by Karen Karbo
For women, self-improvement is a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t conundrum that must be negotiated with the strategic powers of Alexander the Great. A woman must always be working to perfect her physical self, while also trying to figure out how to make life easier for everyone around her. She is expected to do this with a spring in her step and a song in her heart, without conflicting emotions or a bad attitude. If she starts feeling a little murderous, there is a meditation app for that, another SoulCycle class, hormone replacement therapy, or that old stand-by, retail therapy. (We feel especially better when we’re buying things to improve ourselves, which is why buying a $200 monthlong package at a yoga studio doesn’t feel like spending real money.)
However, if a woman spends too much time improving a skill for her own pleasure, or in her own self-interest—or even for her job—if she is unapologetically competent, smart, and ambitious, she risks becoming unlikable, a disastrous turn of events. Look no further than the adventures of Hillary Clinton, easily the most despised woman in America in 2016, whose only crime was having man-size ambition, something she did nothing to conceal. Or at least not enough.
To be sure, men running for public office are also judged on their likability, but like self-improvement, they’re judged on different merits. In 2004 George W. Bush was “the guy you’d want to have a beer with” presidential candidate because he was affable and a little dorky and looked like he would always be the one buying the beers. In 2008, candidate Mitt Romney became unlikable when it was revealed that in 1983, heading off on a family vacation, he strapped his Irish setter, Seamus, to the roof of the car in a pet carrier for the twelve-hour drive. Romney’s lame explanation that “my dog likes fresh air” added tone-deaf idiot to animal abuser on his rap sheet of public opinion. But even though we are a nation of dog lovers, Romney’s political career only temporarily tanked. In 2018, he was elected to the Senate. There is no likability “trap” for men; they earn their unlikability fair and square. After which they take a long vacation somewhere out West, work on their tan, then present themselves as if nothing untoward had happened.
Joan C. Williams, in a New York Times op-ed called “How Women Can Escape the Likability Trap: Powerful Women Know How to Flip Feminine Stereotypes to Their Advantage,” underscored this depressing quandary by offering up a “set of strategies” to escape being disliked. She advocates “thinking of femininity as a tool kit.”* She suggests using “softeners” while negotiating a salary.* Williams is a no-nonsense pragmatist in a girl’s-gotta-do-what-a-girl’s-gotta-do fashion that neatly sidesteps the issue of whether powerful women should use their power to effect change, but the larger point is this: the better women get at what they do, the more they improve, the better they must also be at not appearing to be too good at what they do. It’s at the heart of the double bind of a life devoted to self-improvement: we must not be too much, while hamster-wheeling our effort to be enough.
How are we too much? We are too complicated, too opinionated, too angry, too emotional. “Too smart for your own good” is surely an observation reserved only for women. Celebrities with fan bases rivaling the population of a small country still possess legions of haters. In Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman, BuzzFeed culture writer Anne Helen Petersen surveys ten female icons and the backlash they endure as penance for disobeying the dictates of traditional femininity. Madonna is too old, Serena Williams is too strong, novelist Jennifer Weiner is too loud, etc. Proof, as if we needed it, that even (maybe especially) women who possess money, power, fame, and better-than-average looks—everything Western consumer culture considers the golden tickets to happiness—are despised for pushing boundaries. Petersen writes, “To be an unruly woman today is to oscillate between the postures of fearlessness and self-doubt, between listening to the voices that tell a woman she is too much and one’s own, whispering and yelling I am already enough, and always have been.”
How are we never enough? That’s easy—not pretty enough, slim enough, sexy enough, feminine enough. As second-wave feminist and author Susan Brownmiller noted in the 1980s, “Every woman is a female impersonator.” Performative femininity is a role, as unnatural to the gender to which it is ascribed as it is to the drag queens who’ve made it an art form. And still we persist on beating ourselves up, and giving far too many fucks, when we fail to live up to this impossible ideal.
There is an exception: the only time we’re permitted to be too much is when we’re also more than beautiful enough, slender enough, and stylish enough, which only happens on TV lawyer shows.
Suits, the long-running television show that premiered in 2011, is about one of New York’s “top law firms.” It costars Meghan Markle in her pre–Duchess of Sussex days and features a bevy of legal geniuses (Harvard law!) who are also exquisite beauties living in an eternal state of red-carpet readiness. Jessica Pearson, played by Gina Torres, a named partner, is a Harvard graduate, legal genius, and nervy strategist. She is allowed her fictional badassery because she is absolutely ravishing in her designer ensembles, rocking full makeup and a mane of carefully styled hair. She is never seen to do a moment’s work, but rather slinks around the office as if she’s on the catwalk. Sometimes she perches on the edge of a desk holding a file folder.
Striving to be pretty, thin, and hot enough, while at the same time working to quash every personality trait that makes you feel like your True Self, makes you interesting, and in turn makes life interesting and confers upon you the individuality that we all worship in men but find suspect in women, is a recipe for nonstop distress and anxiety. And how are we advised to relieve our distress and quell our anxiety? By “improving” ourselves, doubling down on our efforts to be prettier, thinner, hotter while doing more to smooth our too muchness—exercising to the point of exhaustion, self-medicating with tequila (made from agave, and thus almost a green smoothie), and downloading a new personality-management app.
Not only is there no finish line, but the perfect woman-self we’re seeking is also a moving target. Jia Tolentino, writing about Naomi Wolf’s work in Trick Mirror, sums up the perpetual motion machine of a life of self-improvement thus: “In 1991, Naomi Wolf wrote, in The Beauty Myth, about the peculiar fact that beauty requirements have escalated as women’s subjugation has decreased. It’s as if our culture has mustered an immune-system response to continue breaking the fever of gender equality—as if some deep patriarchal logic has made it that women need to achieve ever-higher levels of beauty to make up for the fact that we are no longer economically and legally dependent on men. One waste of time has been traded for another.”
As I was writing and rewriting this section, something began to strike a false note. The sentiment feels accurate, but it doesn’t really hold up under scrutiny. More likely, the impulse to achieve ever-higher levels of beauty is related not to some secret cabal of beauty arbitrators, but to the bombardment of ads every time we check our phones, ads promoting the usual panic-inducing state that we don’t measure up, and that have nothing to do with who we are and everything to do with some corporation’s bottom line. And who is this mighty invisible jury legislating these acceptable levels of beauty? When Tolentino anthropomorphizes culture, giving it an immune system, or refers to “deep patriarchal logic,” which, again, alludes to some invisible, powerful judiciary hearing the cases of individual women and meting out punishment, who is she talking about?
In op-eds, think pieces, personal essays, manifestos, and mighty social media screeds, writers sling around a lot of theys, as if culture, society, the patriarchy, the FLEBers, the Lululemon moms—choose your oppressors—are standing armies that exist only to keep our self-esteem low and our compulsive desire to improve ourselves high. Catchy phrases identifying recent trends involving and perpetuated by “them” are coined by journalists to garner clicks. Often, the journalists are pressed into inflating a random idea they pulled out of their asses at three a.m. (not that I would know anything about this) into what so
unds like a legitimate sociological or psychological paradigm by an editor, who in turn has been pressured by the money people. I don’t know who coined the likability trap, but it’s only a trap if you think it’s a trap. In France, where I now live, women who strive to be likable are thought to be “uninteresting,” so it’s far from being a universal dilemma.
And let us recall that aside from our nearest and dearest, few people think about us deeply enough to gauge the degree to which they like us. This is not to say people aren’t making snap judgments and projecting their own insecurities on us like mad, but as I discussed in chapter 1, most people aren’t paying close attention to us, and if they are, it’s to determine whether we’re paying attention to them. Essayist Alain de Botton, self-described philosopher of everyday life and cofounder of London’s The School of Life, wrote a lengthy Facebook post on the topic. He describes the shock of realizing, usually sometime in late adolescence, that we don’t matter to all but a very few people. All the strangers who smiled at us when we were children and gave us free lollipops, those teachers who applauded our mediocre efforts and were invested in our doing better—those people are gone and that time of our life is over. It’s such a brutal lesson we don’t believe it. We still go to parties, and stand around with a glass of mineral water, sure people are talking about how we’re trying to get sober or lose weight. We give a presentation at work and worry for a week that everyone noticed we stumbled over the names of our team. We go to the doctor and feel a rush of shame when we step on the scale.
To absorb the truth of the world’s indifference, de Botton suggests a thought exercise to challenge ourselves to see how much we pay attention to others. Of the experience, he writes, “Imagine that we’re in a lift, standing next to someone on our way to the twentieth floor. They know we disapprove of their choice of jacket. They know they should have picked another one and that they look silly and pinched in this one. But we haven’t noticed the jacket. In fact, we haven’t noticed they were born—or that one day they will die. We’re just worrying about how our partner responded when we mentioned our mother’s cold to them last night.”
He hastens to reassure his readers that he knows we’re not uncaring and irresponsible. If someone is drowning, we jump in. If a friend is sobbing in distress, we pay attention and try to comfort her. When our report is due on the boss’s desk at noon, you can bet that she’s paying attention (because the report affects her). But unless the situation demands it, we pay attention to ourselves and our own lives. De Botton ends the post with an interesting twist. Not only is it ultimately freeing to realize no one is paying attention, but in gratitude we should pay the liberation forward by not paying attention to others. Which, conveniently, removes the temptation to judge or otherwise shame them, and releases them from feeling like they must do something to improve themselves. Everybody wins.
I will never for one second blame a woman for being unable to manage her self-talk in a way that uplifts her, but there is a lot of power in calling bullshit. What if we just stopped thinking we were too much and never enough? What if we shrugged in the face of so-called higher levels of beauty? What if we retired the whole paradigm of the likability trap like a threadbare pair of yoga pants with a hole in the crotch? What if, the next time someone said, or intimated, that you were “too” something, you just laughed? What if, instead of taking that person seriously, you decided they were too stupid or, if you’re kinder than I am, were simply misguided and thus wrong? What if you looked in the mirror and said, “I am pretty”? Full stop. Just typing that, I feel like a fucking revolutionary.
I remember a conversation I had with my mother the summer between high school and college. We had just come from a doctor’s appointment and were on our way to the mall to begin shopping for clothes for, as she called it, my new adventure. I had been accepted to USC, where my father had gone to college, and where she hoped I would meet boys who, she said, were more our ilk. “You’re going to be able to make a fresh start,” she said. I had watched enough TV to know that people who made fresh starts were usually on the lam. They’d robbed a bank or had a baby “out of wedlock” or in some other way ruined their lives and brought shame down upon the heads of their well-meaning mothers.
In my memory, I sighed and looked out the window at our sun-blasted suburb. The poisonous pink-and-white oleander, the lush palm trees in which roof rats nested. I was irritated. She could take her ilk—which I heard as elk—and shove it. “Fuck you,” I said in my head. I remember that part clear as day.
I mark that drive to the mall as both the beginning and the end of my teenage rebellion. A few weeks later something unforeseen happened. My mother was diagnosed with an aggressive form of brain cancer. Four months after an unsuccessful surgery to excise the tumor, while I was away at school, she slipped into a coma and died. I’d last seen her alive on my eighteenth birthday. Even then this struck me as ridiculously symbolic. I imagined that she took one look at me on that day, realized I was never going to be the girl she wanted me to be, and gave up. It took a decade of therapy for me to accept that I had not killed her by failing to improve myself.
Chapter 4
Your Best Self Is Like an Imaginary Beloved
No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.
—Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
What is our best self? Do we even know? Or is it one of those terms we throw around with confidence, even though we’re not exactly clear what we mean by it? We know becoming our best self can’t mean obtaining perfection, because that’s impossible. Or is it? I suspect we secretly suppose that becoming the perfect woman is possible if we just fully commit ourselves to the process and think super positive thoughts and get up an hour earlier to do an enriching thing. Why else do we still yearn to look like celebrities whose perfect photographs we are well aware have been photoshopped?
I have some bad news. This so-called best self—not to be confused with ourselves at our best; more about that in a few pages—is a mythological creature who runs in the same crowd as our imaginary beloved. If you’ve never had one, the imaginary beloved is your soul mate, the person of your dreams who doesn’t exist but who nevertheless thrills and consoles you. One contributor to Thought Catalog wrote about her imaginary boyfriend: “He would be smart, tall, and romantic. He would be an excellent writer, his hands would be strong, he would know how to cook me a perfect meal, he would be sensitive and he would travel with me.” My imaginary boyfriend, whom I concocted in eighth grade and revived again my freshman year in college, was named Rocky. He was a surfer intellectual who lived in Santa Barbara. He had a shy smile and a hank of sun-streaked hair that hung over green eyes. His favorite book was Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and there may have also been a puka shell necklace involved.
The advantage of having an imaginary beloved is that they care about what we think, don’t text when we talk, and bring us hot and sour soup from the farther-away but infinitely better Chinese place when we’re sick. They treat us with respect. Imagining the relationship with the imaginary beloved is a creative exercise: what kind of person would love me, and how would they love me, just as I am?
Our best self is just as fantastical, but from the day we start wondering what we can do to be as pretty as our favorite Disney princess, we’re conditioned to believe that seeking to be our best self is not just a doable goal, but the primary goal of our lives. It’s only when we get a little older that we discover that our best self is a chimera.
In 1972, English painter and art critic John Berger published Ways of Seeing, adapted from his popular BBC television series, which aired the same year and demystified the work of the art critic. First and foremost a primer on how to look at paintings, Ways of Seeing contained a section that discussed the objectification of women in works of art. Essentially, men watch women and women watch themselves being watched. Second-wave feminism effectively repurposed Berger’s theory, and in 1975, film critic Laura Mulvey would coi
n the term male gaze to describe the way the world, including the women in it, is viewed through the lens of the heterosexual male. In the visual arts, this applied to an unseen trinity of men: the man making the picture, the men viewing the picture, and also the men in the tableau, looking at and evaluating the women in the picture.
For the purposes of figuring out how to swear off self-improvement, I’m more interested in Berger’s idea that women have been trained to watch themselves as a matter of survival. We must literally watch ourselves, and watch ourselves being watched, because for millennia we’ve been forced to function within a society created by and for men. How we come across to men has determined the quality of our lives. “A woman must continually watch herself,” Berger writes. “She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. While she is walking across a room or while she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood, she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually. And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as the two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman.” (Italics mine.)
I didn’t learn about John Berger and the male gaze until graduate school, five years after my mother’s death. By then it was the 1980s and already Berger’s viewpoints were being debated. What about gays and lesbians? What about the female gaze? The night of the afternoon of my mother’s funeral, I drove back to USC and took an oceanography midterm. As it happened, I had envisaged what I looked like not weeping. I remained unemotional, stony-faced in my burgundy prairie-style Gunne Sax dress—I refused to wear black. I never saw a counselor. Six months after my mother died my father rekindled a relationship with his college sweetheart, signaling that it was time we moved on.