Why Would You Take Advice From Mike Tyson's Ex-Girlfriend?

If you’re unfamiliar with gossip of the rap underworld and don’t read tabloid coverage of Bill Maher, you probably don’t even know who Karrine Steffans is, even though she’s sold three popular books and appeared on Oprah, Bill O’Reilly, and Geraldo. Her first two best-selling publications were juicy hip-hop tell-alls, but with her latest book, The Vixen Manual: How To Find, Seduce & Keep the Man You Want [2], she has gone from memoirist to relationship guru. The Vixen Manual, which came out in July, has already hit the New York Times best-seller list, and publishing insiders expect it to sell 500,000 copies.

The move to love-advice oracle was a gamble for Steffans. She became popular for dishing the details of her own fleeting romances with celebrities such as hip-hop stars Usher and Ja Rule, rap pioneer Kool G Rap, and boxer Mike Tyson, in addition to Maher. Of Tyson, she writes, “[he] loves the same way he fights: hard and rough. … [A]nd as he proved against Evander Holyfield, Mike Tyson is a biter.” That relationship ended with her “covered in bruises and bite marks and vow[ing] to never have sex with him again." Steffans’ longer-term relationships have been major public train wrecks. After she broke up with Maher in 2007, Steffans tried to kill herself. And while she’s currently married to actor Darius McCrary (best known as Eddie Winslow from Family Matters), the couple had a huge, allegedly violent fight last year, the details of which Steffans leaked directly to blogger Perez Hilton [3].

Her love life is pretty much a disaster. So why are scads of readers paying to get advice on romance from this woman? Some of Steffans’ fans in the hip-hop community want her advice because they see her as a transgressive feminist role model. She violates the hip-hop code of silence enforced by the largely male rap community, explained Hot 97 DJ Minya Oh to the New York Daily News when Steffans' first book was released: “You do your dirt, everyone knows you do your dirt, but no one talks about it.” Jawn Murray, a columnist for AOL's Black Voices, agreed: “We’ve had to listen to rappers brag about their conquests for ages in their music. Karrine is the first female to flip the script and brag about her conquests with actual names.”

In her latest book, Steffans turns herself into the raunchy empowerment guru, serving up her own version of The Vagina Monologues. She encourages her readers to get intimate with their nethers via the age-old experiment of using a makeup mirror to examine themselves “down there.” Then, she asks women to identify whether they have a typical vagina or a “porn pussy”—one that’s stretched from overuse. The illustrations that accompany the explanation include graphic close-ups of each sort of genitalia. She’s not in it to judge, only to categorize. “I think that women are drawn to me because I say things they wouldn’t say, but wish they could. It is refreshing for them to live vicariously through me,” Steffans explains.

But Steffans also promotes a kind of 1950s traditionalism as part of her recipe for nurturing successful relationships. “A little Stepford goes a long way,” Steffans said when I once asked her about that. She advocates that women keep their mouths shut when their man is cranky, always have dinner on the table, and dress and groom like a princesses. “When your man walks through the door, there's a softer, more homebound independence you can show,” she says. “It means you know how to cook and clean, and you don't need someone like his mother (or your mother) to show you how to do so. You can do laundry without [making] his whites pink. He can relax in knowing his woman has mastered her domestic terrain. Just don't look up and find yourself lonely because you were trying to be too world-bound and dominant at home.”

In interviews today, Steffans is the opposite of the sultry seductress who vamps on her book covers. She comes across as a traditional mom, albeit one with a fantastic rack. She made a name for herself by giving blow jobs to rappers—who gave her the nickname Superhead for her prowess at fellatio. And now she is instructing a generation of women to become Betty Crocker homemakers. The shift is jarring and makes sense only if you think about what the two personas have in common. Both the whore and the homemaker spend their lives in the service of men. One works mostly in the bedroom and the other in the kitchen. They can both teach each other a thing or two. Steffans is the same person she always was, only now she is diversifying her brand.

Steffans’ main audience is young black women, some of whom must be single mothers like her. For them, she seems to be laying out a romantic path that moves from strumpet to baby mama to wife. If you add to that the celebrity angle—the fact that her men were not thugs off the corner, but famous rappers, actors, and heavyweight boxing champions—then she seems not only real but inspirational. Steffans plans to further her path to respectability with a vixen advice manual on motherhood and a series of children's bedtime stories. But about that children’s book … let’s just hope she hires a new art team.