Given my job, I pay attention to trends in the book industry. Currently, there’s a lot of talk about book banning and Trad wives, not to mention a bunch of new publications that address these two separate topics.

A Trad wife, if you’ve been living under a rock, is a young woman who prefers a marriage in which the husband goes out to earn a living, while she stays home to raise the kids. This arrangement, not unlike that of my parents’ generation, requires the husband to make the major decisions that affect the family, and the wife to accept his word as law. The husband to embrace his masculinity, and the wife to maintain an appealing femininity.

Now, having been in a marriage that gave my husband the legal right to run my life, I’m a skeptic when it comes to the whole Trad arrangement. And I’m not a fan of book banning, particularly when I see the stuff that’s being pulled off library shelves.

But I’ve got to say, there are some books no twelve-year-old should read. The books I find the most dangerous, however, aren’t the ones being banned, but the kind that would get a lot of play among the Trad crowd.

I’ll explain…

When I was a kid, I liked to watch the Dinah Shore show on the portable TV while my Mom fixed dinner. One day, Marabel Morgan was on defending her book, The Total Woman.

This was the mid-70’s, the height of the Woman’s Movement, and Dinah was taking Marabel to task. “You greet your husband at the door wearing nothing but Saran Wrap?” Dinah asked, aghast.

Interested in the sexual, my ears perked up.

“A woman should allow her husband to make all the major decisions, right down to the color of the freezer?” Dinah shook her head. “Tell me the truth. Do you really believe that?”

Mom snorted as she opened a can of corn beef hash. Clearly, Dinah and Mom weren’t buying what Marabel–with her QT-tan and her frosted pink lipstick–had to sell.

I was dusting the living room, not long after this, when I discovered The Total Woman on the wall-to-wall shelves. Surprised, because clearly my mom would never have purchased the thing, I flipped the pages in search of the sexy bits. There was lots of stuff on greeting one’s husband at the door in hot outfits–you could be a cowgirl one day, or a pirate, or a Las Vegas showgirl–but there was nothing whatsoever about plastic cling wrap.

Sitting on the carpet, I read on:

Many a husband rushes off to work leaving his wife slumped over a cup of coffee in her grubby undies. His once sexy bride is now wrapped in rollers and smells like bacon and eggs. All day long he’s surrounded at the office by dazzling secretaries who emit clouds of perfume…If you are dumpy, stringy, or exhausted, he’s sorry he came. …It’s a bad scene. Is it any wonder so many men come home late, if at all?

When Dad came home that evening, having spent the last nine hours at a place he liked to call ‘a little taste of hell,’ Mom greeted him in stretch pants and a sweatshirt covered with paint. As usual, she’d completely forgotten to comb her hair. “Toilet’s clogged,” she said from the kitchen door. “Chipped beef on toast tonight. Fifteen minutes.”

After supper, as was his habit, Dad trudged down to the basement to drink himself stupid. When he staggered back upstairs, he rattled our cages for a couple of hours, slammed the cabinet doors around, cleaned up the mess in the kitchen, and then passed out in bed. Unhappy with his lot in life, like many men of his era, he wanted to punish us all because there was nothing in the deal he’d bought into for him.

“Why don’t you just divorce him?” I asked Mom, sick of the nonstop tension. “He’s a horrible father and a shit for a husband.”

“You can’t just get up and go like that,” Mom explained, snapping her fingers. “Living takes money.” In other words, without Dad, the family breadwinner, we’d end up eating cat food and living in a cardboard box.

Inexplicably drawn to Marabel’s book, to her happy face glowing from the back cover, I went back to it the very next day.

If you fulfill his needs, he won’t have to escape some other way…you may have a husband who does not do anything but stay home drinking beer in his underwear. The responsibility of the family may rest on your back because somewhere along the line you usurped his role. Your nagging may have taken the wind out of his sails and now he has no desire to keep working for you.

Why hadn’t I seen it before? Dad’s drinking was all Mom’s fault. Really, to improve our homelife, what she needed to do was dress up like Annie Oakley. Light some candles. Chatter on about pleasant things over a nice roast squab dinner.

And I suppose it makes sense that, fifteen years later, I’d assumed it was all up to me to carry my own marriage. To adapt to living in Iran, the country of my husband’s birth. To keep my gripes to myself. So my husband wouldn’t leave me for one of his graduate students. Because the streets of Iran, in case you’re wondering, weren’t a good place to wind up without a pot to piss in.

After moving back to the States. After the divorce. I found myself studying other people’s relationships. I admired those couples who really seemed to make it work. But mostly I predicted disaster, just by looking at the wife. The overweight lady with a tray of cookies for her kid’s karate class? She had fifteen minutes, tick tick tick, before her husband drop-kicked her to the curb. The lady chewing gum, reading The Enquirer at the checkout counter? Keep that up, and she’s be joining Parents Without Partners.

How did your view on marriage get so skewed, a friend I’d known since college asked me one day. Over the course of her marriage, she’d gained twenty pounds. She’d chucked the date nights, the lingerie, and the cute little skirts. Her husband changed diapers while she ate chips. Saran Wrap, in her house, was strictly to protect leftovers. Content to be herself, she wasn’t the least bit worried about how he felt or if he’d leave her for someone else. Her cavalier attitude was a thing to behold.

Thanks to that book I read at twelve, it took me ages to get that marriage is about equal partnering. About negotiation, mutual respect, and allowing the other in when you’re completely vulnerable. Not putting on some cowgirl show to keep my man engaged.

Emotionally, that twelve-year-old ruled for way too many years. The one who believed, thanks to Marabel Morgan, that “A great marriage is not so much finding the right person as being the right person.” And that’s one fucked up way to think.

The book banners aren’t wrong about wanting to protect impressionable kids, but the real question at hand is, protect them from what?