I found this bizarre photocopy - posted here - via someone's Twitter feed earlier today. Stu Kennedy, who put it up, tells me that it was forward to his brother at work as part of a circulatory email.







Have dinner ready. Plan ahead, even the night before, to have a delicious meal ready on time for his return from work. This is a way of letting him know that you have been thinking about him and are concerned about his needs. Most men are hungry when they come home and the prospect of a good meal (especially his favourite dish) is part of the warm welcome needed.



Prepare yourself. Take 15 minutes to rest so you will be refreshed when he arrives. Touch up your make-up, put a ribbon in your hair and be fresh looking. He has just been with a lot of work weary people. Be a little gay and a little more interesting for him. His boring day may need a lift and one of your duties is to provide it. Clear away the clutter. Make one last trip through the main part of the house just before your husband arrives.

Don't ask him questions about his actions or question his judgment or integrity. Remember, he is the master of the house and as such will always exercise his will with fairness and truthfulness. You have no right to question him.



A good wife always knows her place.



Once he has had a chance to have his evening meal clear the dishes and wash up promptly. If your husband should offer to help decline his offer as he may feel obliged to repeat this offer and after a long working day he does not need the extra work.



Encourage your husband to pursue his hobbies and interests and be supportive without seeming to encroach. If you have any little hobbies yourself try not to bore him speaking of these, as women's interests are often rather trivial compared to men's.



At the end of the evening tidy the home ready for the morning and again think ahead to his breakfast needs. Your husband's breakfast is vital if he is to face the outside world in a positive fashion.



Once you have both retired to the bedroom prepare yourself for bed as promptly as possible....



The wise bride will permit a maximum of two brief sexual experiences weekly during the first months of marriage. As time goes by she should make every effort to reduce this frequency.



Feigned illness, sleepiness, and headaches are among the wife's best friends in this matter. Arguments, nagging, scolding, and bickering also prove very effective, if used in the late evening about an hour before the husband would normally commence his seduction.



Clever wives are ever on the alert for new and better methods of denying and discouraging the amorous overtures of the husband. A good wife should expect to have reduced sexual contacts to once a week by the end of the first year of marriage and to once a month by the end of the fifth year of marriage.



Most men are by nature rather perverted, and if given half a chance, would engage in quite a variety of the most revolting practices. These practices include, among others, performing the normal act in abnormal positions; mouthing the female body; and offering their own vile bodies to be mouthed in turn.

The page above, whose provenance I cannot trace, seems to be from a printed original. I can't confirm this; there are, however, other known printed versions. The same passage also occurs in " The Good Wife's Guide" , supposedly taken from a Home Economics textbook (also from the Sixties) in which the sexual advice is tacked onto the end of more general comments about an ideal housewife.The first paragraphs of this read as follows:These same paragraphs also occur in a shorter piece with the same title, which claims to be from Housekeeping Monthly, 13 May, 1955.This is how The Good Wife's Guide ends:The longer Internet version omits the two sentences following "fairness and truthfulness". Instead, it continues like this:There follows the sexual advice with which we began.According to Urban Legend site Snopes , the magazine extract is a fabrication: it didn't surface until long after the text began circulating by email and is "clearly a mock-up". It is just possible that it dates from the 50s - presumably as a satire on contemporary images of the ideal housewife. On balance it's likely to be far more recent, however. It is said to have been circulating in faxed form since the 1980s.To sum up: the sex advice, purporting to be "an actual extract from a sex education textbook", began life as a hoax continuation of an original spoof article, itself likely to have been a hoax. But the style also owes something to another piece dismissed by Snopes, the hilarious "Advice to Young Brides" supposedly written in 1894 (though the repeated use of the word "sex" rather gives it away). The bride in that text, though, is imagined to be a young woman of rather more spirit than the submissive Stepford-style wife depicted in the passage allegedly from the 1960s. For example:It's also rather kinky:A hoax, obviously. Yet according to Wikipedia , while Advice to Young Brides "reads like a satire on the Victorian era" and is often assumed to be a spoof, it is actually genuine. At least, it is accepted as being so by the University of Washington, which published the piece in its bizarre entirety on its website in 1998. The URL would seem to bear this out. Furthermore, it was the pamphlet's use in a UW course in human sexuality that year that led to its modern circulation on the Internet.Despite these undoubted facts, I remain sceptical. There are good reasons for thinking it to be a hoax: neither the alleged writer (a suspiciously-named Ruth Smythers) nor the supposed publisher have left any trace in the records. In fact, the only evidence offered in the text's favour is its endorsement by the University of Washington. Academics have fallen for hoaxes often enough not to take this as decisive.And what of the piece with which we began? Some sources date it precisely to 1963, the year (according to Philip Larkin) in which "sexual intercourse began". A coincidence? The world it depicts probably never existed - unless Mad Men is a documentary.If anyone has any clue as to who actually wrote any of these pieces, and when, do please let me know.