Punching Day: Self-Improvement, Self-Defense, Self-Help, Self-Care for Girls and Women 🌭

Are you a man who wants to explain to women how to improve themselves but can’t get them to stop running away from you on the street for some reason? Why not try putting all of your super-cool ideas into one self-published self-help book with a title that covers pretty much anything a girl or woman could ever need help with? Self-Improvement, Self-Defense, Self-Help, Self-Immolation, Selfie Stick, How To Remove From Eyeball, etc…

I can’t say for sure that Khelen Nicole is a pen name being used by a man to distribute this book, but I have pretty good reasons to believe it is, which we’ll get to later. For now, you have to trust me. I know, that might be difficult for you after all of the terrifying things I’ve introduced you to on this website, but I promise: there’s a reason. 

The synopsis for this book is a journey. It sums up over fifty percent of the book in two sentences and then gives us the banger statement that, “Women are physically weaker than men, hence, numerous laws have been enacted for their welfare, protection, and happiness.” Which makes it sound like all laws are for women. If women didn’t exist, society would just be a lawless stab fest with an occasional break for naps and nachos. I feel like men enjoy not being attacked most of the time too, but sure. Let’s move on. Here’s the book’s extremely long description: 

The second suspicious thing I noticed was how “Khelen” uses old-timey phrases like “pocket money” in a post-pocket society. We now live in a world where it’s so rare for women’s clothes to come with pockets, we’re morally obligated to mention them whenever someone compliments our outfit. And “Khelen’s” book was published in 2019– a full two decades after female fashion designers hunted the last pocket to extinction. 

It’s also not written from any particular perspective. Usually, self-help books and self-defense books draw heavily from the life of the author. They need to tell you why they’re an expert in this field so you know why you should take their advice. If I wrote a book called How To Fix Cars, Probably, IDK: My Best Guess About What Is Going On In Cars, you wouldn’t buy it, as I’ve not proven myself to be an authority on the subject matter. If I wrote one called Pocket? The Fuck is a Pocket!?: A Female Perspective on Carryin’ Shit, you’d be sure of my expertise.

The only time a direct reference to the writer of the book appears is in the second-to-last sentence when they say, “Need to really work on myself,” but I think that snuck in there by accident. It’s also the truest statement in the book; I would very much agree that the person who wrote it does need to really work on themselves! 

This confusion of tense and writing style continues inside the book. It starts with a slight rewrite of the book’s description and then pretty much immediately launches into a voice that is so different from all of that, whatever it is… Need to really work on myself. It becomes an entirely different book!

It’s like the person writing this was possessed by a ghost who died because of their terrible diet. The first part of the book, labeled “Self-Improvement, Self-Help, Self-Care” immediately starts with diet advice that is clearly out of date and also directed specifically at teenagers. It advises not to have too many snacks at “the drugstore” after school and tells you to ask your mom if you can drink coffee in the morning. The rest of the diet suggests a lot of fruit, cottage cheese, hard boiled eggs, and conssome, which is ’50s-speak for bland soup.

I was surprised it didn’t throw in a classic, “Have a cool and refreshing Lucky Strike once a day to keep your body healthy!” Again, the cover says this book was written in 2019, but there’s a section on how to properly fit a girdle.

Later in the book, a girl mows the lawn, and the lawnmower is so unrecognizable to me as a lawnmower that I thought she had lost control of her Segway. 

There’s a picture of a girl waiting for a date by the telephone and the telephone I only recognized because of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. It looks more like a vibrator than a telephone to me. Need to really work on myself.

Now very suspicious, I decided to run some of the text through a plagiarism checker, and I learned that, in a way, I was wrong about this book being written by a man. It was written by famous teen model Betty Cornell in 1960. It’s actually called Betty Cornell’s Teenage Popularity Guide. Some audacious fucker took a 1960s self-help book and added karate to it. 

“Lydia Holmes and the Mystery of What the Hell is a Girdle Again?” was not that difficult to solve! I know plagiarism on self-publishing platforms is a big issue, and scammers are always finding sneaky new ways to make money off of other people’s work, but the combination of this particular 59-year-old book plus karate is especially nuts to me.

On the author’s amazon page, I saw they had written a few other books about self-defense and assumed what I had stumbled across was an instance of book stuffing. Authors on Kindle Unlimited are paid per page read of their books, so some writers will stuff an entire book or two into the back of their book in hopes that a reader will just keep reading through their entire 3,000 page opus and net the author a cool eleven cents. Or, they’ll put a deceptive link in the first chapter that takes the reader to the end of the book, tricking their e-reader into reporting to Amazon they read the whole thing. They’re tricking you into tricking a robot into paying them less than a tenth of what they would have earned mowing lawns with a Segway.

I figured this guy wrote a self-defense-for-women book and wanted to make it longer, so he stole a book from the 1960s and stuck it in front of his self-defense tips. Wild choice, but I get the incentive. However, it turns out the second half of the book is also fully plagiarized! Want to know what gave it away? Check out this image of a guy about to get a stylish, vintage ass whooping. He put on his best bow tie just to hit this lady! Man, those were the days.

My trusty (and free) plagiarism checker informed me that the second half of the book is actually The Science Of Self-Defense For Girls And Women by Professor Henry Seishiro Okazaki, published in 1929. Somehow someone looked at these two books and decided that they could in some way be convincingly woven together to create a guide for teaching modern women in the year of our lord 2019 how to look good and kick a man in the dick. By the way, How To Kick A Man In The Dick And Look Good Doing It is another book I’m highly qualified to write. 

What’s really funny to me is that even though the author could have maximized their potential income from this book by making it as long as possible, they seemed to have gotten bored with copying the self-defense part, possibly because they had to take out all of the mentions of the author and how he came to invent these self-defense moves. The descriptions of what’s going on in the photos are pretty bare, and sometimes confusing.

Getting attacked by a man seems like it used to be way more polite. There’s a whole section on ways to get out of false handshakes, which makes me think that used to be a big problem? Were men constantly luring women into handshakes and then attacking them? “Hello, ma’am. I am Professor Henry Seishiro Okazaki. It’s very nice to… KARATE YOU!”

I’m curious how the author thought this would work? I can’t imagine anyone on earth being gullible enough to get a page into this and not realize it’s super dated. Unless you’re in some sort of Blast From The Past, fresh from an underground bunker situation starring Brendan Fraser, the thing going on here is immediately obvious. So there’s no way this person could possibly be making money off this book, right?

Maybe? Probably? Yet, it seems like this wasn’t a one time project. The same author has several other books on Amazon that are, um, I don’t know, a little suspicious in some way?

This book cover screams written in 2019 to me. It says it right on the bottom! Sure, the title reads like it was purposely designed to trick me into thinking I’m having a stroke, but other than that, it’s definitely a modern book! So is this very informative book by the same author, also for sure written in 2019, about two giants getting knee punched by a tiny guy. 

Some of these books may be old enough to be in the public domain, but even if something is public domain, you can’t add your name and the current year to the cover and call it a whole new book. I mean, I guess no one can stop you? Totally unrelated, I just dropped a new book. It’s called Romeo and Juliet by Lydia Bugg (2021); look for it soon on Amazon! It’s about menstrual belt repair and river boat etiquette!

So I went into this thinking it was a book written by a dude who wanted to tell women how to lose weight by having thinner bones and eating cottage cheese until we die of malnourishment, but it actually turned out to be somehow weirder and scammier than that? Which is honestly impressive.