When I picked up How to Duck a Suckah, I thought it was going to be one of those books that empowered women and kept them from choosing losers as a mate. Then I read it.
It’s not that Big Boom (the author) doesn’t sincerely see himself as “the bodyguard for women’s hearts,” it’s just that the way he views women overall that clouds the way he writes about them. He wants to be the bodyguard of their hearts because he feels they can’t fend for themselves. Ostensibly, the book is supposed to be a primer for helping women to avoid bad men, but there’s a discouraging arrogance behind Big Boom’s words. When he isn’t saying that women are helpless, he’s often encouraging them to seem weaker than they are in order to make men feel better about themselves.
Here’s just one of the sections that bothered me:
Here is some advice: Ladies, stop dragging your man around by his hand. Girls follow, men lead. Girls are not supposed to be in front. Grab his hand and let him lead you. You cannot wear the pants and be the buffalo soldier in the house. You have to ask yourself what kind of man you want. What kind of man do you expect your man to be? What kind of man do you think he can be when you try to act tough like a man?
I never really thought of myself as an ardent feminist, but I actually got angry reading the words “Girls follow, men lead. Girls are not supposed to be in front.” When I finished the passage, I thought “I’m no girl, I’m woman!” And I thought about the questions he asked: I expect my man to be the kind of guy who’s willing to follow me when I know where I’m going and he doesn’t. Leading doesn’t make me a man; it makes me the person that knows where she’s going, literally and figuratively. In certain areas my husband leads because he’s better at something than I am and vice versa.
Apparently, Boom says, if your man wants you to come home from shopping at the mall, it’s because he’s concerned about your safety, “Sometimes she thinks that I am trying to make her come home, but really I am just trying to make sure she’s home because I can protect her in our home.” He says that this isn’t controlling, that he’s just looking out for his wife, who’s probably thinking more about buying that perfect dress than her own safety. The zinger of this section: “the man was put in position to be over you for a reason.” Yep. Truly empowering.
As I read some of these passages, I could not help but feel that perhaps there was a neighborhood gap between me and Big Boom. For about a second I thought maybe it was a black/white thing. That perhaps I wasn’t really getting his world and his point of view because I am white. But it isn’t a black/white thing, it’s a class gap. The man just grew up in a much rougher place than I did, so maybe some of his paranoia is justified. He writes that a woman should always sit with her back to the door in a public place/restaurant so that a man can see the door in case some crazy or criminal with a gun comes in. Domestic violence reaches across the poverty line, but Boom talks about the casual violence of pimps and how women fall into the trap of becoming prostitutes. He even has one section entitled (and I am NOT kidding) HIV Is Real! with an exclamation point and everything.
I think Big Boom means well, but it was appallingly difficult to take anything he wrote very seriously. I was alternately outraged and mystified while reading the book. Despite his approach to the subject, some of what he says does have merit.
Yes, you should wait to have sex, because sex can cloud judgment and can keep a guy from thinking of you as relationship material. It’s reasonable to interrogate the guy about his life and find out about him from as many other sources as you can. Unfortunately, all of this good advice is cocooned under layers of misogynistic goo.
Big Boom’s resume to qualify him as the “bodyguard of women’s hearts” includes a career as a pimp and a player, several failed marriages, an apparently rock-solid new marriage, a reformation by God and another book entitled (for real) If You Want Closure in Your Relationships Start With Your Legs. When I finished How to Duck a Suckah, I finally figured out what kind of man you would attract if you followed all the advice within. This is the book to read if you want to attract a reformed ex-pimp who’s found God. Even if you find the book to be absurd, as I did, it will get you to ask important questions about the kind of man you want in your life.
You can meet the man himself at the Ritz Theatre signing on the 15th!
Article Published in the 2-14-08 Issue of EU Jacksonville
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