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    As something comes into her mind
    Slowly starts dancing, remembering her girlhood
    And all of the boys she had waiting in line.
    Oh, such are the dreams of the everyday housewife
    You see everywhere any time of the day
    An everyday housewife who gave up the good life for me
    B ONUS P OINTS : “Dreams of the Everyday Housewife” was also recorded by Gary Puckett.
    Another song unpopular with women is “Little Green Apples,” in which O. C. Smith sings boastfully about how he calls his woman up at home, “knowing she’s busy,” and gets her to drop everything and meet him for lunch, and he’s “always late,” but she sits there “waiting patiently.”
    B ONUS P OINTS : “Little Green Apples” was also recorded by—I am not making this up—Gary Puckett.
    Then there’s the 1969 R. B. Greaves hit “Take a Letter, Maria,” the song sung by a boss to his secretary. This song prompted Denise Bernd to write: “As if she isn’t busy enough, he wants to dictate a letter to his wife that he’s leaving her. The guy makes my skin crawl. I’d love to hear Maria’s response. Perhaps that’s where ‘Take This Job and Shove It’ comes from.”
     
    B ONUS P OINTS : “Take a Letter, Maria” was also recorded by—I am still not making this up—Gary Puckett.
    But the hostility for all of the preceding songs combined does not match the hostility voiced by women in the survey for Jack Jones’s hit “Wives and Lovers,” the one that goes:
    Hey, little girl, comb your hair, fix your makeup
    Soon he will open the door
    Yo, Jack: Fix this .
    Another detested song from the woman-as-helpless-appendage-of-man genre is “It Must Be Him,” in which a desperate-sounding Vikki Carr sings something like:
    Let it please be him
    Oh dear God it MUST be him
    Or I will stick my head in the oven again
    And then there’s “I Will Follow Him,” in which Little Peggy March sings:
    I love him! I love him! I love him!
    And where he goes I’ll follow! I’ll follow! I’ll follow!
    “ ’Cause I’m a moron,” adds survey voter B. J. Halstrom.
     
    A MAZING F ACT : To the best of my knowledge, “I Will Follow Him” was never recorded by Gary Puckett.
    Many voters cited various songs of teenage-female angst, with one of the leading vote-getters being Lesley “It’s My Party” Gore, who was cited for the part of “Judy’s Turn to Cry” where she sings:
    One night I saw them kissing at a party
    So I kissed some other guy
    Johnny jumped up and he hit him
    ’cause he still loved me, that’s why
    Also cited by many voters was the Joanie Sommers hit “Johnny Get Angry.” (I assume this is a different Johnny, but you never know.) In this song Joanie, in a giant stride forward for feminism, sings:
    Johnny get angry, Johnny get mad
    Give me the biggest lecture I ever had
    I want a BRAVE man, I want a CAVE man
    Johnny show me that you care, really care, for me
    But “Johnny Get Angry” sounds like “I Am Woman” when you compare it to “He Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss),” recorded by The Crystals, which features these lyrics:
    And when I told him I had been untrue
    He hit me and it felt like a kiss
    He hit me and I knew he loved me
    If he didn’t care for me
    I could have never made him mad
    But he hit me, and I was glad
    (We can only speculate whether O. J. had this on the cassette player during the Bronco chase.)
     
    There were also survey votes for:
     
Todd Rundgren’s “We Gotta Get You a Woman,” especially for the part where he sings “They may be stupid but they sure are fun.”
Kenny Rogers’s “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town,” because, as Elizabeth Cosgriff put it, “In these days of kneejerk political correctness, it’s refreshing to hear a song that’s unashamed to stand up for wife murder.” Kenny Rogers, by the way, gets bonus Bad Song points for singing, with Dolly Parton, “Islands in the Stream,” which was written by the Bee Gees and begins with these unforgettable