by Dana James
EXERCISE SOLUTIONS FOR WONDER WOMAN
Wonder Women benefit from a combination of high-intensity classes to burn off that excess adrenaline (unless they’re adrenally fatigued, in which case take yoga or Pilates classes four times a week) as well as some light to medium weight training. Ideal types of exercise include rebounding, sprints, jumping rope, boxing, HIIT, plyometrics, circuit training, dancing, and biking. Try any combination of these four times a week and take a yoga class once a week. If using weights, opt for small-to-medium weights but target a high rep count to help tone and shape your muscles. If you want to build muscle mass, do fewer reps with more weight.
CHAPTER 4
The Femme Fatale
With her long, luscious locks and deep emerald eyes, Sara captivates both men and women, but beneath her alluring facade she is deeply scared; scared to gain weight and scared to age. She is ashamed that she thinks about her physical appearance as much as she does, but she doesn’t know how to stop it. Even when she was at her ideal weight, she wasn’t able to enjoy it because she was so fearful that an extra bite of dessert would immediately make her gain back her weight and all of the sadness and insecurity that accompanied it. At times, she feels imprisoned by this body obsession and wants nothing more than to be free of it. She wants to be radiant and magnetic and would do anything to get there . . . other than eat more food.
Sara is a Femme Fatale, but an out-of-balance one. She can either ascend to the crown by uncoupling her self-worth from her physical appearance or she can allow her perception of her looks to continue to threaten her sense of self. Almost every Femme Fatale will face this crossroad at some point in her life.
THE FEMME FATALE AT HER CROWN: BEAUTIFUL AND BEGUILING
When the Femme Fatale feels secure in her beauty, she is mesmerizing. She is sensual, alluring, playful, and passionate, and you can’t help but notice her. She’s the one throwing her head back and laughing with joy at the silliest things. You’ll find her sipping tea and giggling with her girlfriends at a French tea salon or curled up on the sofa in a cashmere throw, reading a juicy novel. The provocative photography of Helmut Newton, Herb Ritts, and Ellen Von Unwerth captures the essence of the Femme Fatale in balance: strong, powerful, and sexy. When the Femme Fatale wears her crown, she draws beauty and people into her life with ease. Her presence encourages other women to lead a more resplendent life. It’s “I’ll have what she is having.” But when the Femme Fatale doesn’t feel beautiful, it’s a very different story.
Celebrated Femme Fatales include Elizabeth Taylor, Demi Moore, Sharon Stone, Kim Kardashian, the Bond Girls, Lana del Rey, Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman, Manet’s Olympia, and that gorgeous Parisian woman whom you (and your partner) were captivated by.
THE BELIEF SYSTEM: “BEAUTY GETS YOU WHAT YOU WANT”
Because the Femme Fatale’s power source is her physical appearance, her sense of self tends to rise and fall with the average beauty quotient in the room. If she’s the prettiest, she’ll feel more confident. If she’s not, she’ll feel less than. When she’s at her crown, she knows she has more to offer than just physical appearance. But when she isn’t at her crown, a hint of cellulite, a pinch of fat, a chipped nail, or a new wrinkle can throw her into complete panic. She can become fixated on her imperfections. This anxiety might last for a minute or it can be the dark tunnel in which she lives every day of her life. To the outside observer, her flaws (if you even noticed them) are minor. But in her mind, a flaw, no matter how inconsequential, is a mark against her value as a woman.
The dichotomy between a balanced Femme Fatale and an out-of-balance Femme Fatale is so striking that you’d be hard pressed to find a similarity between the two, but their underlying belief—that beauty is the trump card—binds them together. No other archetype has such polarity between the balance and imbalance. If you’re a balanced Femme Fatale, the out-of-balance Femme Fatale may not resonate with you, but you can still appreciate the pain they experience; you just have more resilience and less need for validation.
We can’t blame the Femme Fatale for buying into the warped notion that physical appearance dictates her worth. She has simply internalized society’s fixation on beauty. We live in a culture that says the goodies in life are rationed. Love, sisterhood, kindness, time, romantic partners, money, and attention are the purview of the best people, which the Femme Fatale interprets as the prettiest. Without good looks, you will miss out. This kind of insecurity fuels the economy by enticing you to buy things to make you feel more attractive. And if you don’t feel attractive, you blame yourself.
While the feminist movement of the ’60s and ’70s attacked the status quo that said a woman needed to attract a prosperous partner in order to have financial stability, the Femme Fatale continues to believe in this precarious paradigm, and that being attractive is the best way to achieve this goal. As Gloria Steinem says in Revolution from Within, “It was as if the female spirit were a garden that had grown beneath the shadows of the barriers for so long that it kept growing in the same pattern, even after some of the barriers were gone.”1
Similarly, social media has morphed into a self-consciousness-inducing milieu where bikini-clad women have the most engagement. The message is, if you are pretty and fit, you can have an enviable life with influence. If you can’t, you will spend your life on the sidelines never feeling good enough.
Wanting to look attractive doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a Femme Fatale. To be a Femme Fatale, you must derive your sense of self primarily from your physical attributes. There is nothing wrong with wanting to look more attractive; it is only damaging when it becomes the sole obsession in your life, something the Femme Fatale is prone to.
THE FEMME FATALE ARCHETYPE: THE SECOND CHAKRA
The second chakra has a stranglehold on the Femme Fatale. It represents pleasure and how others perceive you and reflects the emotions connected to sex and power. An out-of-balance second chakra can lead to social withdrawal or to overexposure as a way to seek validation from others. It is located in the pelvic area and includes the reproductive organs. It’s not surprising that Femme Fatales can use seduction to get their way—or shut it down when they feel unattractive.
The second chakra is represented by the color orange. When the Femme Fatale feels overly controlling or judgmental (toward herself or others), she can bolster her diet with orange foods such as papaya, peaches, apricots, nectarines, orange bell peppers, butternut squash, and sweet potatoes. She can carry an orange purse or wear orange lingerie to help strengthen her sense of self. The orange spectrum helps to rebalance a weak second chakra.
THE CHILDHOOD PATTERNS: FROM BEAST TO BEAUTY
Every Femme Fatale I have worked with became that archetype as the result of an upsetting childhood memory. She did not become a Femme Fatale in response to constant praise and adoration of her looks; she used her looks strategically to cope with a lack of attention in her life. Marilyn Monroe, one of the world’s best-known sex symbols, spent much of her childhood in foster homes when her mother was committed to a psychiatric hospital. From an early age she learned that seduction could bring her attention, which became a proxy for the affection and approval that was missing in her life. She became the Femme Fatale.
One client oscillated between restriction and binge eating for more than three decades. When she was ten, her handsome father left her two-hundred-pound mother for a ballerina. She learned to restrict her food, believing that being skinny was how you kept a man, but would binge-eat to rebel against this belief and unconsciously offer support to her mother, who never recovered emotionally after losing her husband.
Other Femme Fatales have taken derogatory comments about their weight or looks to heart. One client was told by her eye doctor at the age of fourteen that she would never be a model because her eyes were not symmetrical. This sent her into a binge-and-purge routine for over a decade, believing th
at if she had a “hot body” people wouldn’t notice the flaw in her facial structure. Whatever the memory, for the Femme Fatale it has created the imprint that beauty is power and if you aren’t beautiful then life will be wretched and miserable.
If you’re a mother and are worried about complimenting your daughter on her looks because you don’t want her to value herself on her physical appearance, please don’t be. I’ve had Wonder Women in my practice who have cried because their parents only gave them accolades for their academic achievements and not for their looks. They felt unattractive because they were never given compliments on their looks, and today they and still carry that scar. Until our culture stops overvaluing physical appearance, women will be subject to criticism—by themselves or others—for the way they look. Making sure your daughter knows she’s beautiful, and helping her believe it, will shield her from society’s judgment. We need our girls to feel whole, and that means positive affirmations for the physical, emotional, intuitive, and intellectual.
OUT OF BALANCE: “I LOOK FAT . . . I LOOK HOT . . . I LOOK FAT . . . I LOOK HOT . . .”
When your self-worth is based on your looks, you’ll instinctively seek out things that make you look more attractive, but this is where things can go haywire. An aging Femme Fatale can have too much facial surgery in an attempt to retain her beauty. Playboy Playmates, Real Housewives, and bikini-clad girls posting selfies on yachts are caricatures of out-of-balance Femme Fatales seeking validation from outsiders instead of believing that they are already beautiful.
Similarly, an out-of-balance Femme Fatale can use sex to feel worthy. My client Jessica finally felt visible when she learned to use seduction and sex as a tool for attention. Tragically, this behavior left her feeling emptier and hollower than before. Her weight would go up and down—along with her self-worth—as she used food to suppress her feelings of disconnection and loneliness. It was only when she healed her childhood scars of neglect and came to believe she was worthy of love because of who she is, not her sexuality, that she was finally able to restore her self-worth and heal the depression that had persisted for most of her life.
The Femme Fatale is also the most likely to make snarky remarks about another woman’s weight and clothing. She’ll ask, “Doesn’t that woman have any respect for herself? How can she be wolfing down that pizza?” Or “Please tell me I don’t look like that when I wear my denim shorts.” The sad part is, she is judging everyone else because she is afraid of receiving the same judgment herself. She’s held in the bondage of her own tongue, projecting her own insecurities onto others.
These examples are the Femme Fatale in amplification. Her natural sensuality and playfulness have become exaggerated, unhealthy, and at times abusive to herself and others. If you’re not a Femme Fatale and find yourself rolling your eyes at her need for validation on her physical appearance, step back and offer some compassion. This is a coping strategy she uses to feel better about herself, just as Wonder Woman works seventy hours a week and the Nurturer does everything for everyone. It’s not vacuous or superficial (as many people perceive it to be); it’s a way to protect her value. She’s fearful that when her physical appeal diminishes, she’ll be discarded like a broken toy.
The Femme Fatale can also exhibit mild delusions. After eating a food that she perceives as “bad,” she will swear that she can “see” it on herself immediately even though it’s impossible for fat to be created that quickly. My client Louise ate a second piece of pie with ice cream one evening and she was absolutely certain that she had gained extra body fat right in that moment. The next day, she didn’t want to go to the beach, even though just one weekend before she had felt lean and radiant, jumping around on the beach in a bikini, throwing a Frisbee, and paddle-boarding. Her friends finally convinced her to join them, but she went in a cover-up, fearful people would judge her for having put on weight. She later discovered that she had actually weighed less on that second weekend; her mind had played tricks on her because she felt guilty at having overeaten. The out-of-balance Femme Fatale doesn’t want to suffer like this, but she doesn’t know how to free herself from this obsession.
EATING BEHAVIOR: “FOOD IS EITHER GOOD OR BAD”
When the Femme Fatale wears her crown, she enjoys the pleasure and sensuality of food. She’s tactile and savors every morsel and chooses foods that naturally bring out her most feminine self.
If you’re an out-of-balance Femme Fatale, however, you can be overly restrictive or binge-eat out of disgust with yourself. You worry that if you overeat, even once, you’ll blow up like Violet from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Your behavior with food mirrors your obsession with your looks. You can become fixated on healthy food to the point of orthorexia, a pathological condition where you exclusively eat food you consider healthy (which may only be greens and whitefish). You may also exhibit anorexic tendencies as a technique of restraint and will applaud yourself for not eating. Eating disorders are more prevalent among Femme Fatales, though they are not exclusive to this archetype. Wonder Women, in their pursuit for perfection, can also engage in this behavior. So, too, can an Ethereal who loses herself and attempts to find acceptance by mimicking the Femme Fatale.
Sometimes the Femme Fatale’s rigid attitudes about food can be the result of chronic digestive issues. If your belly gets distended after eating beans, grains, and cruciferous vegetables, you may declare them to be kryptonite and forever avoid these foods rather than investigating why they made your body react that way. If you insist on placing certain foods in the “bad” category, you’ll ultimately deny yourself nutrient-rich foods that would contribute to your physical beauty. This is what happened with my client Stephanie. She’d previously been diagnosed with SIBO (small intestinal bacterial overgrowth), and part of the protocol for getting rid of the bacteria was to avoid all grains. She’d interpreted this to mean that she should avoid grains for life, not just during treatment. This became a convenient excuse for restricting what she ate. Behind this justification, she was fearful that just one taste of a carb would trigger an unstoppable binge. Her digestive issues legitimatized her disordered eating and took control of her mind.
On such a restrictive diet the Femme Fatale will, rightly, feel deprived—of food as well as pleasure elsewhere in her life. This can precipitate a binge episode. Once she starts, the guilt will become so unbearable that she’ll often continue eating even more food in an attempt to punish herself. This may be anything from an extra apple (which is not on her rigid plan) or massive bowls of popcorn followed by dark chocolate and more. Guilt and shame are the drivers for the binge. The more shameful she feels about it, the more she’ll end up eating.
Not surprisingly, the Femme Fatale can struggle socially with food unless surrounded by other Femme Fatales. She may cancel dinner dates because she don’t trust herself to stop eating. If she does this often enough, she can become melancholic and depressed because connection and intimacy are vital for a woman’s sanity.
THE CHALLENGE FOR THE FEMME FATALE: LEARNING TO GO DEEPER THAN SKIN-DEEP
Convincing yourself that beauty isn’t currency is not an easy task, as you’ve viewed life through this superficial lens for as long as you can recall. But once you accept this, your self-worth will no longer be contingent on your appearance. That sinking feeling you experience when everyone in the room (or by the pool) appears more beautiful or skinnier than you will simply evaporate; it will no longer matter to you. While this may be hard for you to fathom, this is what freedom is. To reach this point, you will need to examine and reinterpret the memories that caused you to believe that your appearance determines your value.
As a Femme Fatale you are constantly judging your physical appearance against others’, so your first mini-challenge is to create an “add-on” compliment. That means, when someone compliments you, you don’t just say “thank you” or “this old thing,” but instead extend the compliment by explaining how it makes you feel (and t
hat feeling can only be positive!). For instance, if someone says, “You look so beautiful tonight,” you can respond with, “Oh thank you, this dress makes me feel so amazing. It reminds me of summer and that makes me feel so good!” By doing this, you have responded from a place of feeling, not judgment. While the compliment was on your physical appearance, your response was not—it was on a positive feeling. You’ll also notice how engaged the person complimenting you becomes when you respond in this way. By offering a bit of insight into yourself, you are creating a connection with someone that has nothing to do with your appearance but rather with your uplifting response.
Embodying the positive traits of the other archetypes is fundamental for the Femme Fatale’s rise to the crown and to breaking your fixation with your physical appearance.
It’s essential that you awaken your spiritual self by embracing your inner Ethereal. By experiencing the power of her magnetic, energetic body, you can heal the scars that have caused you to excessively focus on your physical body.
By embracing the Wonder Woman, you are reminded of your dignity and resilience. Your inner Wonder Woman can hold you strong when the feeling of being “not pretty enough” emerges and you want to retreat into isolation.
The Nurturer can teach you compassion. As you soften your judgment of others, it will be mirrored with compassion toward yourself.