by Karen Karbo
It was the nonfiction hit of 1962, selling two million copies in three weeks, and eventually lead to HGB’s reign at Cosmopolitan, where she ruled as editor in chief for thirty-two years. Gurley’s readership was average young women like herself, “mouseburgers” who came from nowhere and nothing but yearned for a life of romance and glamour. Her bosses thought she was crazy—how many single women who thought there was a satisfying life to be lived away from husband, home, and hearth could there be? Millions, it turned out. Cosmopolitan was and still is the bestselling women’s magazine in the world.
By 1973 women were given the right to choose, and in 1974 they were permitted to open credit accounts without a male cosigner. Feminism was on. Women left their husbands in record numbers, and attended consciousness-raising groups where they gazed at their vaginas with a hand mirror. They had had enough. They were giddy, thumbing their nose at all the female stereotypes and imperatives that came before. They had birth control; they had access to abortion. It was revealed that the world was groaning with humans, so if you chose to have one child or no children at all, you were doing everyone a favor.
Then, in the blink of an eye (okay, a decade or so), Helen Gurley Brown went from sex-positive trailblazer to embarrassment. Second-wave feminists accused her of being a retro man-pleaser. Nora Ephron wrote, on the endless health of Cosmopolitan’s sales numbers, “She is demonstrating, rather forcefully, that there are well over a million American women who are willing to spend sixty cents to read not about politics, not about the female-liberation movement, not about the war in Vietnam, but merely about how to get a man.” Ephron was not wrong. We do want to know how to get a man, or a woman. We want love, even when it’s politically unfashionable.
In the mid-1970s women had more freedom than ever, but while everyone was busy making up for lost time, clubbing in platform shoes and doing coke off the mirrors of strange men with feathered hair and flowered Qiana shirts (we’ve moved on to the disco era), the old expectations weren’t hauled off to the cultural junkyard, where they eventually disintegrated and blew away. Instead the expectations society and culture had of women, and women had of themselves, grew.
No matter how many clubs they closed or strangers they went home with, most women were still expected to get married. Once she became a wife and mother, it was the same old same old. Wives were still expected to keep a clean, well-run, germ-free home. Mothers were still expected to raise the children and, increasingly, to enrich their lives. The laundry wasn’t going to fold itself, and someone had to put dinner on the table. Which remains true right this minute.
Feminism + more women enrolling in college + more women launching careers before marriage = more women in the workforce than ever before. By 1980, half of America’s women worked, regardless of marital status. From 1972 to 1985, the number of women entering “management” jobs nearly doubled, growing from 20 to 36 percent. By 1985 half of all college graduates were women, and they were making their way into professional careers.
While women were making inroads into the workplace, they were reminded that the smarter and more successful they were, the less likely they were to get married. The famous 1986 Newsweek cover fake-worried on our behalf about “The Marriage Crunch.” A graph beside the headline, “If you’re a single woman, here are your chances of getting married,” delivered the bad and erroneous news. (In fact, women with college degrees are more likely to get married and stay married than women without.)
Up until this moment in history, most people didn’t feel entitled to have everything they wanted. There were only twenty-four hours in a day, a person couldn’t be in two places at once, and you could only give 100 percent of your attention and best efforts to that which mattered most. A man couldn’t be a playboy on the Riviera while also working hard enough to make partner at a law firm. He couldn’t be a rodeo clown while also managing hedge funds on Wall Street. He couldn’t sail the high seas while also working ninety-plus hours as a trauma surgeon at an inner-city ER.
But you know what all men could have?
A career, a wife, and kids. Plus, a weekly poker game or standing golf date.
Could women who worked as hard as men at their careers have the same thing? It was 1982, and the debate barely got off the ground before Helen Gurley Brown, still arguably the most powerful woman in media, published Having It All: Love, Success, Sex, Money, Even If You’re Starting with Nothing. Once “having it all” hit the cultural bloodstream, we became convinced that, yes, we could have it all. We could have everything we want. Having it all became code for having a soaring professional career, a happy and hot marriage, cool, well-adjusted kiddos, and, of course, looking thin and fit and fuckable. If you didn’t have it all, or want it all, you were deficient.
For a decade or so, we were made to believe we could have it all if we worked from predawn to postdusk, got superorganized, and were able to enlist our husband to help out around the house. I gave birth to my daughter in 1992, and that was the game plan. Her father and I agreed we would have only one child, because we knew we both wanted to work full-time. We split the day care and the housework the best we could. The marriage failed for other reasons, but for a few years, I had it all.
Twenty-eight years later, having it all is as divisive and triggering as ever. In a famous 2012 cover story for the Atlantic, former State Department director of policy planning Anne-Marie Slaughter called it out for the ridiculous, unachievable bullshit it is. In her 2018 memoir, Becoming, former first lady Michelle Obama wrote, “Marriage still ain’t equal, y’all. It ain’t equal. I tell women that whole ‘you can have it all’—mmm, nope. Not at the same time. That’s a lie. It’s not always enough to lean in, because that [expletive] doesn’t work.”
For what it’s worth, Having It All was not Helen Gurley Brown’s original title. According to her biographer, Jennifer Scanlon, in an interview with the New York Times, Gurley Brown wanted to call her book The Mouseburger Plan.* She had envisioned her book for “the downtrodden” woman, and she felt Having It All made her sound like “a smart-ass-all-the-time winner.” She and her husband, David Brown, had no children themselves, yet having it all would become shorthand for everything to which women in the twenty-first century should aspire. The title Having It All was the idea of the marketing department, and then as now, the marketing department always wins.
There’s a House that Jack Built quality to the expectations surrounding women in the late modern era: this is the woman who pulls down six figures, who manages the house, who raises the kids, who supports the husband, who makes the bone broth and juices the carrots, who runs the half marathons, who whitens her teeth, who rocks the bikini well into perimenopause, who lives in the house built by mass marketing, media, and advertising.
The second shift was identified by sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild in her 1989 bestseller of the same name. It identified all the sack lunch–making, laundry-doing, meal-planning, living room–tidying, and toilet paper roll–replacing women did in addition to holding down a full-time job in the so-called formal workforce. It’s the work women do on top of the work that women do. Men help more than they used to, but it’s still by and large on us. The third shift, coined by Naomi Wolf in 1992, is all the “appearance work” we’re required to do in addition to everything else. By now you know the drill: while giving 110 percent at work, showing up for every T-ball practice with the correct snacks, cooking healthy meals, and doing more than our share when it comes to scrubbing the toilets and picking up everyone’s dirty socks, we must also have silky hair, flawless skin, bee-stung lips, a sassy pedicure, and tank top–worthy triceps, and be able to rock a miniskirt at a moment’s notice.
I’m going to suggest a fourth shift, where we must do all of the above, with a flawless parade of positive thoughts and vigorous affirmations. The fourth shift encompasses all the work we’re supposed to be doing on our inner selves as well. Take a spin through the latest offerings on Medium, and you’ll see what I mean. A sampl
e: “21 Behaviors That Will Make You Brilliant at Creativity and Relationships.” “10 Mental Hacks to Start and Finish What You Hate.” “How to Be the Type of Person Everyone Wants to Know.”
Now, thanks to the fourth shift, we’ve got to be exercising and toning our inner selves as well. Neuroplasticity is all the rage these days. The brain can be trained as easily as a treat-motivated spaniel, it turns out. And since it can be trained, it should be. Reading is no longer something you do for fun, but to build empathy. Keeping a journal is no longer something else you do just because you enjoy keeping a record of your days and are a little in love with your own handwriting, but “a powerfully transformative keystone habit.”* Going for a walk is no longer a thing you do when you need to stretch your legs and get the dog to stop staring at you; it’s a way to increase the size of your hippocampus. Which, aside from our breasts, is the only other part of our body that is allowed to be large.
In 2020, the cultural mandate for women is a version of Nike’s iconic imperative. Just Keep Improving. Life is an ongoing, down-to-the-studs remodel. Self-improvement has become a way of life.
Part II
Chapter 6
Where the Wild Things Still Are
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
Prior to the 2008 housing crash, when you could literally wish for a subprime mortgage and some shady broker would make it so, Rhonda Byrne’s 2006 The Secret burst onto the self-improvery scene. It has sold roughly a zillion copies and was translated into every language on earth. Oprah and many of your favorite influencers endorse it, while Mark Manson, the King of Fuckistan himself, wrote, “The Secret teaches self-absorption and blind acceptance of your emotions, and I call bullshit on all of it.”
I believe in giving things a try before calling bullshit, and I feel I’ve given manifesting a fair shake. I’ll just say this: it’s all well and good to act as if you’ve already sold the house and landed the job, but don’t make financial decisions based on something that hasn’t happened.* Live and learn. And what I learned is that the Universe cannot be conned. It has taken my measure and finds me far too fond of bitching and moaning and other displays of negativity to grant me my wishes.
I have mixed feelings about doing affirmations. The science behind it is sound, or at least it doesn’t depend on attributing consciousness to an inconceivably vast cosmic vacuum inhospitable to all human life except on this crumb of dust we call home. Research reported in the November 2015 issue of Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience found that self-affirmations do affect our well-being, reducing stress and giving us a better outlook on life in general. Consider one of my preferred affirmations: “I am at peace with who I am.” My conscious mind might disagree, especially if I’m in a department store with its usual cruel dressing-room lighting trying on a bathing suit, but my brain buys it. The stimulation in my medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex, the parts of the brain where most of our self-related processing occurs, is the same, regardless of whether the affirmation is true.
Even patently untrue affirmations can be beneficial. If you’re due to give a big presentation at work and you walk into the conference room thinking, “I’m the smartest person in the room,” the affirmation doesn’t magically make it so. In that we can agree on what constitutes intelligence, you’re probably not the smartest person in the room. Maybe you are, whatever. The point is, affirming this to yourself will make you behave in a way that’s more confident and assertive, increasing the likelihood that your presentation will go better. You’ll feel better and more confident, your boss will be thrilled you didn’t blow it, and after work drinks are on her.
That said, I’m a situational affirmationist. Telling yourself, “This is perfectly safe and I’m going to have the time of my life” as you’re standing at the open door of an airplane with your parachute on is one thing; feeling obligated to chant a dozen affirmations before you get out of bed in the morning only builds a habit of self-distrust. We start to feel we can’t just get on with it without telling ourselves it will all be okay. Furthermore, too many affirmations uttered too often under too many circumstances tend to reinforce our feeling that we need to do something to fix ourselves, and you know how I feel about that.
I recommend a balanced diet of affirmations, critical thinking, and common sense, seasoned with skepticism and black humor. Of course, this flies in the face of the orthodoxy of self-improvement, which demands our minds be as smooth and exfoliated as our foreheads, free of all thoughts that are troubling or ambivalent. Every day in every way, we scrupulously make sure our thoughts are positive, that we’re never disapproving or judgmental. We reassure people we don’t know on Facebook that things will work out, that they’ve got this. We send them light and love. I’m the first one to respond to something witty or well-observed with “I love you!” It’s oppressive, this unspoken pressure to be of good cheer every goddamn day.
The recent exception to the happy thoughts-a-thon at the center of most self-improvement projects is anger. The cauldron of female fury hath finally bubbled over, and it’s about fucking time. The late twenty-teens witnessed an onslaught of books, articles, and political moments supporting the expression of female rage. In 2013 #BlackLivesMatter was founded by Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, after George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the death of Trayvon Martin. In 2006 civil rights activist Tarana Burke adopted the hashtag #MeToo to bring attention to the ubiquity of sexual abuse in women’s lives; in 2017 actress Alyssa Milano reinvigorated the discussion after the explosion of allegations of abuse by Harvey Weinstein, imploring every woman who’s ever been sexually assaulted to share her #MeToo story, and her rage. In 2018 three big books celebrating the power of women embracing their anger hit the shelves: Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower by Brittney Cooper (February); Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger by Soraya Chemaly (September); and Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger by Rebecca Traister (October).
These books were roundly celebrated, garnering good reviews and landing on many best book of the year lists. As well they should. As a woman who is always slightly pissed off at something or other, I welcomed their publications, bought them in hardcover, gave them away to friends, and bought them again in hardcover. These books take no prisoners, but a Bustle review summed up my feeling that something was not quite right—not with the books, but with their reception.
Eloquent Rage shows readers the many ways anger can be an effective tool—or, as Cooper puts it, a superpower—in the fight for change. . . .
Rage Becomes Her makes a case [that] . . . expressing anger isn’t only important for individual well-being, but crucial for enacting serious societal change. . . .
Good and Mad is an insightful, inspiring, and razor-sharp look at just how important collective female anger has been and is in enacting change and impacting culture, politics, and the world.
This coming from you, Bustle? The subtextual notion is that anger and its expression are not simply a part of the normal human psyche, “important for individual well-being,” but are only allowed and encouraged when necessary for the greater good. What if a woman is angry only on her own behalf? There are, after all, many kinds of anger. As Lilly Dancyger, editor of Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger, writes in the introduction, “Our anger doesn’t have to be useful to deserve a voice.”
For what it’s worth, another book on female anger was published in 2018, and is outselling the rest on Amazon by a substantial margin: Julie Catalano’s Anger Management Workbook for Women: A 5-Step Guide to Managing Your Emotions and Breaking the Cycle of Anger (June). Proof, as though it’s needed, that even though female rage is having a moment, most women aren’t so sure they want it hanging around causing trouble.
Acknowledging the breadth and depth of our anger doesn’t move us closer to perfection, or the feminine ideal, bu
t it does make us whole. This is true whether you march in the street or spend an hour hitting tennis balls against the garage door or swimming laps in the pool, my teenage go-to moves when my mother would say, “You need to do something with that anger.” Notice, please, she didn’t say I shouldn’t feel it. As mistaken as she was about so many things, my mother knew that anger needed to be addressed, not denied.
Which brings us to Carl Jung—a phrase that probably hasn’t been uttered in many decades. A Swiss psychoanalyst, student of Sigmund Freud, and, along with Alfred Adler, founder of modern analytical psychology, Jung was popular among hippie pundits in the 1970s, or at least my friend Patty’s older brother, Mike, who gave me a copy of The Portable Jung at an impressionable age. Mike was our weed dealer and taught philosophy at the local junior college, and I read the book straight through. I took to heart Jung’s wisdom about learning to embrace my shadow side, a concept that was later confirmed by a therapist I saw for the better part of ten years. “Everyone carries a shadow,” Jung wrote, “and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.”
To be human is to have a shadow, and the more we avoid it, deny it, or try to tamp it down, the more active, and potentially destructive, it becomes in our lives. The shadow is a crowded gathering, where our demons, evil twin, alter ego, and crazy unhinged bitch goddess party. Our so-called base animal urges are there too—the impulse to grab a burger out of a stranger’s hand when you’re hungry, fuck your best friend’s husband behind the shrubbery at the neighborhood barbecue, or strangle the leader of your self-care book club. Why? Because you’re a human being, and that’s part of the show.