By
Sheila Bapat
Listen up, ladies. There's a new book that tells you exactly how to live your lives, and it all boils down to one word: doormat.
A chick named Laura Doyle released the book on Jan. 8, and it has already sold over 100,000 copies. It's called "The Surrendered Wife: The practical guide to finding intimacy, passion and peace with a man."
I'm hoping the hundred thousand have been purchased for comic relief and dinner table joking. Second only to "Mein Kampf," Doyle's how-to manual is the scariest book ever written. And given the way the world works today, Doyle's "advice" is just a big joke.
Doyle's book advises women to let their husbands control the bank accounts. It encourages women to give husbands care packages that make them feel "big" and "masculine." It warns women about giving their husbands advice while driving, because they might get sullen and angry.
One chapter of her book, titled "Abandon the Myth of Equality," advises women that "instead of throwing out traditional roles, try them on again."
Say what?
This feels like a set of 1950s television commercials compiled into an instruction manual. Either Doyle is going to great lengths to pull America's leg, or she is just really weird.
Of course, how-to books tend to be fairly ridiculous. They purport to have solutions to social problems that, in fact, have a web of solutions that nobody has nailed down yet.
Doyle's argument seems to be that the more "masculine" a man feels, the more he will be willing to serve his wife.
But why the hell does anybody have to serve anybody? The entire basis of Doyle's book seems to be that marriages ought to stay intact, that a committed relationship is the most important thing in the world. In order to do this, Doyle wants women to be a doormat without any say in where the money goes.
She seems to forget that the modern world is one of two-income families and of families that are figuring out how the dad can be home for his kids more. Going backwards, like Doyle suggests, doesn't let any of that stuff happen.
However, her book does come at a time when ideas about "women's roles" are less clear-cut. Some may think that emulating the sexual politics of the 1950s is the right way to run a family. People are a bit mixed up by this "post-feminist movement" era and think there is a certain way all women and men should act - as if we're these paper dolls whose actions within relationships need to be dictated by a guidebook that promotes repression.
Sadly, the era of Hillary seems to be over. Hell, her West Wing office didn't even go to her natural successor, Laura Bush. It went to a guy named Karl Rove, one of Bush's right-hand men. Laura Bush should have gotten a White House office from which she could work on her lifelong project of improving children's literacy, a mission she began when working as a librarian and continued with as first lady of Texas.
But she probably didn't request one, and her husband probably didn't think to offer her one.
Laura Bush seems to be exactly the kind of wife that Doyle thinks all women should be. Her "solutions" to how to make a marriage work are so archaicly frightening - they simplify relationships to making one person the dominant and one the subordinate.
Her book throws out the entire concept that the modern world is now trying to adopt: that wife and husband are equal, and that neither has to be weakened by the other in order to make a relationship work.
So let's throw out that whole goofy concept of gender equality. It seems that being a doormat is the right way to go.
