There is a Reason Your Mother Never Told You These Things
Written: Feb 17 '08
Product Rating:
Pros: Some of the straighforward advice
Cons: The chapters on relationships and sex; Advice too brief
The Bottom Line: This book is okay until it gets to the chapters on sex and relationships. It is generalizing, extreme, and often false and misleading.
Bryan_Carey's Full Review: Richard M. Dudum - What Your Mother Never Told You...
What can a teenage girl or young female adult do to protect herself in the modern- day world? This is a question that has been asked by many people, with social workers, politicians, religious leaders, and others quickly coming forward to offer their collective advice on how we can protect the vulnerable among us. One man who feels he knows some of the answers falls into none of these categories. He has played many roles, including that of an attorney, a summer camp director, a musician, and, most importantly, a father of four children including two daughters. His name is Richard Dudum and in this book, What Your Mother Never Told You: A Survival Guide for Teenage Girls, Dudum offers direct advice on how a young woman can survive her adolescent years and beyond.
Basic Contents of This Book:
This 245- page book is divided into the following sections:
Prologue
Letter to Teenage Girls
Letter to Parents, Caregivers, and Counselors Perceptions and Communication Skills
Who You Are and What Makes You Tick
Your Parents
How to Handle Yourself
Sex, Alcohol, and Drugs
The Media Hype
Manipulative Boys
Relationships and Sex
Consequences
Hang in There and Go for It
Closing Thoughts Appendix A: Specific Drug Details
Appendix B: Sexual Assault- Steps to Take
Appendix C: Signs to Watch For
Appendix D: A Friend in Need
Appendix E: Take Some Time
Endnotes
This book starts out with an introductory letter to teenage girls followed by a similar letter to parents/caregivers/counselors, letting each group know exactly why this book was written and how it pertains to them. Next, the book is divided into ten main sections with several short chapters in each. Starting with a chapter titled “How Will You be Remembered After High School” in the first section and ending with a chapter titled “Allow Yourself to be a Teenager“ in the final section, this book attempts to offer quick advice on how a girl should conduct herself in high school, in social situations, and in relationships.
Each of the chapters offered in the various sections is quite short (approximately 1 to 5 pages each), but the advice given is very direct. The author doesn’t spend much time explaining and he doesn’t spend time debating the merits of a given position. Dudum states what he feels are the facts and the correct social norms to follow, then quickly moves on to the next chapter. There are a total of 63 chapters written in this brief, direct manner.
To help give some additional resources and food for thought, this book ends with five appendices. Appendix A offers some online references to government sites that talk about drugs; Appendix B explains the steps to take if you or someone you know has been a victim of sexual assault; Appendix C lists some warning signs that signal various disorders; and Appendix D offers some advice on friendship and how to recognize when a friend is in trouble. Appendix E then ends the book with a short poem written by the author.
Final Thoughts:
What Your Mother Never Told You is a self- help book intended to guide young women as they face the day to day social problems of their young lives. Author Richard Dudum is not a licensed social worker or psychologist, but he does help run a summer camp and he does have four children of his own. With this experience, he has gathered together his years of knowledge and composed this book. His hope is that young women everywhere- high school age and early college age- will read this book and, with a little luck, take its advice to heart and hopefully grow up to be happier, healthier, more confident women.
I am not a licensed counselor, social worker, psychologist, or anything remotely close. I have also never run a summer camp nor have I participated directly in the counseling of adolescent women. However, I have two young girls of my own and I did go through adolescence with plenty of young, “vulnerable” women all around me, so I do have a basis on which to apply Dudum’s advice and judge whether or not it seems reasonable. And from my experience, Dudum’s book offers its share of hits and misses. In some areas, the book is dead- on, but these spot- on moments generally deal with topics that have obvious answers. Chapters like “Figure Out Who You Are…NOT”, “I Don’t Like My Parents Behavior”, and “Always Have a Game Plan” each cover problem areas that have obvious answers, and the advice given in this book is pretty standard. Advice like not accepting rides from strangers and learning from your parents mistakes are things that most anyone would agree with.
However, “What Your Mother Never Told You” also has its share of controversy and some of its advice is misleading and false. The chapters I am referring to are the ones that deal with sex and relationships. I don’t know what life was like where Dudum grew up or what these girls in his summer camps have experienced, but much of what he says in these chapters on sex and relationships is false and often quite offensive. Consider this excerpt taken from chapter forty- three:
“Absolutely no boy of good caliper will overwhelm you with compliments and then tell you ‘you’re special’ unless he wants something. That something is SEX!”
Not only does the author make this extreme statement, he then goes so far as to drill this into the reader’s head by stating that any male who tells a girl she is special in a short duration of time is a total liar with only one thing in mind: Getting into a girl’s pants. He then goes on to say that the “you’re special” statement is total bullsh-t! Wow! Not only is his opinion false in its extremities, but the author is completely full of sh-t himself to make a statement like this. He makes other statements that are equally brash in this section of the book, and then uses guilt to cap it off. Here are some other gems taken from the book (not necessarily quotes, but the same general idea):
1. What will your future husband think of you when you tell him you already had sex in the past?
2. Having sex is often the beginning of the end in a relationship.
The first statement is laughable. In case the author doesn’t know the statistics, the average age for a first marriage has now reached 27 for women and 29 for men. We men know very well that the women we meet and court have most likely already had sex. It is something we fully expect and we do not hold it against them (at least not the vast majority of men). It would make no sense to do this. First, it would make us hypocritical since most all of us have had sex and second, it would be completely unreasonable to expect a women to go that many years without sexual relationships. And the second statement above is also silly. Okay, in some instances, yes, sex could be the beginning of the end of a relationship. But I have news for you: Not having sex can also be the beginning of the end of a relationship! Life is not nearly as black and white as Dudum makes it out to be, and I find it offensive that he is so strongly convinced that these extreme statements and others like them are one- hundred percent true.
Why the author chose to write this section of the book the way he did, I am not certain. But I think he did this because he feels that teenage pregnancy and other sexual issues are so critically important that any means necessary to reduce the number of people having sex is completely justified. Telling the complete and total truth has not been as successful as he and others would like, so he decided to go to extremes and make statements that are patently false. It wouldn’t be so bad if the author qualified these statements to reflect a more accurate picture; like for example, if he said that “some” or even “many” men who say ‘you’re special’ to a woman are looking for sex. I could accept that, because there are most certainly instances where this is true. But all men who make statements like this are not telling a manipulative lie. The author also seems to base his advice on generalized and often false assumptions about young women. He seems to believe that 1. No woman wants sex, 2. Women have to be falsely persuaded to have sex, 3. All women are virtuous at their core, and 4. All women want to wait until they are married to have sex. I don’t know what planet the author arrived from, but these assumptions are most certainly FALSE, as most any man will attest. Again, there are some women who fit these descriptions, but they don’t represent the attitudes of all women.
Extreme statements pop up in other chapters as well and some of them are manipulative in nature. For example, in the chapter titled “Sex and Porn in the Media and Internet”, the author offers this opinion:
“The media is all about influence and money….They don’t give a damn about you….don’t let the media and the internet set your standards in life”.
This is sometimes true, yes. But this could actually apply to many different businesses, not just those that use sex to make a sale. It appears the author, after having chastised men for manipulating women, is offering a little manipulation of his own. He seems to want the reader to believe that only the "Sex and Porn in the Media and Internet" and related businesses are "about influence and money and don't give a damn about you". He wants you to think there is something uniquely “bad” about the way these businesses (and no others) try to influence you when they don’t really care about you. But in reality, this opinion could apply to many types of businesses. It really isn’t anything unique at all.
The chapters in this book are very short and many of them are too brief to address the issue at hand. The appendices are also rather short and don’t really say as much as they should. I think the author was trying to cover too many topics in a single volume. He probably would have been better off stretching this into a multiple- volume set.
Overall, “What Your Mother Never Told You” is a take it or leave it type of book with some good basic advice combined with many extreme statements that are false and misleading. Dudum is an attorney, so he is well versed on the art of manipulation and while some of the advice in this book is good, the chapters on sex and relationships are utterly worthless and because of them, I cannot give this book a recommendation. Reducing teen pregnancies is a worthy cause, and educating youth on the consequences of their actions is a noble and often thankless effort. But sticking to the truth is still the best way to go, and I don’t appreciate any book that makes extreme generalizations and then insists they are absolute truth when the opposite is really the case.
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