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The preface to Nancy Butcher’s How To Make Your Man Look Good
(Without Making Him Feel Bad) maps out the purpose of this
unlikely style and self-help tome: showing you how to help “your
man” achieve a state of optimum style and fitness “using a
positive, holistic, ‘man maintenance plan.’ ” That is bound to
be a relief to most readers. We women have grown sick and tired
of rigid, Western man-maintenance plans that cause irksome side
effects and ignore our spiritual side. We’re looking for a
natural man maintenance alternative.
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How To Make Your Man Look Good (Without Making Him
Feel Bad)
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| By
Nancy Butcher |
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Perigee, 2002 |
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However, after reading the preface, I was somewhat skeptical.
Could Ms. Butcher really live up to the lofty goal she’d set for
herself? And more importantly, could she really fill 165 pages
with this stuff? The answer turns out to be yes.
With the help of a very large type
font, lots of dated cartoons, and a generous use of
bullet points, Butcher manages to stretch about a
five-minute conversation’s worth of material over an
entire book. She teaches us all the basics
(“Feeding Your Man” in Chapter Two, “Grooming Your Man”
in Chapter Six), and still has room for extra tips, like
withholding sex until your man complies with your
wishes. |
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This is a wonderfully comprehensive
approach that, aside from the sex part, can probably even be
recycled when you adopt that new Golden Retriever pup or rescue
a stray from the pound.
One of the strengths of Butcher’s method is that you needn’t
take her word for anything. Her book is not merely a statement
of her own advice and opinions. Instead, she consults a number
of experts who draw on years of professional experience to
provide practical advice for caringly manipulating your partner
into looking the way you want him to.
Some of the best guidance comes from UCLA psychiatry professor
Dr. Mark Goulston, who weighs in with insights into the
psychological reasons men are slobs. Dr. Goulston is
particularly helpful when he advises how to approach the kind of
man who feels he lives for everyone else and wants something in
his life that’s just for him:
“Dr. Goulston suggests that you give him some breathing room and
say something indirect, for example: I was thinking of how
you dress like a slob and how it pisses me off.” That sort
of wisdom, my friends, can only be gleaned from a trained mental
health professional. Yet with How To Make Your Man Look Good,
you’re privy to this information without ever having to set your
head on an analyst’s couch.
Luckily, although Butcher’s guide is full of horror stories of
women being embarrassed by how their men look, it is not simply
an exercise in man bashing. In fact, the author makes an effort
to provide a man’s point of view of the difficulties of being
male and wearing clothes.
“It’s tough to know what kind of shirt to wear if you’re guy,”
29-year-old white guy “Liam” tells us (Butcher has “made up”
people’s names to protect their anonymity). “A lot of times, if
you wear a long-sleeve oxford shirt, you’re probably too dressed
up. … You feel goofy putting on a jacket. You’d rather wear
an overcoat.” What’s a man to do?
Apparently, poor Liam also finds himself stuck wearing free beer
logo shirts because that’s the uniform of his sex and worries
about other men thinking he’s “some mamby [sic]-pamby in
loafers.” It’s hard not to feel compassion for the guy. But
the good news is that if Liam’s woman reads Butcher’s words of
wisdom, she will soon be explaining the benefits of flossing to
him in her “best mean-but-sexy nurse voice.” She may even start
leaving him Post-it notes on the dashboard of his car reminding
him to breathe (“[h]earts and smiley faces optional”).
Ladies, the bottom line is that How To Make Your Man Look
Good is the best holistic man maintenance plan out there,
hands down. After reading this guide, you will finally be able
to take control and stage-manage every aspect of your man’s life
to suit your own whims and taste.
Please bear in mind,
however, that you must always be subtle and choose your words
carefully. As one of Butcher’s experts puts it in perhaps the
book’s sagest piece of advice, “You can’t say to your man,
‘Honey, your hair looks like shit.’ ” But apparently, if you
can get him to think so on his own, you’re halfway there
already.
—Marni Soupcoff, an attorney, writes
from Toronto.
E-mail:
tae@aei.org
The
American Enterprise Online:
www.taemag.com
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