backlash never quite ended.  In fact, it instead seems to have morphed stealthily from direct media tirades to more subtle consumer packaging – making the latter seem all the more frightening.  The dominance of a text like What to Expect When You Are Expecting seems to indicate that the backlash is still alive and working on women across the country in very covert, and problematic, ways.  As Faludi’s original study well proved, the power of misinformation coupled with fear can be quite detrimental.  Given that this same coalition exists on the personal bookshelves of women across the country, it seems important that feminist scholars continue to critique this impregnated genre of parenting advice books with an eye toward their possible long term implications.  

The Timeliness of FX's The Americans: Why Cold War Narratives are Appealing to Post-9/11 Audiences

It often surprises me that I ended up becoming a post-9/11 television scholar because, at times, my historical expertise has been embarrassingly limited.  (We’ll leave the rant about how history is taught in American public schools for another post.)  Certain historical time periods and events have held my interest more than others throughout the years and I’ve sought out information on them (although, perhaps too often, like many of my peers, through media/entertainment products.  To this day I can’t help but see flashes of Ben Affleck, Josh Harnett, and Kate Beckinsale when I think of the attack on Pearl Harbor).

Of all the historical time periods that I’ve felt myself drawn to, the Cold War era, surprisingly, has not really been one of them.  At least not initially.  As an academic the McCarthy era interested me and always seemed uncomfortably relevant to the contemporary moment – especially after the passage of the Patriot Act.  But I never threw myself into studying the time period.

So when FX launched The Americans this year I was initially drawn to it because I liked the actors and I enjoy “period” shows.  Although it took a few episodes for the plot to completely hook me, I was immediately impressed by the show’s faithful depiction of the time period.  I have a nostalgia for the 80s that centers around the fashion, music, and pop cultural fads more so than the politics of the time.  So watching the program conjured up fuzzy depiction of the past – memory fragments from my childhood of family cars, parental hairstyles, childhood games, and so forth.  But as I watched on the 80s backdrop became less the draw and the narrative began to really interest me – not just as a plain old good story that asks you to cheer for the so-called “bad guys,” but as a storyline that really resonates in this post-9/11 moment.

For those unfamiliar with the show here is the description listed on FX’s website: 

The Americans is a period drama about the complex marriage of two KGB spies posing as Americans in suburban Washington D.C. shortly after Ronald Reagan is elected President. The arranged marriage of Philip (Matthew Rhys) and Elizabeth Jennings (Keri Russell), who have two children – 13-year-old Paige (Holly Taylor) and 10-year-old Henry (Keidrich Sellati), who know nothing about their parents’ true identity – grows more passionate and genuine by the day, but is constantly tested by the escalation of the Cold War and the intimate, dangerous and darkly funny relationships they must maintain with a network of spies and informants under their control. Complicating their relationship further is Philip’s growing sense of affinity for America’s values and way of life. Tensions also heighten upon the arrival of a new neighbor, Stan Beeman (Noah Emmerich), an FBI agent. Stan and his partner, Agent Chris Amador (Maximiliano Hernández), are members of a new division of Counterintelligence tasked with fighting against foreign agents on U.S. soil, including KGB Directorate S illegals, Russian spies posing as Americans.

While many have argued that “The Americans” is primarily a marriage drama – that is only half of its draw.  But an important half.  In a Huffington Post interview with Maureen Ryan, the executive producers of the show defended this shows focus on relationships – the marital relationship between Philip and Elizabeth which rests at the core; the complicated friendship between Philip and his next door neighbor/FBI agent, Stan; and the tumultuous relationships between adolescent children and their parents (unfolding in both households on that suburban block).   Despite its 80s backdrop, it is these stories that can easily relate to viewers of today because, as the producers note, “these relationships wind up being allegories for universal experiences, just in this super-dramatized, charged prism of the Cold War.”

And the relationships are good, as well as the acting and character development.  Keri Russell’s Elizabeth is heartbreaking with her ability to constantly hide her underlying pain (from past experiences and current emotional struggles) with a cold, strong exterior mask.  Matthew Rhys’s Phillip’s ability to morph between the sentimental, brooding, emotional, even jealous, husband to the calculated, fierce, cold-blooded killer is sensational.  The surrounding characters – particularly the women (Nina, the Russian informant; Claudia, the Jennings’ handler; and Martha, the misguided FBI secretary) – are also superb.  And although the show may have made some missteps in killing off two characters with potentially great storylines – not unimportantly, as Amy Davisdson notes in an article in The New Yorker, two of the only non-white characters – there are plenty of other characters to continue developing in the coming season.  (FX has officially renewed the show for next year).

However, half way through the season I realized I was watching for more than just the character-driven plotlines.  The similarities between the 80s and the present started to fascinate me.  Unsurprisingly, this post-9/11 television scholar started seeing “9/11” motifs everywhere.

I am far from the first to see the connections between the two historic time periods.    In America Between the Wars:  From 11/9 to 9/11, Derek Chollet and James Goldgeier study the long decade of the 90s from the collapse of the Berlin Wall on November 9^th, 1989 – the event which signaled the end of the Cold War – to 9/11 which launched the War on Terror.  The time in between was viewed as a victory for America and the West:  democracy and free markets had prevailed and the United States emerged as the world's triumphant superpower. The finger-on-the-button tension that had defined a generation was over, and it seemed that peace was at hand. The next twelve years rolled by in a haze of self-congratulation – what some now call a "holiday from history."  This would all shatter on September 11^th.  Chollet and Goldgeier’s text studies this in-between time, arguing that it can reveal much about not only the recent past but about the pending future as well.

Likewise, The Americans, with its portrayal of the last decade of the Cold War, can reveal much about our contemporary time period.  Being released a decade after the unquestioning wave of patriotism surrounding 9/11, the show questions uncritical ideological stances and the ethics behind national security practices.  As it depicts the start of the U.S. government’s technological ability to spy easily on not just on foreigners, but on its own citizens, it is hard not to think of the recent NSA scandal (PRISM).  I would argue that this show could not have been popular a decade ago, too soon after the terrorist attacks when rage-filled Americans still needed to have unwavering trust in the government’s ability to keep them safe from another attack… at any cost (of freedom).  That trust has eroded for many in the past decade.  Therefore, The Americans’s portrayals of Stan as an evolving anti-hero, not the impeccably moral FBI agent he seemed at the start of the series but rather one who would coerce his informant into sleeping with him and commit a revenge killing – is more palatable than it would have been in recent viewing history.  Likewise, while narratives that allow viewers to root for the “bad” guys have often been popular in the past (like many I enjoyed watching Nicholas Cage steal cars in Gone in 60 Seconds and George Clooney rob casinos in Ocean’s Eleven), this pushes that premise to the extreme by asking viewers to, in essence, emotionally invest (and cheer on) the terrorists.  The likelihood of this sitting well with viewers ten years ago is not high.  But today viewers delve into the plot, seemingly, without any cognitive dissonance.  To me this says a lot about the turning tides of the post-9/11 era, at least in terms of American sensibilities.

Of course, as always, perhaps I’m just reading too much into the show.  Perhaps viewers just like the big hair and blocky automobiles, the melodrama and the espionage.  I like that it’s that and so much more.

Fairytales on the Small Screen: ABC's Once Upon a Time as a Post-9/11 Narrative?

I just recently finished watching the final episodes of the past season of ABC’s Once Upon a Time.  This series is one of the ones that lingers in my DVR queue for much too long, always tempting me to just delete it away.  But then I watch an episode and am sucked into its fantastical universe for another 40 minutes and walk away not overly upset that I sat watching its narrative unfold.

I’ll watch anything from the makers of Lost and so that’s why I originally tuned in.  I also like fairytales well enough to be intrigued by adaptations.   As someone who writes on temporal play, I enjoy the duel storylines that each episode provides: a look into the characters in the present (refuges from a magical land living in the “real” world in a town called Storybrooke) and in the past (back in the Enchanted Forest, among other places, where they lived out their lives in their “normal” fairytale character roles).

There’s enough in the story to like, so I’m not sure why I’m always flirting with the idea of abandoning the show.  There is the classic character you love to hate (the Evil Queen) who always has the potential of turning good (due to the love she has for her adopted son); there is a cute kid at the center of the action (Henry was the first person to realize that the seaside Maine town was really comprised of princesses, witches, fairies, and more – fantastical creatures who simply couldn’t remember who there really were due to a curse); there are love stories (callbacks to classic tales such as Beauty & the Beast and Snow White); and more importantly, there are abundant allusions (and reenactments) of the narratives we grew up on as children.  Perhaps it’s the latter that I really like:  seeing how the writers are going to portray Lancelot, Mulan, Pinocchio, Captain Hook, and others.  And, as important, how they will blend such diverse imaginary figures and lands together. 

And so I watch.  Some storylines hold my attention better than other.  The one that season two ended on was relatively intriguing:  a duo with ties to a secret organization came to Storybrooke to rid the human world of magic.  As they tortured the Evil Queen and spouted out comments about how those people “didn’t belong here,” my post-9/11 media detector went off.  Magical persons as “Other”… an organization developed to abolish them… Interesting, indeed.

Of course, to be fair, I already had connected the trend of fairytales-gone-tv to 9/11.  (Once Upon a Time is not an anomaly, NBC’s Grimm – a crime procedural loosely revolving around the Grimms’ Fairy Tales – is also enjoying its second season).  And I’m not the only one to see this as a possible ripple effect of 9/11.  To be clear, fairytales have existed in all documented time periods.  (And my favorite fact is that almost every region on earth has its own relatively ancient version of the Cinderella tale).  But despite the genre’s longevity, certain time periods do seem to revive it.  The last decade has been one of them.  Besides for the television shows mentioned above, fairy tale film adaptations have been plentiful as of late.  To name just a few:  Red Riding Hood (2011), Snow White and the Huntsman (2012), and Mirror, Mirror (2012).  And it wasn’t until post-9/11, in 2002, that the princess craze really infiltrated the children’s market with the launch of the Disney Princess lines.  Did 9/11 amplify our desire for escapism?  Can the fairytale boom be connected to the explosion of narratives centering around other fantastical creatures (like vampires that sparkle in the sunlight)?  Are they similar to all of the “hero” narratives that proliferated after the terrorist attacks (from television dramas like 24  to comic book adaptations like Batman)?  Are they a product of the economic times (do castles and buried treasure appeal to us in this time of recession)?  Or are we simply hungry for any story that promises us a “happily ever after”?  I’m not sure that any of the above reasons fully explain the trend but at least it gives television scholars like me a new genre to analyze on the small screen. 

More Moments from Dating Self-Help Books that Make Me Want to Scream

I imagine if feminist scholars were all polled that an overwhelming majority of them would reveal that the topics they choose to focus on in their research are somehow connected to things that make them really, really angry.  A good portion of my feminist media analysis as of late has had ties to the self-help genre and I haven’t always understood why.  I never read self-help texts myself but suddenly the phenomenon began interesting me.  And as I started researching them, and inadvertently reading them for both my research and for myself, I found myself having a love-hate relationship with them.  While I understand the Siren song that they are – promising a solution to all that ails their readers – I rarely find them helpful or comforting.  In fact, 99% of the time they just make me angry.

In a previous post I wrote about how the self-help craze is seeping into mainstream entertainment productions, particularly Hollywood romantic comedies.  In order to study more of these cross-over narratives (self-help-books-gone-film), I watched Tim Story’s Think Like a Man (2012) and read the book that inspired it, Steve Harvey’s Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man (2009).   While there are things to rant about in the film (although no more than the average romantic comedy really), I’d like to focus just on a few parts of the book that really got me fired up.

Like most dating self-help books, this one is extremely essentialist – it sells a narrative that there is a one-size-fits-all way to understand men (because, apparently, all men are exactly the same).  Similarly, it portrays women as all the same… or at least in want of the same thing:  a man to marry.

One could probably get the gist of a self-help book by just skimming its table of contents alone.  So I’ll save you the trouble and relay the highlights here.  Here are the section headers that reveal the topic coverage within this book:

 

·         What Drives Men

·         Our Love Isn’t Like Your Love

·         The Three Things Every Man Needs:  Support, Loyalty, and the Cookie

·         “We Need to Talk,” and Other Words that Make Men Run for Cover

·         “First Things First:  He Wants to Sleep with You”

·          Sports Fish vs. Keepers:  How men Distinguish between the Marrying Types and the Playthings

·         Mama’s Boys

·         Why Men Cheat

·         Men Respect Standards – Get Some

·         The Five Questions Every Women Should Ask before She Gets in Too Deep

·         The Ninety-Day Rule:  Getting the Respect you Deserve

·          If He’s Meeting the Kids After You Decide He’s “the One,” It’s too Late

·          Strong, Independent – and Lonely – Women

·         How to Get the Ring

·         Quick Answers to the Questions You’ve Always Wanted to Ask

I could easily pull quotes from any of these sections to critique, specifically the parts about how men need “the cookie” (sex).   But it was the last section, “Quick Answers to the Questions You’ve Always Wanted to Ask” that really irked me.   Was it because it was at the end of the book and I had finally had enough?  Possibly.  But more so it was because these were NOT questions I had always wanted to ask.  In fact, I found the fact that Harvey thought most women wanted to ask these questions insulting.  So in order to cope with my rage I’m including just a few of these questions here with my snarky asides.  (It’s like having a sneak peak into my mind as I was reading!)

·         Q:  How do men feel about plastic surgery, weaves, colored contacts, fake nails, et cetera?  A:  “For the average man, whatever you’re doing to make yourself look beautiful while you’re hanging on his arm is cool by him.”  (Me:  Oh, great, one more reason to look into Botox and Lipo.  Glad to see we’re reinforcing media beauty standards here).

·         Q:  What do men think of their women when they gain weight, or look different than they did in the beginning of the relationship?  A:  “A man who loves you is going to love you regardless.”  (Me:  That’s swell, Steve.  Why don’t women get asked if they’ll still love their men once they go bald and develop beer guts?)

·         Q:  “Do men prefer women in flats or heels?  A:” “Heels, baby. Heels.”   (Me:  Really, this is a question all women have been dying to ask?  How to accessorize to best attract a man?)

·          Q:  Would a man date a dumb woman?  A:  “A smart man can’t date a dumb woman.  But he can use a dumb woman.”  (Me:  Lovely.  And is it just me or does this imply that a smart woman could date a dumb man?)

·         Q:  How do men feel about women who ask for money?  (Me:  Way to go, Harvey.  Reinforcing the image of woman-as-gold-digger).

·         Q:  Would men help their women build her business?  (Me:  Is it impossible for a woman to have ambitious goals without turning to her man for support?)

·          Q:  Do you mind if your woman doesn’t work?  A:  Not at all.  (Me:  Surprise, surprise. After all, that’s the way it really should be, right?)

·          Q:  How do men really feel about women drivers?  (Me: Can we squeeze anymore gender stereotypes into this Q & A session?) 

·         Q:  How do you feel about a woman who does not want your last name after marriage?  A:  Most men have a problem with that… A man needs to know you’re as committed to this family as you are to your old one.  You can hyphenate it if you want to, but that last name really needs to be the same as your man’s.  (Me:  Well, gee, if you say so.  I’ll just head off to the DMV and Secretary of State right now to jump on that paperwork).

·         Q:  Are men okay with their women having male friends?  (Me:  I don’t care if they are.  What century is this again?).

·         Q:  How do men feel about gossip?  (Me:  Sigh.  I’m getting bored with pointing out the gender stereotypes here).

·         Q:  How do men feel about the way a woman keeps her house?  (Me:  AHHHHHH!)

I don’t know if I really have a point in writing this post other than to make it obvious that I think that books like these are extremely problematic.  So, if in between reading blogs on popular culture you were thinking of skimming the self-help aisle for relationship advice, I urge you to reconsider.  Or, at least not check out this particular text!