Welcome to Well, That Sucked, our weekly compendium of exactly what it sounds like. Thrown in this week’s garbage: the reputation of sandwiches everywhere and the generally understood belief that you should not rape your wife, please and thank you.
I always thought there were but a few ways to get an otherwise unwilling man to propose: save his life, get pregnant, or get his dad to buy you from your dad. What I didn’t know was that a little turkey on rye was all I needed. I could have been married years ago!
Stop me if you’ve heard this one: future Stepford Wife and New York Post reporter Stephanie Smith wants her boyfriend to propose. Instead of, say, finding someone who wants to marry her because he loves her, she’s plotted out a scheme involving food: Smith is in the process of making him 300 sandwiches, after which he’ll just have to buy her a ring. She’s started a blog about it, too, recapping all of the crushed hopes and dreams she has shoved between two slices of lightly toasted bread. The headline says she’s 124 sandwiches away from getting a ring. She is literally counting.
“Maybe I needed to show him I could cook to prove that I am wife material. If he wanted 300 sandwiches, I’d give him 300 sandwiches—and I’d blog about it.” That definitely does not sound like a cry for help.
It’s unclear why her boyfriend, Eric, has a fixation on sandwiches, but they seem to be key to him giving in and just marrying her already. Is Big Sandwich behind this? Is a consortium of Subway franchisees refusing to give him his freedom until they get the 300 sandwiches they’re owed?
You might think that perhaps Eric is some bronzed Adonis, so perfect that making him a few sandwiches is a small price to pay. Nope. He’s a knockoff Julian Assange, what with his yellow hair and nose that looks like a butt.
Most egregious: making sandwiches is not “cooking.” Toddlers can make sandwiches. I have literally made sandwiches in my sleep. You prove nothing by being able to buy sliced ham from a deli and put it on a wheat-based item.
This isn’t to say that the sandwich isn’t a noble, honorable meal. For decades, the sandwich had to fight against the stereotype that it was the food of the oppressive male. “Make me a sammich!” men across the continent once bellowed to their wives. The sandwich was finally a meal for everyone! Men, women, and children could make and eat sandwiches without feeling out of place. Smith took that away from us. With one blog post, she set back the progress of sandwiches everywhere.
But that was just one of the things that happened on Tuesday. That same day, my detailed knowledge of The Real Housewives of New Jersey finally paid off. Generally uninteresting housewife Melissa Gorga is not just a walking handbag, she’s now a published author! Love Italian Style, an advice tome/anarchist cookbook, details how to maintain a happy marriage with helpful additions from her husband, Joe. Those tips have a lot to do with keeping your husband satiated in every conceivable way. Also: let him rape you. Just let him! What, are you busy? You guys can do it while you’re folding the laundry.
“Men,” writes Joe, pounding a fist on his bare chest and humping the air, “I know you think your woman isn’t the type who wants to be taken.” Taken where? To the mall? Will there be food? I like the mall. “But trust me, she is. Every girl wants to get her hair pulled once in a while. If your wife says ‘no,’ turn her around, and rip her clothes off.” Are these the clothes I got from the mall? Please don’t. “She wants to be dominated.”
Brave Joe Gorga, defending marital rape when no one else will. Literally no one else.
Melissa’s advice is all in the same vein: If you’re married, you should dress for your man, wear makeup, never poop around him (that Starbucks around the corner knows your secret and it’s going to tell everybody), and not require him to take care of any of your children who are, biologically, 50 percent his. “When gender roles are confused, sexual roles are too. If he’s at the sink and then changing diapers, then who throws down in the bed?” asks Dr. Melissa Gorga, Chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Psychology at the Phyllis Schlafly Institute for the Criminally Insane. “In our marriage, Joe is always the man, doing masculine things. I’m the woman, and I do the female things, including housework.”
The female things, I’m guessing, include the cooking, the cleaning, and the childrearing, while Joe devotes his time to hunting, chopping wood, lifting weights, doing crunches and wrapping his head around the 3D function on iOS 7. I imagine when he updated, he just stared at his phone’s screen, perplexed by how the icons seemed to bounce when he tilted his device. “This is amazing,” he muttered while his wife gave him an enthusiastic handjob whilst roasting an entire chicken and turning her children into terrible people.
He probably really likes Proust, too.
Well, That Sucked appears every Friday.
