Tag Archives: self-help books

Gawker recently featured a post from Latoya Peterson on “self-help” dating books for women. Peterson’s article, “Dating Guides Are Hell: When Women Are the Problem”, is an amusing critique of the dating advice industry–an array of books whose messages seem more inclined toward self-destruction than self-help. Still, what’s particularly interesting about the genre is how predominantly hetero the selections still are. One would think that if anyone needed dating advice, it would be the non-hetero crowd; after all, those of us who are heterosexual have had relationship models all around us–on television, in school, in our families and our friends’ families; we should be able to navigate dating without a legion of literature to explain to us how it’s. Gays and lesbians, on the other hand, have often grown up in surroundings lacking in couples whom they could model themselves after. I remember David Sedaris writing that, as he struggled through his confusing adolescence, his mother liked to say, “Oh, you kids think you invented sex,” a remark that made Sedaris think, “But hadn’t we?” In his world, where everyone around him seemed to be hetero, what would it mean if he wanted to be with another man? Continue reading →