Woman Power
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Strong medicine
Hard-hitting advice from Dr. Laura The multifaceted Dr. Laura Schlessinger, a radio host, successful author and child advocate, has been dishing out no-nonsense advice for nearly 25 years. Fans and curiosity seekers have made Dr. Laura's radio talk show one of the most popular in the country and turned her books into bestsellers. Her most recent book, The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands, was Dr. Laura's seventh bestseller and her fastest selling work ever. She's expected to have another hit on her hands with the release this month of Woman Power: Transform Your Man, Your Marriage, Your Life.
In her new book, Woman Power, a companion volume to The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands, Dr. Laura advocates a return to more traditional male/female roles as the solution to what ails the modern marriage. Feminism, she argues, has gone too far. Instead of empowering women, it devalues and diminishes the importance of men, leaving modern women with a disdain for men that can harm their relationships. Women have come to equate considering their partner's needs with being submissive and downtrodden, she says, and this viewpoint leads to countless problems within a marriage. Today's women don't see the roles of wife and mother as powerful, so they've put them second to other life goals and don't use their "woman power"—innate abilities such as sensitivity and sensuality, among others—to make their families happy. Dr. Laura doesn't think this has to be the case. She contends that women are specially designed to give men the things they really need to survive emotionally—approval, appreciation and affection. Women "give men purpose, control male aggressive and promiscuous urges." She's upset that "women have been indoctrinated to see that as subservience rather than power." In her typical straightforward fashion, Dr. Laura pulls no punches when telling female readers where they've erred. She also doesn't hesitate to label viewpoints and opinions as just plain wrong, an attitude that's earned her comparisons to tough-talking TV guru Dr. Phil. Woman Power takes readers through a series of exercises and questions, including some for men, and provides space for readers to write about their experiences as they work on their relationships. It also answers 21 questions posed by readers of The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands and contains inspiration and tips from everyday women dealing with issues in their marriages. Readers of Woman Power may not agree with all of the reasoning Dr. Laura uses to support her ideas, but the overall message of her book is indisputable. As the old song says, "It's all so easy, Try a little tenderness."
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A Google search for "Dr. Laura" pulls up thousands of hits, and the top two show how polarizing she can be: the first is her official website, where you can read her columns, listen to previous radio broadcasts and buy Dr. Laura merchandise, including T-shirts. The second? StopDrLaura.com, a site constructed in 2000 to persuade Paramount Television to drop her then-upcoming TV talk show. Love her or hate her, it's impossible to ignore Dr. Laura, whose unabashedly un-politically correct views on everything from homosexuality to childcare to women in the workplace have drawn fire over the years. But her at times outrageous, always entertaining commentary is what makes her stand out among the jam-packed self-help crowd, and anyway, a little controversy isn't necessarily a bad thing.