by Karen Karbo
The part of our brain governing automatic self-absorption is a vast and complex neurological web called the default mode network. The DMN processes our memories, creates and stores our self-perception, and evaluates our emotional state and the emotional states of others. In 1929, Hans Berger, inventor of the electroencephalogram, posited that our brains are always active, but it wasn’t until the development of the PET (positron-emission tomography) scan and the fMRI in the 1990s that neuroscientists were able to observe the DMN in action. The growing sophistication of technology, including computational analyses, has given rise to an explosion of interest in the DMN, the place where, according to Jessica R. Andrews-Hanna, writing in the Neuroscientist, our “highly personally significant and goal-directed thoughts” about our past and our future reside.
This is reassuring news for several reasons. First, because it means we’re hardwired for a certain amount of selfishness; we shouldn’t feel guilty about thinking about ourselves, because it’s literally our default mode. Second, and more pertinent to this discussion, most of the time when we’re feeling judged by others, we are judging ourselves in a way we imagine someone else might judge us.
When my daughter, Fiona, was in eighth grade, she came home weeping one day. A girl she’d thought was a friend told her best friend that my daughter was a “low-key slut.” I had no idea what that was, but it couldn’t be good. After I made a batch of blueberry bread, my girl’s favorite comfort snack, and hugged her and indulged in a fantasy of finding and strangling that so-called friend, I consoled Fiona by telling her that it wasn’t about her, but about the friend. Sure enough, when Fiona’s best friend confronted the girl spreading the gossip, she admitted that she was jealous of Fiona and her popularity. Fiona was relieved, and I was relieved to have been able to offer some parental wisdom that wasn’t the usual platitude.
The moment we accept that people aren’t judging us, but rather judging themselves and projecting their own dissatisfaction with themselves onto us, is the moment we begin to liberate ourselves from the bonds of self-improvement. But it’s not easy. As you’ll see, a lot of people have a lot invested in keeping women in shame and focused on chasing the fantasy of perfection. But we can fight those forces. Instead of trying to escape the shame of being imperfect by resorting to trying to “fix” ourselves, let’s take some time to see how we got here. Let’s have today be the day we begin imagining life as the “come as you are” party it should be.
Chapter 2
The Great Female Self-Improvement Bamboozlement
To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect.
—Joan Didion, “Self-Respect: Its Source, Its Power”
Before I swore off self-improvement I would look at my phone over my morning coffee. All the productivity gurus said this was a terrible habit, but I did it anyway, something I already felt bad about. After a few minutes of scrolling, I was reminded of all the ways I didn’t measure up. I hadn’t spoken to another human being yet, hadn’t even read an email. I’m pretty sure no one was judging me or seeing me in any specific way—in part because anyone who might have been was also looking at their phone. Instead, I was starting my day with the messages of a hundred ads thrumming in my head. My parents or family weren’t shaming me, nor were my friends, coworkers, or anyone in my social sphere. No human was involved in the making of my despair and self-loathing.
The most successful way to sell something to a woman has always been to bamboozle her. Convincingly create an imaginary problem—ideally something she’s never thought about so as to induce complete panic—then save the day by providing just the right product to set her mind at ease. Ads targeted at women are designed to stir up emotions and have been since the dawn of advertising. With relative ease, we can be manipulated into doubting ourselves. We care less about the price or function of something and more about fixing what we’ve been told was wrong with us, and it’s been this way for a hundred years. No one alive in today’s modern world has escaped its influence.
Behold an advertisement in a 1919 issue of Ladies’ Home Journal for a deodorant called Odorono: “Within the Curve of a Woman’s Arm, a frank discussion of a subject too often avoided.”* The accompanying illustration shows a handsome couple in evening wear. He is considerably taller than she. Her slender arm is raised. Her delicate hand rests upon his manly shoulder. They appear to be waltzing, but in fact she’s got him backed into the corner of a balcony, where he’s obviously trying escape her eye-watering BO. The mailbag at LHJ burst with outraged letters. Alluding to the way women smell was scandalous, tasteless to the point of immorality. But sales of Odorono shot through the roof.
The smell of our breath could also ruin our lives. In 1923 the makers of Listerine mouthwash worried we would be “often a bridesmaid, but never a bride.” A 1923 ad campaign featured Edna, who “like every woman, her primary ambition was to marry.” But “as her birthdays crept gradually toward that tragic thirty mark, marriage seemed farther from her life than ever.” But Edna’s story ends happily. Her problem was merely halitosis, nothing a slug of Listerine couldn’t fix. This ad campaign increased Listerine’s profits by 4000 percent in six years and has become a legend of advertising history.
Men haven’t escaped the manipulations of the marketing and advertising industry, but women are the titans of shopping, responsible for more than three-quarters of all consumer spending. Because we drive the entire economy with our handbag and shapewear purchases, our gym memberships, weekly salon appointments, and, not incidentally, the tons of stuff we buy to keep the household afloat, food on the table, and the kids in monstrously expensive sneakers, the advertising industry spends its billions focused on selling primarily to us. There’s no marketing deep state (or none that my research turned up, anyway) that uses targeted advertising to control women, to keep them mired in self-loathing and focused on what they can purchase to improve themselves, but that’s more or less the result.
In 2018 women spent forty trillion dollars worldwide on consumer goods, up from twenty-seven trillion in 2013. A 2019 study showed that 94 percent of females between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five spend over an hour a day shopping online. A 2015 article in Forbes called “Top 10 Things Everyone Should Know About Women Consumers” begins with “If the consumer economy had a sex, it would be female.” The post advises “. . . study[ing] women as you would a foreign market.” The Today show reported a study showing that with the money a woman spends on cosmetics over the course of a lifetime, she could afford to buy a house.
My intention in trotting out these statistics is not to whip up shame around shopping. As cultural critic Ellen Willis pointed out in a 1970 essay on women and consumerism, the primacy of the marketplace, and the socializing and relationship building that takes place there, is an ancient and communal human activity. Women purchased food and household goods to take care of their families. They bartered, managed their budgets, and procured all the stuff necessary for domestic life. Only at the rise of the twentieth century did the notion of shopping as a leisure time activity take hold, perpetuated and driven by advertising. It made women feel as if they were in control of their own lives, and to a degree, this was not untrue. My housewife mom prided herself on tracking down sales and finding the best deal. That most of the time it was for stuff we didn’t need only reaffirms the manipulative power of advertising.
You could google old-time ads all day long for a cheap laugh, but the joke is on us. These silly ads with their alarming taglines and melodramatic stories were educating us, training us in the consumeristic two-step: identify with the woman being shamed in the advertisement, who then “cures” her inferiority complex by purchasing the product.
Between World War I and II, Madison Avenue found itself stymied. Smoking had become a huge pastime. It was glamorous and seductive, and every movie star did it. The problem: despite the many brands, cigarettes looked alike and smoked al
ike. They were all pretty much the same cigarettes. Why choose Camel when Lucky Strike would do? Cigarettes were also a product no one needed, except smokers, who, at the time, were unaware that nicotine was addictive.
Enter the clever tactic of selling a lifestyle the consumer would come to associate with the product. Marlboro was originally called Marlborough, named for the street where cigarette maker Philip Morris operated his factory, and was targeted as a smoke for women, with its “ladylike filter.” It was no different from any other filtered cigarette, and its sales were modest. Then, in 1950, after the release of a major British study linking smoking to cancer, Philip Morris began advertising the filter as a disease preventative. Marlborough became Marlboro and rebranded as a cigarette for a man’s man who was smart enough to be concerned about his health. The image of the rugged, handsome, independent Marlboro Man who “came to the flavor” was born and inspires would-be cowboys to this day.*
Philip Morris also manufactured Virginia Slims, and in 1973 launched a campaign that harnessed the prevailing winds of second-wave feminism. The ads featured “liberated” slim, pretty, glamorous young women rocking the latest fashion, who personified the tagline, “You’ve come a long way, baby.” Sepia-toned photographs appeared in the upper corner or on the side of the image of the comely smoker, illustrating how far “baby” had come. One showed a woman churning butter beside a parody of the lyrics of “I Want a Girl (Just Like the Girl That Married Dear Old Dad)”: She’ll wash the floors / Polish up the doors / And never make me mad / She won’t smoke / Or be a suffragette / She will always be my loving pet . . .
The campaign caused a stir: feminists were disgruntled at the use of the word baby, while traditionalists decried the celebration of “women libbers.” Teenage girls, in the meantime, felt as if smoking Virginia Slims empowered them to tear up the world. In their hot pants and suede boots, birth control pills and ciggies tucked in their shoulder bags, they would be in-charge women so different from their mothers!*
But what had really come a long way was advertising. By the mid-twentieth century, consumers would no longer require a hokey, hypothetical narrative to connect the dots.
Synecdoche is a literary device in which a part stands in for the whole. On TV, a close-up of a woman handing over her credit card to someone else signifies a purchase. We don’t have to see her flipping through racks of clothes, trying them on, then deciding on this or that. We’ve been trained by a lifetime of TV and movie consumption to know what handing over the plastic means. Our comprehension is sophisticated. The hand itself also communicates information. Is it soft and plump with polished nails and golden rings? Is it grubby, with nails bitten to the quick? What does this tell us about the owner of the card? We don’t need to see her in relation to another human being. We don’t need a story to convey the message, however subtly, that something is wrong with us, and it needs to be fixed.
A study published in the Journal of Consumer Research in 2011 revealed that just a photograph of a beauty product—a bottle of perfume, a stylish stiletto, a tube of lipstick—made female subjects feel worse about themselves. There was no attendant copy, not a word. Just an image that evokes what we’ve all come to think of as a successful (i.e., beautiful) woman is enough to make us feel as if we are lacking. The researchers learned something else: the distress their subjects felt did not lead to “lower buying intentions,” but just the opposite. We buy more when we feel bad about ourselves, and we feel bad about ourselves a lot.
By the age of thirteen I’d gotten the message that part of being female was never believing you were good enough. I was going through a mad phase of creating large collages on poster board using pictures torn from magazines. I remember an ad for the Little Fibber Bra, featuring a large pear with the message, “This is no shape for a girl.” Also, a diet soda ad showing a slender and smoking-hot young woman in a red bikini trying to button her jeans. “You can do it. Pepsi can help.” My mind was completely blown by the pervy 1974 ads for Love’s Baby Soft body spray, featuring pouty-lipped teen sexpots in white puffed-sleeved dresses cuddling teddy bears and the tagline, “Because innocence is sexier than you think.”
Repurposing the images from the ads into devastatingly cool collages did nothing to dilute the message: a girl could not hope to feel accepted, loved, and safe unless she was beautiful, and to be beautiful was complicated, if not impossible. Since everything about our bodies could be improved, it meant that every part was unacceptable unless it was improved. A girl’s less-than-perfect breasts could be fixed by buying a Playtex padded bra. A girl’s not-white-enough, not-bright-enough teeth could be fixed by brushing with Pepsodent. A girl’s plethora of hair problems (not enough body, not enough shine, not enough volume, horrifying, social life–destroying frizz) could be fixed by a myriad of hair products.
Those early messages of inadequacy, gleaned from the ads in Seventeen, gathered into a steady stream of lowish self-esteem that flowed beneath my life, regardless of whether I succeeded or failed, was loved or lost. It’s a mark of advertising’s eternal might that even as I grew up and went to college and suffered the early death of my mother, got married and had a child, then divorced, got married again and acquired two stepchildren, then divorced again, then married again, built a rickety career as an author, traveled all over the world, read and wrote, bought and sold homes, adored and said goodbye to several great dogs, and recently moved from Portland, Oregon, to a tiny village in the south of France, I’ve never been able to deny what advertising was selling, which is a fundamental sense of inadequacy. No experience matters, no maturity matters, no knowledge that I’m being manipulated. My feelings are stirred up in a way they’ve been designed to, and those feelings make me wonder if maybe the ad is right.
At the airport recently I flipped through a copy of a glossy women’s magazine. Airports are the last places in America that have well-stocked magazine racks, presumably because there are still people who view a plane ride as a chance to unplug. I spied an ad for a $4000 purse, a lion-colored calfskin leather shoulder bag with a gold clasp. It was photographed in a manner that evoked style, class, affluence, and sexiness. Even though I knew exactly what was going on, that extremely well-paid professionals designed and created this image to stir up inchoate yearning, I felt a pinch of despair: I am not the kind of sophisticated woman who carries a bag like that, nor could I afford it even if I was. Nor would I buy it even if I could afford it, because is there anything more vulgar than a $4000 handbag? . . . Around and around my thoughts went. My intellect was of no use to me, even though I knew from experience that women’s magazines basically exist to pour gasoline on the fire of our obsession with self-improvement.
One day a dozen years ago or so, an editor from Self emailed, asking if I would contribute my best weight-loss tip to a feature on no bullshit dieting.* I wrote back to say I would be happy to do this, as I was in possession of the only tip that anyone would ever need: “Eat less, move more.” She didn’t write back. After a few days, I wrote to her again. She answered quickly, “So sorry, but our readers are interested in diets that are more science-based, possibly including some good supplements.”
I knew how women’s magazines aided and abetted our quest for perfection, but I was still naïve enough to believe that a “no bullshit dieting” feature would not push the same old complicated eating plans that consumed a woman’s every waking moment. The no bullshit dieting feature was bullshit, and I realized in that moment the female compulsion for self-improvement would be exploited until the last woman alive was still fretting about her thigh gap while running for her life during the zombie apocalypse.
Even when you’re minding your own business reading a serious newspaper about serious world events, there’s no escaping advertising. There I am one Sunday morning, reading the New York Times. I flip through the Style magazine, past all the ads for things only the 1 percent can afford, thinking maybe there are some cool clothes. My grandmother was a couturiere, and I learned to se
w about the time I learned to read, so I love to see what’s up in the world of outrageous, arty, completely unaffordable fashion.
I come upon a headline: “How You Can Get Glowing Skin with Minimal Makeup.” Who is the readership for this article, which is just an advertisement dressed up in editorial clothing? Women who prefer their skin to possess “a subtle dewiness that suggests the afterglow of a hike or yoga session.” Hell, yeah! Before this moment, I didn’t fully comprehend that there was an appropriate degree of skin dewiness that I should strive to obtain, but it makes sense. On one end of the spectrum there’s hot flash during a heatwave, on the other, dried apple head doll. Now that I know, I cannot unknow.
The solution lies in following this five-step routine: daily exfoliation ($195) followed by weekly microblading ($150) to make sure you start with a smooth, light-reflecting surface; replace old foundation with one of the new water-based tinted gels ($65); massage area around eye with an ice cube to reduce puffiness and tighten skin before applying concealer ($65) with a special sponge-tip applicator; pat on special highlighter that “combines antioxidant-rich jojoba oil with a peachy-brown tint” ($75); follow with a spritz of extra dew-creating hydrating mist ($45).
I am a complete sucker for skin care products. I want all of this, even the unpleasantly futuristic microblading thing. If I had $595 to spare, I would go online and order up all this shit right now. But I don’t have $595 to spare, and that makes me feel bad about myself, my career, my ability to manage money, and my skin, which is smooth but neither glowing nor dewy. Really, the only thing that made me feel marginally better about falling for articles like this one again and again was that Simone de Beauvoir wasn’t immune to this sort of thing either. She may have said, “Society cares for the individual only so far as he is profitable.” But she also said, “Buying is a profound pleasure.” So, there you go.