Self-image

Real Women


Caitlin Flanagan irritates me to my core. Last year she published a book, To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife, which made her the darling of the nano-second with the Right Wing talking heads. Although it stops short of endorsing the shoeless, knocked up and slaving over a radiating microwave conservative mantra, it is a load of poser crap because as nearly as I can ascertain Ms. Flanagan is not, and never has been, a housewife. Her husband is filthy rich. She has a nanny and a housekeeper. She works. Okay, from home. But if the woman has a job that necessitates the need for a nanny and a housekeeper, them ain’t mother’s hours. 

This month she has a featured article in Oprah Magazine. I love O and I hate it. I love it because it provokes me and gives me good blog topics. I hate it because while it professes to be a tool for female empowerment, it completely buys into the same garbage about what being a woman is that all the other women’s magazines do. It is the deeper end of the self-help pool perhaps, but it isn’t helping because it makes the assumption that all the others do. If there is something wrong in your life from your relationship to your children to your job the root cause of this dysfunction is you, and though sometimes it is, a lot of the time it’s THEM. Anyway, the title of the article is You’re Middle-Aged. But Are You Done? Discuss. Oy! Where to begin with that! There are so many issues to be taken with the idea that 40 is some kind of huge mile-marker and that the decade that it kicks off is the precurser to Depends undergarments. Good lord, at 40 you still have a dozen or more years of tampons to buy. 40+ year old women are not near as wrinkly as the cosmetic industry would like us to believe (unless you smoke and were/are a tanning addict) and with a little bit of vigilance we can stave off the first bits of facial hair growth and graying. It’s not the wonder years of that the mid to late 30’s are but as Shrek says, “It’ll do.”

Flanagan yips a bit about not having the same drive or need to do and succeed that she did as a younger women and then wonders what her friends think about this decade of crisis. So, she fires up the old Rolodex and invites a few of her “average” friends over for party favors and wine and Q&A on the burning questions – marriage – money – sex and how this effects their ability to keeping dreaming about their lives and futures. Now, given who she is I didn’t expect her friends to be like mine. My best friends is a home health care nurse who is almost finished with her MSN despite having a full-time job, husband and two kids. Another very close friend is a middle school teacher whose husband is a farmer, her three girls are 22, 19, and 16 and has also just finished up her MA studies. Flanagan’s friends include a successful novelist, a performance artist, a television personality, a professional organizer , a temporarily retired entrepreneur, and she  throws in a SAHM as a bone for we merely ordinary women to relate with.

I truly went into the reading of this article with an open mind. I thought, “Hey, this is Oprah, right? She isn’t going to tolerate some vacuous shit. These women probably discuss some really important topics. The pressure on women to stay young looking and thin. The difficulties of juggling career and kids. Getting back into the workplace after taking time off. Being taken seriously in your profession.” Yeah, I was wrong, but I read on. And just made myself so crazy that I cornered my poor husband with a diatribe that lasted a good half-hour or so on how I would have answered this idiot woman’s questions. 

Although the entire article is not worth the paper it is printed on, there are a few topics that particularly galled me. One of them was sex. Not one of these women viewed sex with their husbands, or other significant mate, as important. It was an afterthought or worse, an inconvenience. One of them even quoted from a book entitled I’d Rather Eat Chocolate: Learning to Love My Low Libido whose author actually told her husband that she was unilaterally scaling back the number of sexual interactions in their relationship, and what’s more incredible really…..he agreed with her. Furthermore the group on the whole was intrigued with the notion that instead of women visiting their doctors to get help with increasing their low libidos (I am assuming that the 40’s are a low point hormonally for many women …. though I don’t personally know any such women) men should see their physicians to see about decreasing their sex drives instead. Sex with one’s love is a chore? Granted, I was married for a goodly while to a man too ill to be intimate with in any way, but even if that wasn’t the case, I would still want to make love as often as possible with my husband. Sickness, exhaustion, child, selling a house, packing, moving to another country. None of these present any sort of insurmountable obstacle to passionate interactions and this I know for sure.

Another topic was money. Money spent wisely and money thrown away. Most of the participants discussed some purchase of clothing as the best investment they ever made and were thankfully shamed into silence by the women who said that the money she spent on fertility treatments was easily the best investment she ever made. When the discussion turned to money they thrown away, it was predictably things that they regretted splurging on like outfits of clothing, furniture, interior decorators. The money  that I regret spending is on the grave site and headstone I purchased for my late husband. $1300 that I really couldn’t afford, but I did it because he wanted to be buried somewhere that his family, mainly Katy and I, and his friends could come and visit. Sadly, Katy and I were the only ones to really visit his grave and had I not interred him I could have brought his ashes along to Canada with us. Now he lies alone in a little cemetery that it is unlikely I or his daughter will get back to for long while. Who knows really? Maybe even never. I regret that money a lot now.

I thought about conversations I have had with my friends about the state of health care and education. About the night my women’s writers group discussed the realities and ins and outs of dating and how one’s relationship history influences our choices and views. I suppose that “depth” is one of those eye of the beholder things, but I am irked that such a completely shallow person was given an opportunity to have a frank discussion and blew it so definitively. 

Nancy Drew and the Case of the Missing Self-Esteem



I can’t think of even one Nancy Drew mystery I ever read cover to cover, and I know a tried to read a few as a child. I was an avid reader of The Hardy Boys even before Parker Stevenson and Shaun Cassidy, but I found Nancy (even the TV version) too girly. A funny assessment really because Nancy Drew was the kind of girl I would still like to be, would like my daughter to grow up to be. Not the modern version but the pre-sixties model. She may have worn twin sets and sensible shoes, but she rarely, probably never, doubted herself or asked for advice or let her boyfriend, Ned, get in the way of solving the mystery. She was self-reliant, confident and free from the need to inspect her inner self. And this last bit is a good thing you might be asking yourself right now (especially if you are female). My answer is a resounding YES. The reason being that women today, young and old, are not only encouraged to introspection: they are expected to inspect their inner and outer selves to the point of inertia and find themselves lacking whenever possible.

So what brought this up? A few things. First there was a review in the Edmonton Journal bemoaning the new Nancy Drew movie. Apparently, the mystery solving machine teen has been burdened with self-esteem issues. Next I was browsing the month’s Oprah (because it is great blogging fodder) and discovered that the theme of the month is how to lose your inhibitions and gain confidence in yourself. Finally, I happened across a blog entry written by a woman who, with her children, is visiting her mother for the summer and lamenting the fact that their life long issues still have the power to render her childlike and doubting herself. The combined effect of these things got me thinking about self-esteem and particularly about the self-esteem of the women, and girls, I know. And, of course, it got me thinking about myself. Especially myself of late.

Let me digress a moment, and I swear there is a point to this, someone posted a link to a CNN article on the board this morning about the horrific treatment of widows in India. It has been making the news quite a bit lately because the widow of John Lennon, Yoko One, has taken up their cause and is trying to push some widow amendment or other through the United Nations. A pointless gesture that will amount to lip service, but that is another digression for another day. I was not a bit surprised by the article’s contents but the whole caste system in India and the appalling way women and children are treated there should not surprise anyone with an double X set of chromosomes because women, as Ms. Ono once so aptly put it, are still “the niggers of the world”. Which leads me back to my original line of thought on the whole self-esteem thing. When do women lose their self-esteem? Or did we ever really have any as a gender? Are we raised and then socialized to see ourselves as inadequate and in constant need of outside tweaking and propping by a world that needs to hold us back in our place?

It doesn’t take more than a quick perusal of the magazine rack at the check out of your local grocery to see what is expected of women. There are magazines selling information on every topic the 21st century woman needs to know, and she needs to know a lot. How to stay young and beautiful. How to cook quick nutritious meals when you are short on time because you had to stay late at the office (or are pulling the second shift at Walmart). How to be beautiful, sexy and a vixen in bed even if you are over 40. How to decorate and organize yourself, your home and your life. And if you are not sure what these magazines are getting at, you can always read about those who put these principles to practice in the latest issue of People or US.  Even though most self-confident of our gender are still appraised first by their packaging and then by their contents. What is that?  You object? Aren’t men today beginning to be judged the same way at times?  Aren’t they subtly plied with similar notions in the handful of magazines aimed at them. Well, at times they are, I guess, but how is that progress? Dragging new victims into the quagmire doesn’t make it less of a muddy obstruction.

Once upon a time I was an insecure, overweight teen who thought that all my problems would be solved if I were thin and could wear the same clothes as my thin friends and my thinner sister. Teachers would like me. Boys would like me. I would be popular. But the truth was that my thin friends and sisters were prisoners. They were just as insecure about everything that I was, but they had the added burden of maintaining an exterior that solved no problems for them and may have created new ones. Teachers didn’t like me much because I didn’t buy into their enthusiastic nonsense. I questioned everything they said and did so in that rather pointed, but earnest, manner that irritates like the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard. Boys did like me but I deliberately held them at arms length. And, according to an old dear friend, I could have been popular, but I chose not to be. Something that is more clear to me now than at the time she made the observation about ten or twelve years ago. But was it really a matter of a lack of self-esteem on my part? Was it really me or the round hole the world gave me to inhabit. I wouldn’t say that I never have moments of doubt at this point in my life. My late husband’s illness, years of caregiving and surviving and then being widowed, rattled my foundation at many different points. Instead of stopping me though they had the curious effect of making me more determined to reclaim my confident, carefree self because long ago there was a little girl who really was free of issues and believed that there was nothing she couldn’t do or wasn’t entitled to. I don’t know if I am full circle yet, but I do know I am closer, much closer, to who I am and where I belong than I have been at any other point in my life.

I am hardly the only woman who didn’t come into her own until adulthood and then only after a series of soul battering hard knocks. And I would like to be able to say that most, if not all, women eventually reach an epiphany that allows them to say, “Fuck it” to the world and live their lives without worrying about what “they” think or what “they” might be saying, but, sadly, I know that this is not the case. Why? Do we have Oprah and self-help books to thank for this? Or our mothers who don’t know any better and continue to run that same childhood reel on us whenever we phone or visit them? Is it a society? The warped world view that teaches our little girls to define themselves by the boys who like them,  or 20 year olds that it is nearly past time to begin physical self-preservation. Are we still being victimized as  mature women (I think that  mature is defined as past 30 but since 40 became the new 30 I am no longer sure of that) when we are told that the only way to avoid complete irrelevance is to cryo-freeze ourselves via botoxification. Are we victims when we listen? Where is our self-esteem.

I began teaching in the public school system around the time that it was popular to “teach” self-esteem. There was the completely misguided theory at the time that self-esteem was something that could be given to a child through constant meaningless praise. Any teacher can tell you that children see through shallow praise quite quickly and that it is only through accomplishments and personal success that students gain confidence in themselves and their new skills  and that eventually this translates to other areas of their lives. 

To tell you the absolute truth, I am beginning to suspect that self-esteem is not a real thing at all. Perhaps Dr. Phil made it up when he was still working the Oprah Show. I am sorry that Nancy Drew is its latest victim though. She was a doer who gained confidence through doing what she loved and helping people in the process. She relied on her intelligence and ingenuity. She wasn’t interested in fitting into any pre-cast molds. Poor Nancy. There is a lesson there, but probably not the one that the filmmakers intended.  

Fat Girl Inside


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I was reading an interview with Lisa Delaney, the author of Former Fat Girl, today as I hunted down blogging ideas. The title of her book caught my eye because I too am a former fat girl and being such felt an immediate kinship. It may not be easy being green according to the song sung by a rather famous amphibian Muppet but his portly pink companion could have warbled an entire opera on the downside of being “pleasingingly plump”.

In the news this last week there have been many articles about a recent study that found, unsurprisingly, that diets do not work. There are no long term benefits for the vast majority of people who attempt to lose weight using the array of dieting methods that proliferate like e. coli on Canadian beef. Only a very small percentage of dieters will lose weight and keep it off for more than a year. The majority will gain it all back and then some. I didn’t need MSNBC to tell me this though. I know from firsthand experience. I was put on my first diet by a….I would like to say “well-meaning” pediatrician, but I think in retrospect he was a sexist pig. I was twelve and almost as tall as I am now and maybe about only about 10 lbs heavier. Which is to say, I wasn’t fat as much as in need of more exercise. I was pretty much at the weight my body has always gravitated towards regardless of my level of fitness. But in 1975 the baby boomers had yet no need of Lycra in their Levi’s and the clothing industry had not begun its vanity “re-sizing”, and I was shit outta luck. I didn’t lose much weight. 10 lbs maybe. Putting me curiously at about the weight I am now and which my mother, ironically, thinks is much too thin. At the time I wouldn’t have found the irony amusing even if I had known what irony was. I was the “fat girl” at school. The “unattractive sister/daughter” at home. I wore big clunky plastic framed glasses, and my mother commanded me to keep my hair as short as a boy’s because long hair “makes you look heavy”. I was forever being told that I had such a pretty face if only I would lose some weight. The backhanded compliment of choice for fat girls.

So I lost 10 lbs. My father was pleased. My mother “rewarded” me with a trip to the mall for new clothes (a dubious reward as I hated to shop for clothes) and my younger, thin as a stick sister got her nose bent out of shape when boys began to notice me. Older boys. I gained the weight back. And thus the pattern for the vicious circle of the next 15 years or so began to spin.

You see, you are always a fat girl inside. It doesn’t matter how much time has elapsed. The memories of taunting and name-calling. The dances you never got asked to. The horrible shopping experiences that would have reduced you to tears, if you were the kind who cried in front of people, and left your mother grim and tight-lipped. None of that ever goes away.

I started to lose weight when I went to college because I walked everywhere I went mainly and I was free of the meat and potato diet that my father’s preferences imposed on our family. At some point I started running and began to toy with weight lifting on and off. In my mid-twenties, I picked up martial arts and began to run in earnest despite the asthma that I was developing. By my thirties I exercised nearly every day of the week for a hour or two a day and recently, certain health conditions have compelled me to explore organic, meat-less and nearly dairy-free eating. I do all of this because I want to. Not to be thin. But. There is still a part of me that needs to check my weight often. That panics a little when clothes feel a bit snug. And that mentally shudders at the thought of gaining weight. Because you are always a fat girl inside. Always.