by Karen Karbo
My husband and I save up our episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher, and when the day’s gone to crap and we really feel like yelling at the TV we mix up some margaritas and settle in to watch. Recently, one of Bill’s guests was social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who’s coauthored a book called The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. At first, it was the usual thing: kids today! What are ya gonna do? They’re spoiled. They’re entitled. They’re the new Me Generation. Nothing we haven’t heard before.
Then the subject turned to the disastrous effect of social media and smartphones on preteens. When boys get smartphones, they play video games and search for porn. When girls get smartphones, they post pictures of themselves and wait for the likes to pour in. Or not. As a result, the rates of anxiety, depression, and self-cutting have risen drastically. Suicide rates of young girls have gone up by 70 percent since 2009, the year when smartphones became all but ubiquitous.
In a September 2017 article in the Guardian entitled “You Are Your Looks: That’s What Society Tells Girls. No Wonder They’re Depressed,” mental health activist Natasha Devon cites studies finding that girls as young as seven believe their appearance is the most important thing about them, and that stereotypes convince them “first that an ever more demanding paradigm of physical ‘perfection’ must be met with apparent effortlessness and then that being ‘popular’—meek yet sociable—sexy but not ‘slutty,’ sporty in a narrow, feminine parameter (not ‘too muscular’) are imperatives.”
The longer we keep our girls away from that shit the better. Every day a girl spends making collages or learning to draw or killing it on the soccer field or riding her skateboard, she is adding another wooden block in the Jenga game of her character. She’s figuring out just a smidge more who she is, and in doing so, what she will find to be intolerable when it comes to “self-improvement.” The more time we give our girls to figure out who their True Selves are, the greater the chance they’ll be able to say yeah, no, not happening.
To engage in endless self-improvement is to continue to participate in a game that’s rigged against us. As I write this, we’re celebrating the one hundredth anniversary of women’s suffrage. Movement leaders Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton gave their lives for the cause, which began to take shape in 1848. Seventy-two years later, the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified by Congress, and it wasn’t because they’d all just gotten laid and were in an exceptionally good mood. Generations of women have fought for our freedom to own property, to keep our jobs even though we are pregnant, to open bank accounts and apply for credit in our own names, to control our bodies and reproduction. It’s been a two-steps-forward, one-step-back affair, but historically we have more rights than our mothers. This is not nothing.
That said, men and the systems they’ve built still rule. Look no further than the outcome of the 2016 American presidential election. Politics aside, one of the world’s most powerful nations preferred the unqualified candidate with testicles to the candidate with more experience for the job than possibly anyone alive, who happened to be a woman. The oceans of ink, the miles of tweets and posts analyzing, interpreting, rationalizing, and finger-pointing change nothing. Of the 146 countries in the world, in 2017 only 15 were led by women, 8 of whom were the first female to hold that office. Forbes’s 2019 list of billionaires comprises mostly men; the richest woman in the world, ranked number fifteen, is Françoise Bettencourt Meyers, the granddaughter of the founder of L’Oréal cosmetics. How fitting.
“Humanity is male, and man defines woman,” wrote Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex. And how does the patriarchy define us women, mostly? As humans who give birth, do for them, and buy stuff.
Women—we—and all the crap we buy and money we spend to improve ourselves throughout our lifetimes keep the economy that enriches mostly men afloat. We make cosmetic companies billions of dollars every year (see above). We support the luxe lives of plastic surgeons who specialize in keeping our faces, tummies, and vaginas forever young. We make motivational speakers and FLEBs multimillionaires and are the bread and butter of a cavalcade of micro-influencers. Together they create a mighty army of people with a vested interest in continuously moving the goalposts of self-improvery.
Corporations spend billions every year keeping women feeling insecure about every molecule of their being, and thus inclined to spend their hard-earned money on fixing what will prove to be unfixable. If the distressing condition is fixable, it will very soon go out of style/prove to be bad for your health/be not that important to your likability and fuckability, and it will be on to the next thing. Society becomes accepting of mothers who work, or women who want to stay home with their children, or women who don’t want children, or women who without shame acknowledge and act on their own sex drive, or whatever—pick your freedom—and in a hot minute the “lifestyle” requires buying stuff and doing stuff to ensure we live it successfully.
The upshot is this: women may never be able to self-improve themselves out of their important role as Ms. Consumer. “Money gives men the power to run the show,” said Beyoncé in 2013. “It gives the men power to define value. They define what’s sexy. And men define what’s feminine.” The feminine ideal, defined by men, chased by women, forever and ever, amen.
We also cannot self-improve our way out of sexism and misogyny. We may be partnered with absolutely lovely men, but wait for one of those once-in-a-decade plate-smashing arguments and you might glimpse his essential feelings about women. We’ve established that he is a good man—the best!—but underneath his decency and kindness and impeccable socialization rests his short history of self-improvement during the late modern age involving the men who came before him, and how they felt about and related to women. Fathers who never learned how to operate the washing machine because it was beneath them. Grandfathers who treated their wives as if they were only slightly smarter than the family dog.
From 2004 to 2013 I wrote a rather lame monthly self-help column for Redbook magazine, and the number one question revolved around housework and why he wasn’t doing his share. My advice seekers had tried everything, couples therapy and chore wheels and blow jobs in exchange for scrubbing the bathroom grout, but nothing worked for long. “Every time he changes a light bulb without being asked, he thinks he deserves the Congressional Medal of Honor,” fumed one writer. Much thought has been given to this cosmic mystery. Do men just not see what needs to be done? Do they see it but don’t believe it’s an important use of their time? Do they see it and believe it’s a good use of their time but just don’t wanna? More likely, it’s what my ex-husband hollered at me during one of the aforementioned plate-smashing arguments, “You should be doing it.” Never mind that at the time I was also supporting the family.
In 1976, psychologist, scholar, and activist Dorothy Dinnerstein wrote a book called The Mermaid and the Minotaur, in which she posited that a host of domestic and political difficulties could be resolved if men shared equally in child-rearing. None of this “babysitting” his own kids or feeling like a good guy because he was helping their mother. If, in his heart, a father believed he was equally responsible for the care and upbringing of his children, it would change the way all men viewed women.
The cockroach-resiliency of the patriarchy exists, according to Dinnerstein, for the simple reason that psychologically men never quite recover from having been born of woman, then raised by her. Mom was the first and ultimate authority figure. Every moment of joy or sadness was in her control. He was coddled and smothered by her love. Or, he was criticized and humiliated by her. Most likely it was a combination of both because mothers are only human, trying to do their best. But no matter. Because a man’s mother had all the power in his childhood, his unconscious holds her responsible for everything that sucks in his adult life. Dinnerstein believed that until fathers shared equally in the joy, burden, responsibility, and power of their parental role, boys would always possess t
he same “buried foundations” that prevent them from seeing males and females as equal.
Bottom line, we can’t win if we play the game according to their rules.
The system may not be built for us, but we are, for the most part, freer than ever to operate inside of it. Running after the ever-receding mirage of ideal womanhood will never gain us the love, acceptance, and happiness that we seek. It’s not designed to. But we’re far from powerless. We can say yeah, no, not happening.
Why be the cash cow for the consumer economy? Why believe the propaganda that only by trying to squeeze yourself into the culturally sanctioned cool-girl mold you are worthy of love? Why assume that someone on Instagram knows more about what’s good for you than you do?
Why not save your money? Money is power.*
Why not pursue your cockamamie interests? Passions make life interesting. They give life meaning. Added bonus, they make you more interesting, both to yourself and to others.
Why not coax some of your repressed character traits out of the shadows and see what they’re all about? The puritanism of self-improvement is so god-awful boring. It’s not the worst thing in the world to knock back some cheap scotch and skip yoga.
I’m not suggesting you say fuck it all to everything—you will have to pry my bottle of Chanel No. 19 from my cold dead hands—just the bullshit that stresses you out, wastes your time, money, and energy, and promotes self-doubt and erodes self-trust. Life is a one-way turnstile. Time is our most precious commodity.
And if you still worry that saying yes to your True Self will make you unlovable, consider the story of Judith Taylor, an associate professor at the University of Toronto. One night in 2018 Professor Taylor was binge-watching Friday Night Lights and was struck by the character of Coach Eric Taylor, to whom she probably felt kinship, given they shared the same last name. How was it, she wondered, that Coach Taylor was considered by one and all to be a good guy, when he was also kind of a jerk? He was brusque, fair, firm, and took grief from no one. He bossed people around even when he was being supportive. He didn’t bother connecting. Behavior, as we know, that is permitted in men but instantly renders women unlikable.
Professor Taylor was feeling overwhelmed by her workload at the time. She was the opposite of Coach Taylor, who issued orders and never offered an explanation. She worked hard to be kind and accommodating to her students, making sure they fully understood her reasoning behind each assignment and her grading decisions. Her door was always open.
She decided to run an experiment: what would happen if she traded in her identity as nice-as-pie Professor Taylor for the swaggering, always slightly pissed off Coach Taylor? Would her colleagues come to dislike her? Would her student evaluations suffer? Would she be shunned in the faculty lounge? Would she be written up by the dean?
For two weeks, she behaved like Coach Taylor. When students wandered into her office and mewled about the current assignment, asking if maybe they could do something else, she said, “Not gonna happen.” The students shrugged, then did the original, objectionable assignment. Likewise, when a graduate student was dithering over her dissertation, she said, “Do you have what it takes? Then just do it.”
“I came to meetings late,” she wrote in a piece about her experiment in the Toronto Star. “I made jokes. Crucially, I started to meet colleagues for beers. . . . I was one of the only women, and my status was quickly elevated to one of the power brokers, and I joined the executive committee.”
Her Coach Taylor strategy also worked at home. Over Sunday dinner she would say, “Here’s how it’s gonna go,” and give her kids their chores for the week. They sort of looked at her like what have you done with my mother, but they cooperated.
In the end, Professor Taylor enjoyed success as Coach Taylor. Her students turned in more assignments, her kids complained less, and there was that promotion to the executive committee. She didn’t much like herself that way, preferring to find a blend between cooperation, communication, and inclusivity, but our takeaway is this: no one hated her. Her husband didn’t initiate divorce proceedings. Her kids went ahead and did what they were told, possibly glad for the structure. Her dean didn’t discipline her. Nothing bad happened. No one stopped loving her, or even disliked her.
I’m not suggesting that if every woman in the world suddenly decided to embrace her inner asshole* there wouldn’t be substantial pushback; rather, that deciding to stop being all things to all people all the time isn’t always the personal calamity we imagine it might be. Despite the reality of the double bind, there’s more room to maneuver than we suppose.
That said, when you’re a young woman with your romantic and domestic future ahead of you, it takes courage to channel your inner Coach Taylor. In Bitch Doctrine: Essays for Dissenting Adults, British journalist and activist Laurie Penny writes about the real choices women in their twenties are often forced to make between being true to themselves and being partnered with dolts who are happy to sleep with them until they sense there’s an actual person in there with interests, passions, opinions, and proclivities.
“Nothing frustrates me so much as watching young women at the start of their lives wasting years in succession on lackluster, unappreciative, boring child-men, who were only ever looking for a magic girl to show off to their friends, a girl who would in private be both surrogate mother and sex partner. I’ve been that girl. It’s no fun being that girl.”
Penny could never quite bring herself to be that girl. She would sleep with a guy for a month or more, then he would ghost. She was sad. Her heart was banged up if not broken. She grieved for a bit that she couldn’t make herself more “stereotypically lovable.”
“With hindsight, though, I’m glad that I’ve never been willing or able to narrow my horizons for a man. It didn’t turn out to be half as scary, or a fraction as lonely, as I’d been told.”
I’m not going to lie to you. It’s a little dangerous to live a life in which you do what you want to do, behave in a way that feels authentic, pay attention to things you find of interest, and direct your passions in any way you see fit.
You are now a woman who can’t be controlled by mass media and consumer culture.
Congratulations, sister.
In 1977 the great poet Adrienne Rich delivered a commencement speech at Douglass College, and her words remain distressingly relevant today, over forty years later. Douglass College, part of Rutgers University, was founded in 1918 as the New Jersey College for Women, and Rich’s audience was all female. In her speech, she encouraged them to be aware that the education they’ve received reflects the male view of the world. That the so-called great issues and mainstream Western thought are their issues, their thoughts, excluding half of the population, excluding women. She seemed to have been leading into a talk about the importance of women’s studies, but that was not her true concern. Her subject was the importance of responsibility for ourselves. She said, “Responsibility to yourself means that you don’t fall for shallow and easy solutions—predigested books and ideas, weekend encounters guaranteed to change your life. . . . It means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short, simply to avoid conflict and confrontation. And this, in turn, means resisting the forces in society which say that women should be nice, play safe, have low professional expectations, drown in love and forget about work, live through others, and stay in the places assigned to us.”
It’s time to say yeah, no, not happening. Because life is beautifully complicated and we are beautifully complicated, yet we would happily trade complexity for endless happiness, an impossible feat. Because we don’t really know what makes us happy, because we’ve become less interested in knowing ourselves, and more interested in doing a new program that will make us like someone else. Because many young girls claim they would rather be blind than fat. Because their older sisters, cousins, aunts, and mothers would trade five years of their lives to be thin without having to diet. Because the colossal energy we direct toward endlessly improving
ourselves could be spent on higher, more varied and interesting pursuits, not to mention improving our communities and the world at large. Because we watch beloved friends spend more and more of their precious days, their limited time, in the existential swamp of working toward a state that’s impossible to attain. Because we watch our exquisite daughters forgo joy in the moment because they feel as if they don’t deserve it but will at some future time when they become thinner, fitter, more organized, more productive, more positive, and sweeter. Because regardless of whether the pressure is cultural, societal, familial, or social media-al—it’s time for all of us to say fuck it all to self-improvement. It’s time to take back ourselves.
Epilogue: Collioure
. . . the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.
—Jack Kerouac, On the Road
After I lived with my True Self for a while, it occurred to me that more of my life was behind me rather than in front of me. While I was sitting with my mortality, I came upon one of the chestnuts of the internet, possibly the best one—Australian hospice nurse Bronnie Ware’s 2009 blog post listing the top five most common regrets of the dying. The post garnered millions of views; by 2012 the number was eight million and counting. Ware then wrote a memoir called, fittingly, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. It was translated into twenty-seven languages. The top regret was:
I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
We think we’re taking ourselves and our lives seriously when we’re immersed in optimizing every moment of every day, fine-tuning our already perfectly fine diet, weighing ourselves every morning long after we can no longer see the numbers on the scale without glasses, working, always working, to be better, to be best.