Eat the Damn Cake

Are women taking over the world? Or are they dropping out where it counts?

Yesterday I watched two TED talks. The first was by Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook. It was called “Why we have too few women leaders.”

Sandberg talks about ways to encourage girls and women to succeed in corporate environments. It’s lonely at the top. She’s made deals with CEOs of important companies who couldn’t direct her to the women’s bathroom, because she was the first woman who had been in that part of the building. Women, Sandberg insists, underestimate themselves constantly. When men are asked to explain their success, they attribute it to their personal awesomeness. When women are asked the same question, they name the people who helped them along the way, and consider themselves lucky. Remember when I was talking about ambition? I’m like a prophet. Kidding (especially since these talks were given a month ago. Being a prophet of the past isn’t nearly as impressive). But really– this stuff is everywhere.

The second TED talk I watched was by Hanna Rosin, the amazing journalist who recently wrote “The End of Men” for The Atlantic. It was called “New data on the rise of women.”

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So while I was reading one of the aforementioned women’s magazines (occasionally I walk by the stack on the couch and get hypnotized by the hot pink bubble letters in the headline and start thinking, “What IS he really thinking about sex every time he sees my hair?”), I stumbled upon an article about women and ambition. Women, said the article, don’t like to admit that they’re ambitious. In fact, the only woman who has ever been known by the editorial staff at this particular magazine to refer to herself as ambitious is Catherine Zeta-Jones. The rest of us just blush and look down modestly when we receive our Olympic gold medals. We say afterward, to the hordes of hungry reporters, “Oh, gosh…I don’t know. I guess I was lucky?”

Of course, I immediately thought, “Yet another way in which Catherine Zeta-Jones and I are soul sisters.” No, not really. But I did think that I don’t know very many women who aren’t ambitious. And it seems to me that they are willing to admit it.

I am ambitious. It drives me crazy. I don’t want to be. I want to be completely content with a delicious sandwich, a decent job,  and a good TV show. Or several delicious sandwiches, a reasonably decent job,  and a few mediocre TV shows. Life would be  a lot easier. I want to be OK with leading a quiet life, surrounded by family, like my fantastic 90-year-old grandmother.

But I’m ambitious. I don’t need to be a celebrity or a world-famous something or other. I have no interest in the paparazzi and I’m incredibly unphotogenic anyway. I don’t feel any need to make a million dollars. But I want to be recognized for what I do. I want people to think that I’m awesome. I want to be perceived as successful. I want to push myself to be better at the things I’m good at. To be better at the things I’m bad at. To be better.

(source)

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Being a nerd has gotten complicated. It used to be that nerds were never cool. It was assumed that nerds secretly wanted to be popular, cool kids. Glasses were bad.

And now the hipsters have taken over Brooklyn, and are spreading throughout the coastal and urban areas like…healthy green algae.

People are buying glasses that don’t magnify anything, just for that sexy black-framed look. People are quoting philosophers they haven’t read and listening to bands so obscure even their members mothers don’t know they play instruments. Everyone is alternative everything. We’re all aware of everything. It’s this magical blend of wickedly sharp cynicism and blatant hope.

But I don’t know that the hipsters can take nerding for themselves.

(source)

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I just read this article, in The Atlantic, about Duke University. I really didn’t want to talk about Karen Owen at any point, ever, because everyone in the world with a soap box got immediately up on it to say something about her.

Karen Owen: the girl who wrote a “thesis” detailing her sexual encounters with Duke athletes. I read a little of it and got upset and stopped. I got upset when she was saying, “The next day, I was in so much pain I could barely walk. Which meant it’d been really great.” Or something to that effect. And then she was saying, “I was so drunk I don’t even remember what happened, but we definitely had sex.”

I am angry, thinking about it. I didn’t follow the immediate aftermath, the frantically jabbering media frenzy, because I didn’t want to hear people call her empowered. I didn’t want to read them praising her, or heaping insults on her, or describing her as something new and creative. I didn’t want to read her described as anything except for ordinary and tragic. But somehow, the tragedy has been sucked out of stories like hers. She’s telling it, after all, trumpeting it– yelling out her exploits as though they are actually HER exploits, and not her being exploited and exploiting herself.

I’m exhausted by her story. A young woman who will do anything the boys want, while the boys don’t even seem to want her very much. Everyone is incredibly drunk in it. They can’t do anything before they are drunk.

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A few weeks ago, my mom went shopping for a Christmas gift for a very young cousin of mine. This cousin is very fond of dolls, so my mom set out on what should have been a completely unremarkable, straightforward mission.

It started out that way. She had only to drive to the nearest Toys “R” Us and follow the hot pink glow to its source.

But when she arrived at the doll aisle, she was disturbed by what she found.

“Do you know what dolls look like?” she asked me, the next day.

“Um,” I said. “Is this a trick question?”

“Do you remember what they look like?” We hadn’t spent time in the doll section since I was ten or so.

“OK,” I said, playing along, “There are two basic types: baby and Barbie.”

“And their hair?”

“Blond.”

“Yes! It’s ALL blond!”

(source)

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I am reading Gail Collins’ book “When Everything Changed,” and it is freaking me out. Starting with the 1960′s, she tracks the experiences, legal situation, and struggle for equal rights of American women. I’m at the part about the 80′s, but I had to pause and write this.

It isn’t that I didn’t know about the stuff she’s describing. I had whole classes about this stuff in college. But it’s easy to forget.

It’s easy to forget and it’s difficult to imagine that so recently, women had to apply for separate jobs from men, where there was no question that they would be paid less than half as much, and where they would have to sue to be promoted. It’s easy to forget and difficult to imagine that so recently, women weren’t admitted to most colleges, and the women’s colleges they did go to promised that they would acquire an excellent education in being good wives, and gain access to appropriate young men to marry. And of course, the unchecked physical abuses that women suffered without legal intervention are a part of the story. And the specific experience of black women, who definitely didn’t have access to the suburban life that was quietly driving housewives of Betty Friedan’s generation insane.  I’m connected to it all. I mean, my mother was around then. She was a kid in the 60s, but she was there.

And now people are fond of imagining that everything is taken care of. That we don’t have too many issues with sexism anymore. Yeah, there aren’t many women in the most powerful jobs and roles this country has to offer, but they’ll be there soon. It’s really just a matter of time. Continue Reading »

Speaking of getting married, there’s that thing about names. You know, that thing where you’re a woman, and you get married, and then you have to decide whether you want to keep the name you grew up with or take this completely new name that you hadn’t given any thought to (or maybe even heard) until you met a particular guy.

There’s something strange about giving up a name. Suddenly, it sounds like you’re not a part of your own family. You’re a part of this other family, except that you don’t know their stories yet, and you don’t have memories of them yet.  So you’re kind of a name ghost. You’re floating between families. You haven’t grown solid and real yet. That happens when you become normal at their gatherings and dinner tables, and when you can say your own name and think of yourself. It happens when you become automatic to them, and they are automatic to you, and you all have memories of each other. It might take years . Maybe a lot of them.

And what if you do something remarkable and public? The little girl you were wouldn’t know how to recognize herself in your name when she read about you. People who read about you won’t immediately connect you back to the other members of the family you grew up with. And when they know those family members or read about them in the paper, they won’t connect them back to you. You’ll have to say, “You know, he’s actually my brother.” And if you have a sister, and you both get married, and you both have new names, it’s even more confusing.

(My Hebrew name is on my wedding contract. That’s another name entirely.)

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