To print this page, select "Print" from the File menu of your browser salon.com > Books March 23, 2000 URL: http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2000/03/23/shrinks Shrink wars Dr. Joy may have beaten Dr. Laura to the tube, but she can't win on the bestseller lists. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Sally Eckoff Observers of the human zoo, have you been noticing a surge in animal behavior in unlikely places? There's been a lot of nature-show activity on the radio lately. You've got your noisy males carrying on with their puffing and snarling, despite the torpor of the one alpha guy who's firmly glued to his roost. Spend some time sorting out the territorial noises, the shrieks from the gurgles from the motherly cooing, and you'll see that the real story is with the nesting females -- the past-breeding-age ones who are into monitoring the flock. Catch them at the right moment and they're scrapping like mad. Yes, bird-watchers, the radio shrinks are at it again. Listen to the song of the small-clawed bottle-blond (Dr. Laura Schlessinger) in the presence of the larger but less aggressive ruby-throated handholder (Dr. Joy Browne). You may need earplugs. Though the first species has been much in the news of late, the second is making a viable bid for dominance. Not long ago, these two birds inhabited such different regions of the dial that their opinions seldom collided. As the traditional daytime gal, Dr. Laura razzes the working stiffs, including mothers who have the kinds of jobs that allow them to listen while they drive, cook, iron or type. Dr. Joy, in contrast, has always been the psych babe for the desperate hours, crooning through the midnight road trips, the insomniac intervals with crosswords and Scotch. A couple of years ago, though, something began to shift in the Dr. Laura habitat. Her feckless listeners -- the ones who provided the juicy entertainment -- realized she was going to shred them every time, and stopped calling. There would be no more "I've dated this girl for two months and now she's pregnant; do I have to marry her?" no more puzzled roué pondering his conquests on the air and suddenly bursting into tears. Now her show is all people who want to discipline their pastors and outlaw co-ed camping, salted with dispatches from ex-spouses screwing around with each others' visitation schedules. Meanwhile, Dr. Joy has been flying reconnaissance missions into Dr. Laura's airspace. She landed a daytime TV show months before the one promised Schlessinger by Paramount. Not only that, but in some key locales, Joy's radio gig has been moved to daytime, enabling listeners to toggle back and forth between the two. Now you can compare them more closely than ever before. Joy and Laura never mention each other by name, but for those who closely observe their behavior, it's obvious there's a covert rumble going on. They'll be ramming each other head-on any minute. Dr. Laura is naturally irritating to begin with. Her voice evokes the high-pitched "whaaang!" a skinny board makes when you rip it with a table saw. Not that we can blame her for that: Early listeners will remember her frustrated joking about having to take singing lessons. She really should consider not ratcheting up the aural pain any further, though: Her robotic disco theme song (by Patti LaBelle) is so screechily out of tune that Quincy Jones' music director once faxed the show, begging Dr. Laura to find something else. Schlessinger's an East Coast gal originally, but she displays a showoffy gloss that seems like it was picked up during her conquest of L.A. A photo of her in Vanity Fair showed her flexing her stringy muscles next to her pool in a Bob Mackie-looking jeweled evening gown, her glittery blonde hair teased into a foofy helmet. Her cutesy lingo -- "Boonchkin" means child, "warmies" are sexual attraction -- doesn't help, either. A dispassionate listener might conclude that in her world, there's something morally expedient in having a tin ear. Dr. Joy, from New Orleans, can afford to disagree. Even on a bad day, she sounds like Eve Arden mouthing off to James Stewart in "Anatomy of a Murder": mature, smoky, wryly secretarial. She talks too fast, but it adds to the impression that the weight of her knowledge makes her nervous. This cagey woman does her broadcasting from New York, which gives her a tastier range of sonorities in her callers; weary Brooklynese trumps flat-voweled Californian any time. Browne's also the only radio talk-show host to slip the Ink Spots and Esquivel into her bump music. Dr. Laura could smear Dr. Joy in a snowball fight, no question: Schlessinger has a black belt in hapkido, after all. But on the tube, Browne's got some pair of legs to go with that voice. Furthermore, her attacks of silliness in front of her studio audience make her fascinating and vaguely alarming to watch, like a continuously exploding soufflé. A typical episode has her listening to a man whose affair, he claimed, was an accident. He hadn't meant to have sex. It just happened. "Oh please!" Browne bellowed at him, jumping up so fast in her agitation that she nearly fell over backward. "You have to unzip your pants" -- she gesticulated wildly, whirling her arms like windmills -- "You have to whip it out" -- grand penis-presentation gesture here -- "It doesn't just happen!" Try that in an Ann Taylor suit sometime. Dr. Joy may have bested Dr. Laura on the TV front of her multimedia assault, but there's one arena where she can't seem to catch her tiny rival: Browne doesn't have the knack for penning bestsellers. She's written six books already, but "Dating for Dummies" and "Why They Don't Call When They Say They Will" just aren't going to have the is-what-am of a zingy Dr. Laura title. "Nine Fantasies That Will Ruin Your Life (And the Eight Realities That Will Save You)" is probably Browne's best attempt to get a bounce from Schlessinger's "Ten Stupid Things" gimmick. But you see the problem: a nonjudgmental, rolling method of assessment ("nonjudgmental" is Dr. Joy's middle name) is no match for a neat Dr. Laura concept you can flagellate yourself with. "Nobody's Perfect: How to Stop Blaming and Start Living" (another Dr. Joy opus) will never cut it when there's Schlessinger's "How Could You Do That?!" to chew on. Shame saps energy and depotentiates change: That's Dr. Joy in a nutshell. Shame keeps people in line when nothing else works: Dr. Laura. The comparisons get starker the harder you look. Self-righteousness is the gateway to a fruitless life, Dr. Joy admonishes in her "Nine Fantasies" book. She might as well slap Dr. Laura in the face with a steelhead; "Self-righteous" is the No. 1 epithet assigned to morality warriors like Schlessinger who think the Ten Commandments aren't self-explanatory. (Dr. Laura wrote a book about them. She loves things in groups of 10.) Nine fantasies plus eight realities makes 17 concepts for Joy to cram a lot of meaningful advice into. She tries, but the effort to make a measured, cohesive concept out of the enterprise is doomed by her compulsion to drag nonjudgmentalness into everything she says. Fantasy No. 1, "There's No Place Like Home," is not terribly different from No. 4, "The Truth Will Set Me Free," at least the way she explains it. No. 6, "Ignorance is Bliss" is a lot like No. 8, "Good Always Triumphs," but directly opposed to No. 4, which collides resoundingly into Reality No. 7: "People Do Things For Reasons." Using a Q&A format in which Browne apparently pens the questions as well as the answers, she's able to skew the proceedings any way she wants to. But she always comes to the same conclusion: The letter-writer winds up in the doghouse for meddling and smugness, even when the complaint is that the letter-writer's brother may be beating up the letter-writer's niece. (This was filed under Reality No. 1, "Never Tell Someone Something They Already Know.") You probably can't help the girl, says Dr. Joy. "You can do quite a lot, however, about your own shortcomings." What Dr. Joy is about is examining yourself before you hop all over other people. "Queenie" probably should have done that instead of writing to say she feels unloved because her bridge club didn't appreciate her gift of two dozen brownies. Dr. Joy gave herself an earful on that one. (It falls under Fantasy No. 7, "Stick to Your Guns.") From admonishing Queenie for doing good just so she can score a little gratitude, Browne launches into a definition of socialization ("Somebody has to invent ways of increasing the probability that individuals will do the right thing") and eventually winds up nosing into one of the Big Questions: "Who determines what's good and what's evil?" Queenie may think the subject is brownies and thwarted generosity. The real deal is, she wants those bridge ladies punished for lacking the virtue of thankfulness. From brownies to moral certitude in three paragraphs: That's either too much caffeine, or an agenda. Browne, now definitively off to the races, warns us away from catastrophic personality types like Queenie: "Heaven protect us from folks who are only trying to ... Help/Be Honest/Be Kind/Do The Right Thing," she says. The alert shrink-watcher will spot that red flag: "Do the right thing" is how Dr. Laura signs off every hour. It's been her habit for a year, possibly two. Habitual listeners can hear her yelp that phrase 15 times a week. "Knowing your own agenda is a good beginning," says Dr. Joy. If the Enquirer is to be believed these days -- big if -- Browne's agenda is to make sure people recognize Schlessinger for a bully and a fraud. Dr. Joy has a Ph.D. in psychology, she'll have us know. Dr. Laura's is in physiology. (But Dr. Laura doesn't go around saying she's a shrink.) This name-calling turned up in an article in which Dr. Joy confessed to having snorted coke in the Reagan White House. Everybody's a hypocrite, even me, the confession implied. But we know lots of much bigger hypocrites, don't we? Especially proponents of premarital purity whose naked how-do-you-dos have been flashed all over the Internet. Dr. Laura had to endure that nasty little scandal. But that was nearly two years ago, and she's been acting as freaked-out as if it were yesterday. The few minutes of social commentary she uses to kick off each hour have begun to mutate and grow into surprisingly vitriolic rants. Either she's getting not enough sleep or too much karate or maybe both; Dr. Laura seems to be coming unglued. She's started coming down all over her callers before they get a chance to blurt out two sentences. She's also fresh out of patience with people who can't, or won't fit in: "They give you what you want so you won't hurt them," she once memorably admonished a woman whose lesbian teenager had lied about being gay. That was the old Dr. Laura. The new one is big time into the biblical idea of homosexuality as a sin. They can't get married, she fumes, so they want to destroy marriage. The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation is taking out newspaper ads to protest this recent hobby horse. And as for those feminists, well, they won't be happy until everybody gets third-trimester abortions. Dr. Laura's son just entered teenhood. Maybe she's afraid an army of perverts is about to swoop in and nab him. Dr. Laura also got obsessed with the American Psychological Association -- for a while, she was ripping it every day -- because it supposedly printed a study's findings on the nonharmful aspects of adult sexual relationships with children. This makes out the APA to be flag-wavers for NAMBLA, pederasty and homosexual 'recruitment', or so Schlessinger seems to think. Did she ever see the article? Listening to her show, and I mean a lot, you can't tell. When was it published? Is this male adults and female children, female adults and male children à la Mary Kay LaTourneau and her sebaceous Romeo? Can we even be sure that this study exists? The APA awarded Dr. Joy its presidential medal the year "Nine Fantasies" came out; we do know that. Even grazing far outside Dr. Laura's normal stomping grounds, Dr. Joy hasn't been able to resist saying things guaranteed to make the Conservative Canary go nuts. Dr. Joy's newest book is about male-female relationships. Dr. Laura doesn't do relationships. Relationships lead to dating and dating leads to sex. Discussing any of this would mess up the gestalt of her theme, which is that we should cease and desist from sexual frolicking so we can sort out whose children are whose. Dr. Joy's idea of a fresh perspective on the whole sexual mess, the 1999 book "It's a Jungle Out There, Jane: Understanding The Male Animal," posits that an accretion of animal social habits makes the human male incomprehensible to women. Dr. Laura, of course, is of the Katharine Hepburn (as in "The African Queen") school of social intercourse: We were put on this Earth to rise above nature. Browne tries to improve the relations between the sexes by explaining tarantula motility and the territorial habits of grouse. She uses zebra herd behavior to help explain why it's better for men to be adaptable rather than simply brawny. "Men aren't from Mars and women aren't from Venus," she insists. No, men are from the jungle and women are from the fireside. It's basically the same concept in a rougher, more macho-friendly form. That's Browne's idea of a happy biosphere: Women playing along with men's inner zebras or bears or ferrets, making heterosexuality so much easier. Harmony in the home, however, demands that we not entirely knuckle under to nature, according to Browne. No matter how bonded Mom may feel when she's nesting with her kiddies, she's got to get out of the house and make some money. "Real change won't happen until we decide that our children are as important as work," Browne says. "And children won't be as important as work until women take some of the financial responsibility off men." That leap of logic is a Dr. Joy trademark. Last week, a stressed-out mother of kids ages 3, 5, 7 and 9 called Dr. Joy's radio show. The advice? "Get a job." If Dr. Laura is famous for any one pronouncement (after "homosexuality is deviant"), it's that day care is the worst thing to happen to American children since polio. She'd be flinging Joy's book right across her Beverly Hills living room if she knew what was in it. Dr. Laura's ideal of an everpresent, homebound mother may be extreme, but it's grounded in compassion for confused young minds. Dr. Joy's contrarian view that the female of the species ought to get the heck out of the nest isn't an effective counter to Schlessinger's position. In fact, it doesn't dent it at all. Get out of the nest to make room for what? A jungle dude who thinks nurturing is femmy? This is getting weird. Schlessinger and Browne may be guilty of exaggerating the contrast between their personal views and what they think the competition is saying. But in much the same way that some of Schlessinger's views seem to be skirting some terribly vulnerable territory in her own life, Browne appears to be trying to exculpate some painful moment of her past. It looks as though we're being entertained by a pair of know-it-alls who can't get a line on their Weltschmerz for long enough to wrestle it into submission. This could drain all the fun out of being a radio voyeur because it means we have to decide which one of the pair is closer to identifying the real demons in human nature. Whether we like her or not, Dr. Laura wins. Swayed by her own fears, bent by odd and irrational prejudices, she judges, and invites judging. That's a whole lot more illuminating, and ultimately more interesting, than listening to a nonjudgmental woman not judging. It takes a lot of work to sift through this cacophony of shrinkish squeaking and shrieking in search of something useful -- not to mention true. There's more harmonic justice in tuning out these media starlings, opening the window, and giving a listen to the real thing. salon.com | March 23, 2000   - - - - - - - - - - - - About the writer Sally Eckhoff lives in upstate New York. She is a regular contributor to Salon.