Self-Help Books ‘Bitch’ About Sexes

In a world filled with writers who write badly and stories that sell on shock value alone, there’s something satisfying about a book that manages to excel at both: butchering the English language while writing about a topic at once vulgar and banal. Hence my joy upon hearing of the release of “That Bitch: Protect Yourself Against Women with Malicious Intent,” a book that refers to the fairer sex as “domestic terrorists” or “Al’Qa’ida in high heels and lipsticks.”

The main premise of “That Bitch” is that lurking in America is a small but lethal sub-group of the female population who live to dominate and abuse men. The book is co-written by Mary Cleary, the (female) founder of AMEN (a support group for male victims of domestic abuse) and Roy Sheppard, a writer for Loaded (the British equivalent of Maxim, but with toplessness).

If this combination demonstrates anything, it’s that the only unique aspect of “That Bitch” is its demographic. While most self-help books cater to an obvious niche, this book aims at the group of men who are both misogynistic enough to enjoy reading about “pampered predators” but secure enough in their manhood to peruse the self-help section without shame.

Men on the whole represent a tiny proportion of the self-help market, but perhaps a growing one. A search on www.amazon.com for “that bitch” brings up the recent publication and also “How to Get Over That Bitch and Grow Balls They Can’t Resist: The Masculine Way to Love, Leave & Attract Women,” written by a former male escort and his current wife. The authors of “That Bitch” do plan to tap into the larger, more lucrative market of female self-help readers with a follow-up called—you guessed it—“That Bastard.”

Self-help books draw a decisive line between the sexes, firmly sequestering them in enemy camps. Listed between the two books above is “Why Men Love Bitches,” a book that shows women how to become more desirable while losing any remnants of decency and self-respect. While in other genres the differences in male and female readership aren’t as clearly drawn, they still exist.

A recent survey in The Guardian asked men and women to name the books most personally important to them. The results found that men were drawn to books about isolationism (number one was Camus’ “The Outsider”), while women tended toward Austen and Brontë novels focusing on social relationships. Men and women have differences in erotica preferences as well: studies have shown that women react more, let’s say, strongly to sexually explicit stories featuring dominant female protagonists, as opposed to dominant males.

But not only do women read differently, they read more. At least anecdotally, it seems that women are the overwhelming majority of purchasers and readers of self-help books. In the years since the Larry Summers/innate differences fall-out, a number of books have come out exploring not only male tendencies towards the sciences, but also female tendencies towards verbal skills and communication.

And the research is carrying over into the classroom. Single-sex classrooms, once proposed with the aim of improving females’ scores in math, have now been lauded as also improving boys’ engagement with books by allowing teachers to modify content for gender. All sorts of suggestions have been put forth for why girls read more than boys, from the content of the books taught in school to males’ stronger engagement with other media, particularly video and computer games.

It’s a fine line to walk between examining quantifiable differences and delving into either the causes or implications of those differences. A recent article in The Guardian claims that for men fiction reading is an adolescent rite of passage rarely revisited afterwards, but never attempts to explain why women continue reading fiction and men put it away. Of course there are men who still read fiction, just as some men turn to self-help books for solace. But most publishers have realized, even if Mary Cleary and Roy Sheppard haven’t, that the bitches are the ones buying the books.

—Staff writer Madeline K.B. Ross can be reached at mross@fas.harvard.edu.