How to Be a Woman

Any writer, male or female, that can spend an entire chapter riffing on pubic hair so hard I nearly pee my panties and then turn around and deconstruct the entire recorded history of women into the depressing thimble of: we've-been-too-busy-and-tired-giving-birth-and-cleaning-up-after-you-twats-to-do-anything-important has my attention.  This lady is smart.  Smart and brash and awkward and so spot-on sometimes you'll want to argue with her but then you realize she's right.  The thing is, feminism has become a dirty word.  And not in a good way, like saying something naughty under your breath makes you feel powerful behind the back of an overbearing boss.  Feminism has become embarrassing, for everyone.  Conjure up the image of a feminist in your mind and I bet you picture a short-haired, ugly, makeup-less middle-aged woman screaming bitter tirades about absolutely NOTHING.  You just want to give her a valium and a warm bath.  Nobody in their right mind wants to be that woman.  Or sleep with her.

This is not Moran.  Moran wants us to take back the word.  She wants us to stand on chairs in bars, slightly tipsy, and shout, I AM A FEMINIST.  And not just us ladies, the menfolk too.  See, the problem is most people (that actually take the time to think about this) are walking around under the impression that feminism is a "female" issue, which is ridiculous.  Feminism is a female issue as much as civil rights are a "black" issue.  The right for one gender to be treated equally to another is a HUMAN issue.  Just like the right for one race to be treated equally to another is a HUMAN issue.  Feminism is a human right.  And men have as much to benefit from it as women, which is why we should all be standing on chairs right now shouting, "I am a FEMINIST" while wielding our furry muffs and spending our hard-earned paychecks on tequila shots.  Well, that's Moran's take on it anyway, but I'm pretty sure she'd be just as thrilled if you stood on a chair at the hairdresser and shouted while getting your eyebrows waxed.  The thing is ladies; no one is going to just give us rights and freedom, unfortunately.  The whole sad history of human affairs does not bode well for oppressed peoples being granted liberation from the money-hungry power mongers just because, well, the raging tyrants stopped raping and pillaging for a moment to say, "Hmmm....maybe we should share our wealth and power and get along!" 

My two grandmothers never learned to drive.  Not only were they not "allowed" to by their husbands, they didn't have the means to purchase and maintain an automobile or the freedom to use it.  And this isn't a story from 1688.  I'm not THAT old.  We're talking a few decades ago.  We're talking NOW.  These were my role models growing up.  That's why I get so bitchy and angry when I watch yet another movie/video game/advertisement/music video where the woman's role (sometimes we get lucky and there is two or three women!) is that of aggressive seductress or passive damsel in distress.  That's it.  That's what we are reduced to.  That's what all the little girls growing up have as role models.  Grotesque surgically-mutilated clowns teetering around in stilettos or else trembling ingénues waiting for a big strong man to protect them from the world and keep them safe.  Seriously?  Because that’s fucked.  Because that is not a single woman I know in real life.  And I doubt very strongly that’s a thinking-man’s idea of a solid life-partner.  A quick wank, maybe.  Real women are strong and courageous and tender and vulnerable and loving and sometimes horrible.  We are so much bigger and more complicated that society wants us to be.  And that’s what is so great about Moran’s book.  She wants us to celebrate the fact that we are bigger and more complicated than some puny, pathetic stereotypes.  As Meg Jay says, we need to get some identity capital: http://www.ted.com/talks/meg_jay_why_30_is_not_the_new_20.html

We need to get off the poles, get into office, throw on our big-girl granny panties and get on with getting shit done.  If that means we need to put our kids in daycare or have abortions or stop spending money on “investment bags” or get a divorce or piss off a lot of people, then so be it.  We need to let go of the boring, heterosexual get-a-man-and-have-a-baby-and-everything-will-be-perfect dream we have been sold because it isn’t a dream at all, it is a nightmare.  Everything is not perfect just because you are married with kid(s).  Sometimes those husbands leave, or die, or hate you, or leave their damn shit all over the place and expect some magic fairy (you) to pick it up for them.  Sometimes your kids get sick, or die, or hate you, or leave their damn shit all over the place and expect some magic fairy (you) to pick it up for them.  Sometimes you stare in the mirror at three am with baby-vomit on your nightgown and think, “THIS is what I was waiting for?”  All those nights at the club grinding my pelvis against some over-cologned idiot hoping he was “the one” lead to THIS?  I could have been in Paris eating truffles!  I could have painted a masterpiece!  I could have slept for more than three hours in a row for the last ten years!  I’m not discounting the joy and delight there is to be had during the coupling of two people leading to reproduction and parenthood.  I’m just saying it isn’t necessarily the pinnacle of your existence.  We need woman doing other things.  Like men.  Because men can seem to have babies and wives AND also invent shit and lead revolutions and make art and get things done.  Because they aren’t usually the ones up at three am cleaning baby vomit off their nightgowns.  They are sleeping blissfully in their cozy beds with their hand down the front of their boxers dreaming of their next merger or the blonde next door.

For throughout history, you can read the stories of women who - against all odds - got being a woman right, but ended up being compromised, unhappy, hobbled, or ruined, because all around them society was still wrong.  Show a girl a pioneering hero - Sylvia Plath, Dorothy Parker, Frida Kahlo, Cleopatra, Boudicca, Joan of Arc- and you’ll also, more often than not, show a girl a woman who was eventually crushed.  Your hard-won triumphs can be wholly negated if you live in a climate where your victories are seen as threatening, incorrect, distasteful, or - most crucially of all, for a teenage girl - simply uncool.  Few girls would choose to be right – right, down into their clever, brilliant bones - but lonely. (p.10)

Just imagine how much other shit you could get done if, instead of worrying what your boyfriend thinks about how your butt looks in your new jeans, you just GOT ON WITH IT.  What if you took all that money you spent painfully and tearfully ripping downy little hairs off your beautiful body and went to Paris?  With or without said boyfriend.  Moran claims there are four things a modern grown woman needs, “a pair of yellow shoes (they unexpectedly go with everything), a friend who will come and post bail at 4 a.m., a fail-safe pie recipe, and a proper muff.  A big hairy minge”(p.45).  This big fluffy muff is not only a political statement, but it is also a subliminal message to yourself that you have better things to do than spend time and money making your front door look like a cold, itchy, child’s vagina.  Your vagina is worth more than that.  You are not going to hurt it any longer.  It has been hurt enough.  If a man takes one look at your lovely mess of curls and gags, well, let him.  I’m sure he’s no prize himself.  Maybe he’ll asphyxiate on his own vomit.  Any man who spends more than ten seconds tending to his own love triangle is a deranged sheep.  Leave him to the fold.  His vanity is his own affair.  If this narcissism also leads him to bake like a potato in tanning beds and hog the bathroom mirror during those crucial minutes you have to get ready when the kids are actually occupying themselves: RUN.  He is not a man.  He is a plastic Ken doll.  Spooning a pillow would be more emotionally fulfilling.

Even though Moran makes a thorough argument for all the ways she has been repressed or discriminated against during the long road to adulthood she never becomes morose or despondent, but instead encourages us to embrace the future with new hope that women will, one day, earn as much as men for the same work.  The future is bright; not because everything is just so much better, but because WE are getting so much better at standing up for ourselves.  Louder, more visible, angry, motivated, and banding together.  We now live in a world where Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Amy Sedaris, and Caitlin Moran make a living BEING FUNNY.  Not being cookie-cutter sexy.  Not being rescued.  Being smart and witty and powerful and hilarious.  And there is pleasure to be had here girls.  Pleasure in making it on your own.  A deep, satisfying, post-orgasm “ahhh” in knowing you paid your own damn way and did it on your own terms.  And it doesn’t have to be lonely.  We’re all in it together.  And believe it or not there are men out there who don’t give one lick whether or not you have hairy legs.  Find them.  Don’t settle for less.

I’ll leave you with this from Moran:

Lying in a hammock, gently finger-combing your Wookiee while staring up at the sky is one of the greatest pleasures of adulthood.  By the end of a grooming session, your little minge-fro should be even and bouffy – you can gently bounce the palm of your hand off it, as if it were a tiny hair trampoline. 

Walking around a room, undressed, in front of appreciative eyes, the reflection in the mirror shows the right thing: a handful of darkness between your legs, something you refuse to hurt.  Half animal, half secret -  something to be approached with a measure of reverence, rather than just made to lie there, while cocks are chucked at it like the penultimate game on Wipeout.

And on proper spa days, you can pop a bit of conditioner on it and enjoy the subsequent cashmere softness, safe in the knowledge that you have not only reclaimed a stretch of feminism that had gotten lost under the roiling Sea of Bullshit, but will also, over your lifetime, save enough money from not waxing to bugger off to Finland and watch the aurora borealis from a five-star hotel while shit-faced on vintage brandy.

So yeah.  Keep it trimmed, keep it neat, but keep it what it’s supposed to be: an old-skool, born to rule, hot, right grown woman’s muff. (p.49)

The Hard Way

I believe it was Malcolm Gladwell who said in his book, Outliers, that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to get really amazing at something, that talent is only a small fraction of what it takes to be a master.  People have said to me before, "Oh, if only I was as talented as you I would go back to school" (or write a book or make a scarf or whatever), which, let me tell you right now, is complete baloney.  Talent has absolutely nothing to do with it.  Yes, I work full-time while raising two kids and doing my Masters and teaching yoga and volunteering in my community and cooking all our meals and making art.  This is not because I'm a good person and it is certainly not because I was born with a special gift.  There are many many days I feel angry, anxious, overworked, overwhelmed, taken advantage of, and exhausted.  There is nothing admirable about hiding in the bathroom hyperventilating over a ruined dinner and hurt feelings, trust me.  So sometimes I just want to shake these people and say, "Hello!  If you took all the time you spend playing on your phone (or watching reality TV or gaming or whatever) and put it towards a goal you really cared about I guarantee that you can achieve it (barring natural disaster or death).  But see these worry lines and grey hairs and my nervous tic?  Yeah, well, you'll look like me, they come with the territory.

Some people just like to take it easy.  And that's great for them, if they are happy doing it.  Most days I wish I had an off-switch.  Sometimes I wish I just didn't give a f*ck about anybody or anything.  Believe me, if I could find the "detach" button on my neck I would take the whole damn head right off.  I like the idea of me on a beach listening to reggae.  But the reality is that I would spend all my "free time" on the beach snorkeling and looking up fish species in a nature guide and doing yoga and picking up trash and reading books and swimming and playing in the waves and organizing some sort of beach protection activist group and teaching myself to surf.  I would spend only 2% of my time in the hammock napping.  That is who I am.  I like to take the hard way.

Why?  Well, that's the million dollar question, but I think a lot of it comes back to my parents and the way I was raised.  The ability to defer gratification is a badge of honor in my family.  As well as the ability to endure emotional anguish in exchange for originality and independence (I think Murakami expressed a similar sentiment in his memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running).  I have not always been this way.  I used to smoke.  And overeat.  I used to be a horrible procrastinator (and still am occasionally...in fact I'm avoiding writing a paper by writing this blog post!).  But slowly, with time and maturity, I'm only now beginning to realize that it's the really hard stuff in life that is the most rewarding in the long term.  Maintaining boundaries in relationships.  Carrying a child in utero and then pushing it out while experiencing the kind of pain for which there is no words.  And then loving and caring for that child even when they make you want to drink all the vodka in the house before noon.  Writing a thesis and getting an A.  Selling a painting you struggled with to someone who loves it dearly and thanks you for making it.  Writing, even when you don't want to, even when you say you can't.  Making the conscious choice to breathe instead of following the impulse to act out in anger (even if your husband is really getting on your nerves). 

There is no feeling that can compare to the elation and lasting sense of accomplishment I feel when I finish a course, or complete that last stitch on a dress I've been slowly working away on for months, or bite into a delicious dinner.  The temporary high from drugs just don't compare.  And like any good people-pleaser, I enjoy accolades and recognition for my hard work, but secretly I know I would be like this in a vacuum.  Alone on a deserted island I would still be on that damn beach classifying rocks and cataloguing them into different piles.  I'm intrinsically motivated.  The process is as important as the end result.  I love making things, but I like the act of making the thing as much as the finished product.  I want to be emotionally invested in whatever I'm undertaking or I'm miserable and it's a tough slog to the other side (and totally hell to live with me).

So, all this to say, Thanks Mum.  Thanks for not letting me quit when the going got tough.  Thanks for being an example of strength and resilience in the face of more shit than any one life should dish out.  Thanks Dad, for teaching me to live within my means.  For supporting me through all my crazy plans and ideas and false starts and complete disasters.  And I also needed to remind myself that sometimes, when the going gets tough, you just need a plan.  Sit down, write, and you'll find yourself again.  Breathe.  Come home to your heart.  There's no map for the hard way, you just figure it out as you go along.  And to those of you on your own hard journeys, with your own seemingly impossible goals, I'll see you on the other side, because I know you'll get there.