120 ways to please your husband
And two ways to annoy your waxer
I got my ass handed to me last week by the lady who does my waxing. She’s from Belarus, where she had a masters in psychology before she and her daughter moved to the States. I was making that idle bikini wax chitchat you semi-desperately make to fill the air and asked her if her daughter, who is my age, was a picky eater as a child. “Nobody was picky because there wasn’t enough food to be picky about,” she said. “We were under Soviet rule.” Ugh god. I felt like a jerk. I’ve been seeing her since 2015, so you would think I might know better than to ask a clueless question like that. I apologized but she didn’t seem mad. She’s been through worse.
Then, after I’d flopped onto my stomach, I told her about something that was stressing me out at home. “You should be easier on him,” she said, referring to my husband, whom she’s never met. “He’s a good man, a good dad.” Well damn, Elena!
I felt like a bad person, especially after my picky eating question. Elena was probably right. I harp on my husband too much and I’m a negative person despite having everything. Meanwhile, when Chernobyl disaster happened, Elena was living a couple hundred kilometers away; she assumes both her and her daughter’s thyroid issues are related.
A few days after my appointment I told my friend Lauren about my guilty feelings. “Oh god,” she said. “My waxer defends my husband all the time! If I say he works too much she says he’s a good provider, if I say he doesn’t help with the kids she says he’s worn out from work.” We agreed that the most rational explanation is that waxers are just mean, and that we don’t need to change a thing about ourselves.
Anyway, below are some tips on how we can all be better wives. I found this magazine in a thrift store in Leelanau County, Michigan this summer and it was some of the best money I’ve spent this year.
Below are the most practical tips on pleasing a man (the rest are recipes and tips like “Use your vacation as a reason to wear something different!”)
I am super curious to learn some day how this type of advice got written and published in 1965, but I have one clue:
The only woman on the masthead, Willie Mae Rogers, was hired by Richard Nixon as a “consumer consultant” and lost her job due to a conflict of interest. Hmm.
End credits
I hope you enjoyed this issue of Evil Witches, a newsletter for people who happen to be mothers. Please pass it along, if you know someone who'd like this sort of thing in their inbox a couple times a week. You can also follow us and talk to us on Twitter here or follow us on Instagram. If you need a great aesthetician in Skokie, IL, tell Elena I sent you, I’m serious, I love her.
One witchy thing
