You Asked For It

There are few public figures so forcefully engaged in trying to apply old-fashioned morality to the problems of modern life as Laura Schlessinger, known popularly across North America as “Dr. Laura.” Her call-in radio program, after only two years of national syndication, has a daily listening audience of more than fifteen million, second only to Rush Limbaugh. She is the author of the best-selling book Ten Stupid Things Women Do to Mess Up Their Lives (now in paperback from HarperCollins) and the more recent, How Could You Do That?!: The Abdication of Character, Courage, and Conscience (HarperCollins: 1996).

Her popularity seems to be based on two factors: the tough — and often rough — approach she takes to her listeners’ problems; and her insistence that she is as tough — and rough — on herself. “The message and the messenger are one,” she told us. That messenger, like so many of her generation who are now on the cusp of turning fifty, is a repentant Boomer–maybe the most repentant Boomer — who repudiated most of her early radical notions after she got married and had a kid.

Her popularity seems to be based on two factors: the tough — and often rough — approach she takes to her listeners’ problems; and her insistence that she is as tough — and rough — on herself. “The message and the messenger are one,” she told us. That messenger, like so many of her generation who are now on the cusp of turning fifty, is a repentant Boomer–maybe the most repentant Boomer — who repudiated most of her early radical notions after she got married and had a kid.

Schlessinger was born in 1947 in Brooklyn, New York. She is the elder of two daughters of a Jewish father and an Italian mother. In her college years, Schlessinger got caught up in the heady feminism of the late sixties. After a brief, disastrous marriage, she became even more adamant in her belief that a woman’s happiness lay in a satisfying career and independent emotional life. She earned a Ph.D. in physiology at Columbia University, before going on to get a post-doctoral degree in marriage, family, and child therapy at the University of Southern California. She then taught psychology at Pepperdine University for eight years and began hosting her radio program for a local Los Angeles station. It wasn’t until she reached her mid-thirties that Schlessinger felt there was “something profoundly missing” from her life.

Still fearful that commitment might somehow compromise her, she dated Lewis Bishop, a professor at the University of Southern California and thirteen years her senior, for nearly a decade before marrying him. The couple eventually had one child, a son named Deryk, now ten. And she decided to convert to conservative Judaism. Schlessinger has subsequently taken to marriage, motherhood, and her religious beliefs with a zeal that would impress Ralph Reed.

On the other hand, she remains in many ways a product of her generation: she keeps her maiden name; she believes women should get married and have children later rather than earlier; she told her son about sex when he was five. Yet this odd hybrid of new and old personality is probably why so many people turn to her for advice. Schlessinger is able to take, as she puts it, “four thousand years of reasonable thought” and convey it with the slang and slickness of any modern-day shock jock.

Laura Schlessinger spoke with TWQ interviewer Maureen Sirhal by telephone from her home in Los Angeles.

Her popularity seems to be based on two factors: the tough — and often rough — approach she takes to her listeners’ problems; and her insistence that she is as tough — and rough — on herself. “The message and the messenger are one,” she told us. That messenger, like so many of her generation who are now on the cusp of turning fifty, is a repentant Boomer–maybe the most repentant Boomer — who repudiated most of her early radical notions after she got married and had a kid.

Schlessinger was born in 1947 in Brooklyn, New York. She is the elder of two daughters of a Jewish father and an Italian mother. In her college years, Schlessinger got caught up in the heady feminism of the late sixties. After a brief, disastrous marriage, she became even more adamant in her belief that a woman’s happiness lay in a satisfying career and independent emotional life. She earned a Ph.D. in physiology at Columbia University, before going on to get a post-doctoral degree in marriage, family, and child therapy at the University of Southern California. She then taught psychology at Pepperdine University for eight years and began hosting her radio program for a local Los Angeles station. It wasn’t until she reached her mid-thirties that Schlessinger felt there was “something profoundly missing” from her life.

Still fearful that commitment might somehow compromise her, she dated Lewis Bishop, a professor at the University of Southern California and thirteen years her senior, for nearly a decade before marrying him. The couple eventually had one child, a son named Deryk, now ten. And she decided to convert to conservative Judaism. Schlessinger has subsequently taken to marriage, motherhood, and her religious beliefs with a zeal that would impress Ralph Reed.

On the other hand, she remains in many ways a product of her generation: she keeps her maiden name; she believes women should get married and have children later rather than earlier; she told her son about sex when he was five. Yet this odd hybrid of new and old personality is probably why so many people turn to her for advice. Schlessinger is able to take, as she puts it, “four thousand years of reasonable thought” and convey it with the slang and slickness of any modern-day shock jock.

Laura Schlessinger spoke with TWQ interviewer Maureen Sirhal by telephone from her home in Los Angeles.

TWQ: Who calls you more often, women or men?

LS: It’s about equal.

TWQ: In your first book, you offered an observation about feminism–

LS: Today’s feminism. I don’t mean the women who marched so we could vote.

TWQ: You said that young women have grown up believing all the stuff in the women’s lib movement. That you can be a mother, be a doctor. That you can have it all. And you said this wasn’t true.

LS: Nobody can have it all simultaneously. No man can, no woman can.

TWQ: So what would you say to young women? Can they still have kids and a demanding job?

LS: Anybody who has ovaries can have kids. The question is, are you going to be able to take care of the family properly or is the family going to be sort of an accessory, like shoes. That’s the category I fear children have been put into today. We have false information out there: kids don’t need families, full-time day care is fine. Yet not one of these women you are talking about would ever have chosen that sort of care for themselves, would they? They wanted the benefit of a loving mom and dad who were there.

We have never had a higher teen suicide rate, or drug, alcohol, and violence [rates] in our history. Kids don’t have discipline, direction, love, or a place to go at night for affection. It’s so obvious what the problems are. This notion that you can “have it all” is absurd. Something has to give, and it’s usually the family.

TWQ: Do you think the women of the baby-boom generation are figuring this out?

LS: In all the statistics I have seen, the young people of the baby boomers are the ones turning it around. They’re the ones saying, “I don’t want to raise my kids the way my parents had me growing up.” I think the kids who have suffered through their parents’ selfishness are the ones who are going to turn it around.

TWQ: What do you say to the women who have to go to work, who don’t have a choice?

LS: Who are they, the ones who don’t have a choice? There have been enough articles, television programs, newsletters, and books giving evidence to the fact that it is not always true that two parents have to work or they’re going to starve. The money they spend on daycare and eating out (or bringing home fast food since nobody bothers with dinner anymore), the money they spend on clothes, driving and parking, [results] in not much profit from the second income. I didn’t go out and buy a car until I could afford the payments, the upkeep, and the insurance. I think people shouldn’t have children until they can do the same. And when you say that, everybody’s aghast. I reply: a human being is of less value than a car? You should wait till you’re educated, settled, and married. Give it three to five years of marriage until you’re really sure you have a stable marriage. You should actually plan. Yes, there are people for whom the circumstances are such that they must absolutely work; the one thing no one wants to admit is that it is a tragedy for the children–an absolute tragedy. A lot of people have taken that tragedy and said, “No, it’s fine.” They lie to try to make themselves feel better. No matter what you do, or have to do, you should not have any hurt feelings or any regret or pain, and so we live in lies. We just live in lies.

TWQ: What if fathers helped out more?

LS: The fact of the matter is that I get calls from wives who don’t respect their husbands if the men are at home taking care of the kids. That is not a woman’s vision of a man. So while women will complain when they are the ones stuck at home, when you give them a man who’s willing to do it, they don’t respect him. How can you whine and complain about your role in society, and when the man takes it over, you don’t respect him? Let’s take ten of your friends who are unmarried and let me introduce them to ten men who say, “My dream is to be home taking care of my children.” Do you think these men will get a second date?

TWQ: I doubt it.

LS: See?

TWQ: Okay, then, what about single mothers? What should they do?

LS: How did they get to be single mothers?

TWQ: You can pick the circumstances.

LS: No, it makes a difference.

TWQ: Does it?

LS: Yes. Why don’t you think so? Life takes place in our bodies. We should be circumspect about with whom and when we have sex because sex makes babies, even with the best contraception. If you’re not sterile, you’ll eventually get pregnant, that’s a fact. Now, in these cases, single mothers can put the kids up for adoption to two-parent, intact families. I think that would be the best thing to do.

TWQ: Do you think the children raised in a single-parent household can overcome the detrimental effects if the one parent is a very strong mother or father?

LS: At least you’re admitting there can be a detrimental effect. You are one of the only people to admit that. I’m going to have you Plexiglassed! The point is not being “strong,” the point is not being there. Let’s just face it. It doesn’t matter how good you would be. If you’re not there, you’re not there.

TWQ: So you don’t think children can be normal in a single-parent household?

LS: Sure they can, but it’s much harder. When we look at children in single-parent households, you see an increase in sex, violence, drinking, depression, problems at school. When there’s a death of a parent, families rally around. When someone just gets knocked up, families don’t rally around. When there’s a divorce, and remarrying, and boyfriends living in, and all that, families don’t rally around. Kids cope better when a parent has died than with divorce.

TWQ: With death, they feel the circumstances are beyond their control?

LS: Yes, exactly. The parent was there, and they have the memories of love, and they don’t have the ongoing memory of fights in court or the parent not coming to see them, not calling, not paying support.

TWQ: To some, your advice might seem to contradict your own circumstances. You do seem to have it all. How do you cope as a working mother?

LS: Well, I work my career around my family. I don’t have it all. Without family, I’d be involved in more enterprises. As it is, I leave the house at ten in the morning. My kid is at school at eight a.m. I am back home at four in the afternoon, and he comes home at three. So for one hour he doesn’t have a mother, he has a father, because my husband–his dad–works out of the house. We don’t have dinners apart. If Deryk goes over to a buddy’s house and sleeps over, we have dinner apart, but that’s because he’s at a buddy’s house, not because I’m working. If someone in business invites me out to dinner, we all go. If anyone wants me to do a speaking engagement out of town, they have to pay for me, my husband, and my son. That’s how we live. My priority is family first, career second. I am horrified at the notion of six in the morning you see your kids, eight o’clock at night you see them again. To me that’s cruel.

TWQ: I’ve heard you stress this on the radio–how your son goes everywhere with you. Have you ever been criticized for being obsessive about mothering?

LS: No, and I’m not obsessive about mothering. I am extremely pro-family. I have pounds of mail from men and women thanking me for supporting parenting.

TWQ: Is it difficult to protect your son from your critics?

LS: Every now and then when someone criticizes me I bring it to his attention. He says, “Some people are really scared about what you have to say, aren’t they?” At age ten, he is very astounding. I will say, “How does this make you feel when someone says something bad about your mommy?” And he says, “Well, they are wrong and they’re stupid and who cares? I know what you do and that is all that matters to me,” and he hugs me and goes off and plays. He is a very stable kid.

TWQ: What was your own family dynamic like growing up?

LS: It was quite difficult. My father was a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn who was in the Army as a lieutenant, liberating Northern Italy. He met my mother, a nice Italian girl–a knockout–and married her and brought her back. Some of the Jewish family of my dad’s here were not exactly enthralled. If she had been ugly they might have been nicer to her. So there was a lot of cruelty, a lot of rejection, and a lot of pain. And that, I am sure, was extremely difficult for them. When I was Deryk’s age, and really aware of what was going on, it was very sad.

TWQ: What do you think is the solution for people who feel lost in modern life?

LS: Religion. I frankly think my show is so successful because I am filling a gap for people, the gap that used to be filled by family and religion. I could do a whole show on twenty-two-year-olds. There’s no family they can turn to, to ask the questions they ask me. Their families divested themselves of religion a long time ago for one very basic reason: religion requires something of you. The religions you see going around today are New Age: they schmooze you up and require nothing of you; whereas formal, traditional religion requires something of you, an obligation to come out of your egotistical and consumeristic point of view and embrace discipline, sacrifice, and holiness.

TWQ: Why did you decide to convert to conservative Judaism?

LS: I have always identified myself as a Jew. I have Jewish blood through my father. For me, conversion was no switch; it was a formalization.

TWQ: Do you think it is important to marry someone of the same race or religion?

LS: They are not the same thing. Ethnicity, to me, is irrelevant to whom you marry. Religion, I think, is very important. When families embrace a religion and celebrate it together, you’re going to have a much stronger family life. When people call in and say, “I’m Catholic and I am marrying an atheist,” I really get on their case about not marrying another Catholic. They pretend it’s going to work out, but I get the calls after the marriage, with kids — the “My God, we should have thought about this.”

TWQ: But what do two people do if they’ve already fallen in love?

LS: First of all, one of the things I tell Deryk is, you can fall in love with anybody–anybody. It’s not enough to base a good marriage on. You need to fall in love with somebody who has the same dreams, the same ideals and goals, the same notion about family, the same notions about ethics and morality. If you don’t marry a person with these things in common, romantic love is going to fade and you’re going to be left with torture. So deciding whom you’re going to date early on is important. You don’t start with somebody you know you’re not going to finish with. You don’t sleep around.

TWQ: There has been much talk lately, particularly during this current election, that America is in a moral crisis. Do you believe this is so?

LS: Totally! When you get somebody like me who is simply saying there are moral ways of handling things, and I can get attacked for it, you know we have a moral crisis.

TWQ: Do your listeners tend to agree with your answers?

LS: The letters I usually receive say “I agree with you” seventy-five to ninety-five percent of the time. But I’m not interested in agreement. I appreciate the respect for my different views more.

TWQ: Do you ever think that you are too hard on callers?

LS: I don’t think I am too hard, but I am direct and blunt. People call me knowing exactly what I do. So when you say I am too hard, well, they picked me. They know I am going to be tough and relentless in pursuing the truth, and they avail themselves to that opportunity. And that opportunity doesn’t exist much out there, because most people will let you get away with a lie.

TWQ: What do you do when you get hit with an incredibly tough question?

LS: I don’t answer the question, I go for the philosophical point. And there are times people will call me with the most incredible mess, like, “I have three kids by three different men: one lives in one state, one lives in the other state, and one lives in a third state. I know kids should be near their dads, so what should I do?” I haven’t got the vaguest idea. To me that call is a message to the millions of people at home saying, “Oy, I don’t want to be in that position.” I don’t think there’s an answer. This is one you shrug and say, “This hole is too deep. Not everything can be fixed.” To this caller I said, “Two of these kids are not going to have the benefits that the third has.” Then people at home will have to take responsibility for what they’re doing.

TWQ: What should parents tell their kids about sex?

LS: My son and I were discussing sex from the age of five on. I talked about how sex feels good, how a lot of his teenage friends are going to do it and say he’s a weenie if he doesn’t. But let me explain, I said to him, all the things that may happen if you do. I was very frank about all these things, and when I got to abortion, he said, “What’s that?” I said that is when the girl takes the baby out of her belly. “Well, how does it live?” he asked. “It doesn’t,” I said.

“You mean it dies?” “Yes.” He was just horrified: “They waste a perfectly good kid?”

He has also been brought up in a very Jewish home where certain things are elevated to holiness: the sanctity of marriage and sex within marriage.

TWQ: What do you say to these college women who run around behaving like men, running from one relationship to the next?

LS: That is what women’s liberation said we should do, didn’t they? We should debase our bodies as most men do. I say these college women should listen to my show because they will hear women who’ve been where they are now. My show gives you a chance to look at your future. You are screwing around and look where you will be at twenty-five: three kids by different men, with scarred ovaries from all the STDs.

TWQ: Is this then how the women’s movement missed the mark? By saying we should be like men?

LS: The women’s movement ignored the reality of female nature and male nature; it pretended we were all unisex robots. They constantly said what we should have, but they didn’t look at who we were and what we really wanted. So I think in that way they lost a grip on really helping women. When I talk to women, I am real clear about what our ultimate possibilities are, and what our weaknesses are, and how we have to fight against our weaknesses. “But I love him” — that emotion is very powerful in women, much more powerful than in men. “I really love her, but I have to go climb Mt. Everest” — that’s more male. And it isn’t all socialization. If I say “You need to be a man,” you tell me what are the first words that come to your mind?

TWQ: Suck it up, be brave.

LS: Now how about, “Be a woman?”

TWQ: Nothing comes to mind.

LS: Interesting…maybe “emotional”? I remember a story in the New York Times about a bunch of female lawyers deciding that the law and the way we teach law is “masculine” and not appropriate for women. I was laughing on air. I went after them with a vengeance. [They said legal reasoning and the Socratic method of teaching law] is too tough for women. I thought, I don’t believe this! These are feminists saying that we have to change the entire legal system and how we teach law because they can’t handle being embarrassed in front of a classroom when they can’t answer quickly. Doesn’t that scare you? That’s the new feminism.

Now, when Susan Smith killed her children to clear the way for this rich boyfriend, and we started hearing about all these other mothers doing harm to their children, feminists blamed it on their “low self-esteem.” The men, of course, are “evil,” but the women have “low self-esteem.” Feminists don’t deal with the truth. They have a rigid agenda that women are oppressed. Any evil that women perpetrate is just a by-product of that oppression, not a lack of character, or courage, or conscience.

TWQ: But you were once a feminist?

LS: Yes, I was in college and the feminist movement was my movement. Getting married and having children was a “cop-out.” You know, you lost your status, your power, your everything. So I decided I was going to become super-successful and not let anyone get in the way of that. I say I am a reformed feminist, because I see the error of those ways and have a healthy, joyous balance with family.

TWQ: Was getting married at an older age wiser, do you think?

LS: In Ten Stupid Things I say it ought to be made illegal for women to get married under the age of 30. Because in our 20s, we’re grown women in our bodies but not in our minds. And I think it takes until 30 for a woman to become a grown woman and to really know her mind and what she wants. Until then it’s a lot of romantic and desperate attachment.

[My husband and I] were in a relationship for eight years. I just wouldn’t get married. We dated, did things together, and for most of it we didn’t date anybody else. I focused everything on [my career]. I told him a million times, “You get between me and my career, you’re dead meat!” When I was 35 I realized that something very profound was missing from my life, and that was family and being a mommy. So we got married. It’s kind of interesting that when you focus only on your career it doesn’t do half as well as when you have a balanced life. Being a mother is the most important thing I’ve ever done and will do, and that’s why I start every hour on my program with, “I am my kid’s mom.”

I want everyone to be perfectly clear with all that they see that I do, that’s the most important thing to me.

I remember at a book signing a young lady–a college student from one of those awful women’s studies programs that I think ought to be made illegal–came up to me and said, “We talk about you in our women’s studies class.” I said, “I bet you do.”

“We just can’t figure out with all your degrees and all of your accomplishments” — and she starts whispering — “why would you say you’re your kid’s mom?”

I looked at her and I said, “I am very sad for what you will have to go through in the next twenty years to get that idea out of your head. I am very sad that that’s what they’re doing to you.”