It’s Her Fault? Really? Ashley Bradley University Blogger

If you’re from the Chicagoland area, you’ve probably heard about the high school counselor and girls’ basketball coach from the southern suburbs who wrote a racy, “self-help” relationship book geared towards women entitled It’s Her Fault and was recently fired as a result. Now, he has the right to exercise freedom of speech, his first amendment right, by writing a book. The issue is that it is a highly offensive and degrading work.

Now, I haven’t read the book myself, but I’ve been hearing a lot about it since returning to school. The media continually quotes the same sentence from the book: "The ultimate point here is to utilize your worth, brains, experience or even sex appeal to potentially dominate one of the least intelligent creatures on the planet when it comes to the opposite sex," Craig writes. So women are one of the least intelligent creatures? The same “creatures” who bring males into this very world? If we are so lacking in intelligence, then what is our purpose on this planet? Is our purpose only to appeal to and please men? If that is our sole purpose, then I would agree that we are not too intelligent, but the majority of women are not on this planet to simply please men.

I spoke with a friend about it, and she mentioned the possibility of Bryan Craig (the author) writing the book as a joke just to see if he can get away with it. Maybe he did it as a publicity stunt of sorts. The thing is I don’t think Craig wrote it as a joke at all. I believe this is what he truly believes and how he feels about the female population. It makes me wonder if this is how he feels about his own wife (since it turns out that he’s actually married). Does he expect her to behave certain ways and hold her to a certain standard? I don’t think this is fair to his wife or women in general.

Blaming women for most issues in a relationship is not fair at all since relationships are a two-way street. I think another issue with this book is that it is truly reinforcing patriarchal society concepts in some areas. Because Craig is a man, he is superior and therefore knows exactly how a woman should act and what would make her a better wife and such. It’s one thing to give good advice on how to make relationships better in little ways, but it’s another thing to basically criticize and blame half of the human race for relational problems.