Sleeping Our Way to the Top? Dream On.

Here’s another one for the Well, Duh file. Women need more sleep.

I bring this up not because I like to make Well, Duh-style proclamations. On the contrary; I tend to prefer proclamations of the Wowee! variety. I bring it up because this week, Arianna Huffington and Glamour magazine EIC Cindi Leive have issued a New Year’s Call to Arms on the Huffington Post: “Sleep Challenge 2010: Women, It’s Time to Sleep Our Way to the Top. Literally.”

Sounds great, right? Not so fast. As Feministing’s Jessica put it:

But here’s the thing – what Huffington and Leive are really talking about is sexism, not sleep.

Let’s back up, shall we? From the HuffPo piece:

“Women are significantly more sleep-deprived than men,” confirms Michael Breus, Ph.D., author of Beauty Sleep: Look Younger, Lose Weight, and Feel Great Through Better Sleep. “They have so many commitments, and sleep starts to get low on the totem pole. They may know that sleep should be a priority, but then, you know, they’ve just got to get that last thing done. And that’s when it starts to get bad.”

…Getting a good night’s sleep, of course, is easier said than done. You have to tune out a host of temptations, from Letterman to the PTA to your e-mail inbox — and most of all, to ignore the workaholic wisdom that says you’re lazy for not living up to the example set by Madonna, Martha Stewart and other notorious self-professed never-sleepers. Of course, the truth is the opposite: You’ll be much more likely to be a professional powerhouse if you’re not asleep at the wheel. (Even Bill Clinton, who used to famously get only five hours of sleep, later admitted, “Every important mistake I’ve made in my life, I’ve made because I was too tired.” Huh! ) The problem is that women often feel that they still don’t “belong” in the boys-club atmosphere that still dominates many workplaces. So they often attempt to compensate by working harder and longer than the next guy. Hard work helps women fit in and gain a measure of security. And because it works, they begin to do more and more and more of it until they can’t stop. But it’s a Pyrrhic victory: The workaholism leads to lack of sleep, which in turn leads to never being able to do your best. In fact, many women do this on purpose, fueled by the mistaken idea that getting enough sleep means you must be lazy or less than passionate about your work and your life.

Maybe. Or maybe, as Dr. Breus pointed out, it’s more to do with the fact that many of us are so overloaded with tasks and to-dos, first shifts and second shifts, there simply isn’t any time left over for sleep. (And it’s worth mentioning that the not getting enough sleep thing is a notoriously vicious cycle: The more we take on, the more stressed we are about all we have to get done–and how and when we’re going to get it done. And stress has a rather nasty way of messing with our zzzs. And, in the face of a packed day after a restless night, well, coffee becomes our BFF–until, like a fickle 5 year-old, the clock strikes X and we ditch that BFF for another one–named Malbec. Or whatever. And then we go to bed, worrying about whether or not sleep will come… Rinse, repeat.)

Sleep deprivation, of course, comes with all sorts of nasty side effects, as the HuffPo piece points out. Among them: illness, stress, traffic accidents, weight gain (let no fat card go unplayed). But wait, there’s more!

Rob yourself of sleep, ladies, and you’ll find you never function at your personal best. Work decisions, relationship challenges, any life situation that requires you to know your own mind–they all require the judgment, problem-solving and creativity that only a rested brain is capable of and are all handled best when you bring to them the creativity and judgment that are enhanced by sleep.

Well yeah. Who could argue with that? We all know we should get more sleep. We know how it feels to slog through a busy day in the fog of exhaustion–how impossible it is to think straight. But what rubs me wrong about the whole thing is this: I can’t shake the sense that this is yet another instance in which something that’s societal, systemic, is trivialized by framing it as a personal issue. Yes, we should all aim to get a little more sleep. But the fact is, the modern workplace–of which women are on track to become the majority, like, any second now–is still set up as though the workers who fill it were Don Draper clones, men with a full-time Betty at home, able to take care of all of the stuff that keeps a life running smoothly. But the ladies (and gentlemen) of today don’t have a Betty. She took off to Vegas, baby. So we do our best Don–and then we make the time to get Betty’s job done, too. We work our full day–and then we fold the clothes. And do the grocery shopping. And pick up the dry cleaning. And attempt to cook healthy items (or contend with the parking lot at our favorite take-out joint), to exercise, to socialize, to sleep. To quote Germaine Greer yet again:

When we talk about women having it all, what they really have all of is the work.

Or, as Lisa Belkin put it, over at the NYT Motherlode:

The reason women don’t sleep as well as men is not because of our misguided workaholic tendencies, or our short-sighted need to prove ourselves, but because the world, as it is constructed, gives women more to DO. Particularly during the hours when we should be sleeping. Some of this we can’t control — a baby who needs to nurse at 1 a.m. and again at 3 a.m., for instance, or the fact that at least one study found women wake more easily to a baby’s cry than men. We have those hormonal insomnia issues, too, and, with time, hot flashes and night sweats.

Other reasons are handed to us by society. The expectation is that mom will work a second shift, filling her evening with homework checking and lunch fixing and bedtime storytelling and clutter picking-upping and laundry sorting. Then, after that, so many of us get back to the pile of work we brought home from the office — an office we left early in order to be home for dinner. Yes, men do this more and more in many homes, but the social expectation is that this is still a mother’s job, and shaking it requires more than a simple declaration that we will get more sleep.

It’s enough to make me cry out for my blankie! So what are we to do, aside from putting ourselves down for a little bonus shut-eye every now and then? A good start might be recognizing the only marginally deeper truths in “personal challenges” likes this for the eye-openers that they are.

And the Justice Wore Red

Is there something to be said about fingernails painted fire engine red? Stay with me here, because I think there is.

Some months back, we wrote about the condescending confirmation hearings of now-Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. In something of a rant, we wondered whether white, male candidates would ever have been subjected to such patronizing questions, comments, and — let’s be honest — racially tinged non-jokes. From that post:

Channeling Ricky Ricardo, Oklahoma’s Tom Coburn joked to Sotomayor: “You’ll have lots of ’splainin’ to do.”

South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham suggested to Sotomayor that she had “a temperament problem” and advised that “maybe these hearings are a time for self-reflection.”

And Coburn not only lectured Sotomayor on the “proper role” of judges, but read her the oath of office.

The big-picture point we made back then was that, like Sotomayor, we women are navigating a whole different world when it comes to the workplace — yet one more reason why dealing with choice is so angsty for us. Amidst all this scrutiny in unfamiliar turf, we wrote, we’re suddenly at a loss as to how to fit in:

Let’s face it. We missed the socialization. From ancient times, men have been raised to know their job is to slay the dragons, and that they will be alone in doing it. American mythology, too, teaches men that their role is to go, seek and conquer. For generations, men’s roles have been predetermined, and unquestioned: They provide. And workplace — and social — structures have evolved to support the model.

For women, though, relatively new to this world of work, roles are still in flux. We never learned to slay the dragon — we were the pretty princesses waiting back there in the castle — and often, we’re a little confused by the messy nature of reality as opposed to the comfortable fit of school. And so we’re flummoxed. Overwhelmed. We’re feeling our way…

Like many women who are making their way onto what should be an equal playing field but clearly is not, our newest Supreme Court Justice had to defend herself for being who she is.

But now, given recent media play, I wonder if she’s scored the winning goal. With a symbol as simple as red nail polish, is she showing us that we can still play with the boys without relinquishing ourselves?

Clearly, it’s all more complicated than a few quick coats of Fire and Ice. But still. Our newest justice’s nail enamel stood out on the cover of Latina Magazine and as telling detail at the top of a recent twelve page New Yorker profile. Now, before I move on, we can all harrumph and kvetch and moan that men’s appearance would never be scrutinized this way and women’s shouldn’t either. But there’s another way to consider all this, and I kinda like it: that a symbol of what’s conventionally considered feminine — and ethnic as well (more about that below) — is a mark of power.

What is says, pretty loud and clear, is that I’ve made it to the top without hiding who I am. You can, too.

In a piece on Jezebel.com, blogger Latoya pulls eight points from the New Yorker profile that set our new justice apart. Here’s how she tops that list:

Much has been made of Sotomayor’s nail polish and hoop earrings. Writer Lauren Collins continues this trend within the first few paragraphs noting:

By the end of the hour allotted to the case, Justice Sotomayor-wearing a snaky silver cuff bracelet and with her fingernails painted sports-car red-had spoken five times.

This is normally positioned alongside other quirky characteristics of Sotomayor, like her card-sharking ways. No, seriously.

The financial-disclosure form that she filed with the Senate revealed that, in 2008, in a Florida casino, she had won $8,283 playing cards.

During the nomination process, Sotomayor’s background was carefully scrutinized, and she was instructed to camouflage or obscure some of her normal habits. In some ways, her embrace of her own cosmetic preferences and hobbies over what is considered to be safe or acceptable is a signal she is not ashamed of who she is or where she has come from. Assimilation requires a very high price and her refusal to do so is an amazing stand for individual truth. There is nothing inferior about wearing colored nail polish, or wearing an off-the-rack suit to work, or rocking hoop earrings. Just as many of us are asked to remove our ethnic and regional markers in exchange for success (straightening hair, tightening diction, and avoiding items that call attention to the wearer) Sotomayor’s subtle – but persistent- refusal to fall in line implies much more than a love of candy apple red polish.

Forbes woman.com adds to the thread, by addressing Sotomayor’s Latina cover directly, and the subsequent focus on her fingernails:

Florian Bachleda, the creative director of [Latina] recently wrote a post about the photo shoot with Sotomayor on the Society of Publication Designers Web site, “A Wise Latina and the Color Red: Latina ’s Justice Sotomayor Cover.” “On the day of the shoot, Justice Sotomayor entered the room with a big smile on her face, and the first thing she did was extend her hand and introduce herself to everyone in the room. Everyone … it was incredibly refreshing to see.” But what’s up with her nails? Bachleda writes that during Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings, the justice was fully prepped on everything from potentially explosive questions down to her dress and nail color. She was, apparently, advised to keep the lacquer neutral. But, he continues, “on the day of the White House reception celebrating her appointment, Sotomayor asked the president to look at her freshly manicured nails, holding up her hands to show off her favorite color: a fire-engine red. The president chuckled, saying that she had been warned against that color.”

Why red and, really, should we even be looking at her nails? To answer the first question, Latina Editor Mimi Valdés says, “In many Latino families, red is a very important and symbolic color. … For many, the color is very much a point of pride.”

It’s also a signal, a nod that gives us permission not only to succeed, but to be ourselves when we do. As Bachelda writes on his post:

I love this photo. To me, it looks like she’s taking a pledge. It looks like she understands how historic this is. What this means not just for her, but for millions of other people. And, I like to think, it looks like she’s now able to proudly show off… that beautiful color red.

Absolutely. Bring on the Fire and Ice.

Putting Off Til Tomorrow What Can Be Enjoyed Today

Now that the holidays are behind us, I can officially announce that I did not receive a single gift card. Which is probably a good thing, as currently gathering dust on my dresser are the following: a year-old gift certificate for a Thai massage at a local spa; a Nordstrom gift card so old I can’t remember its origins; and a Crate & Barrel gift certificate I recently looked at again, only to discover I received it in 2002. (To be fair, there is no Crate & Barrel in Santa Barbara.) These cards are as much a source of shame as amusement–at times, I’d swear I could hear them snickering at me–but I was comforted to learn that, apparently, I am far from alone in my tendency to procrastinate… even when it comes to matters of pleasure. As John Tierney put it in his recent NYT piece, “Carpe Diem? Maybe Tomorrow”:

You just need the strength to cash in your gift certificates, drink that special bottle of wine, redeem your frequent flier miles and take that vacation you always promised yourself. If your resolve weakens, do not succumb to guilt or shame. Acknowledge what you are: a recovering procrastinator of pleasure.

It seems odd, but this is actually a widespread form of procrastination–just ask the airlines and other marketers who save billions of dollars annually from gift certificates that expire unredeemed. Or the poets who have kept turning out exhortations to seize the day and gather rosebuds.

In the piece, Tierney cites a couple of studies conducted by Suzanne B. Shu and Ayelet Gneezy, professors of marketing at UCLA and UC San Diego, respectively. In one, they found that

People who have moved to Chicago, Dallas and London get to fewer local landmarks during their entire first year than the typical tourist visits during a two-week stay.

In another, Shu and Gneezy gave people gift certificates good for movie tickets and French pastries; some expired within two to three weeks; some in six to eight weeks. Of that one, Tierney writes:

The people who received the long-term certificates were more confident than the others that they would redeem the gifts–a logical enough assumption, given all the extra time they had. But they just kept putting it off, and ultimately they were more likely to let the gift go unredeemed than the people who had received the short-term certificates.

Once you start procrastinating pleasure, it can become a self-perpetuating process if you fixate on some imagined nirvana. The longer you wait to open that prize bottle of wine, the more special the occasion has to be.

All of which is interesting when it comes to using those gift cards, cashing in those frequent flier miles, and opening that killer (or so you’ve read) bottle of Syrah. Not to mention enjoying a free croissant. But what it really left me wondering was this: what does this psychological tic mean when it comes to our lives, our choices?

How often do we find ourselves putting off going after what we really want, because we’re waiting for the stars to align and offer up the perfect circumstances, assuming there will be plenty of time to Fill in the Blank? Of course, it just so damn easy, sticking to the path we’re already on, opting to postpone that trip (airfare might come down!), that move (sure, that apartment is cute, but it’s so small… what if I sign the lease and then The Perfect Place opens up?), that baby (next year, we should be making a little more money…), going back to school (I’m only going if I get into my Number One choice), starting a business (maybe it’s not the right time), changing careers altogether (maybe once the economy improves), Insert Your Dream Here (insert your excuse here), all because circumstances aren’t quite perfect yet… But really, where does that get us? With a stack of dreams, piled up on the shelf, gathering dust, and in danger of expiring, turning to vinegar? Yet another problem with perfection: the time we waste waiting for it.

Here’s what Dr. Shu has to say:

People can become overly focused on an ideal. Even if they know it’s unlikely, they get so focused on the perfect scenario that they block everything else. Or they anticipate that they’ll kick themselves later if they take the second-best option and then see the best one is still available. But they don’t realize that regret can go the other way. They’ll end up with something worse and regret not taking the second-best one.

Regret. Such a bitter pill. So: what to do? Leap now, and forever hold your peace? What’s the worst that could happen? Consider this slightly unconventional wisdom, pulled from the hedonism-hailing flick Sideways:

Remember the advice offered in the movie ‘Sideways’ to Miles, who has been holding on to a ‘61 Cheval Blanc so long that it is in danger of going bad. When Miles says he is waiting for a special occasion, his friend Maya puts matters into perspective:

‘The day you open a ‘61 Cheval Blanc, that’s the special occasion.’

I’ll drink to that. And I’ll drink (something good–though not ‘61 Cheval Blanc good, alas) to that while cooking an epic meal using the last of those dried chiles I scored last year in Santa Fe. But first: I have a massage to book.

New Year’s Resolution: Kill the Clock

Partially fueled by good champagne, we had some silly chitchat with good friends on New Year’s Eve regarding stupid celebrity “news” stories. My husband won the “top this” prize with a rumor that made the rounds a while back about Morgan Freeman planning to marry his step granddaughter.

Huh?

Apart from the very obvious yuck factor, there’s this: Freeman is 72. His intended is 27.

Now, at the risk of starting out the new year in a pair of the cranky pants, I can’t help but notice that nowhere (yes, I googled) is Freeman referred to as, ahem, an “older” actor. But women actors? Once they become old enough to be, say, Freeman’s daughter, “older” becomes their middle name.

Case in point, a recent post on Broadsheet riffing on a CNN.com piece by Breeanna Hare about the new screen stereotype of the woman-of-a-certain-age: the boozy grandma. First, from Hare’s post:

“These women, they’re not knitting — they’re more interested in mixing their drinks than watching kids,” said Entertainment Weekly’s pop culture writer Tim Stack. “They’re more inclined to offer a witticism or a barb than to give you sweet advice. These ladies aren’t cooking — I don’t think they even eat. They drink their lunch. And their dinners. And their breakfasts. … Maybe they eat the olives.”

They’re the exact opposite of the stereotypical grandmother, said TVGuide.com’s senior editor Mickey O’Connor.

Or, apparently, the over-50 woman. While Broadsheet rightly bemoans the fact that good parts for veteran women actors are slim and none, I couldn’t miss a certain patronizing subtext in the way writer Kate Harding brings up Meryl Streep and Susan Sarandon, both playing real women on the big screen this season, and her need to frame them in terms of their age. Ugh. From her post:

For all the talk of Meryl Streep rocking Hollywood’s socks off this year (and believe me, I’m as thrilled about that as any other female moviegoer who’s not invested in Edward vs. Jacob), let us not forget that she’s Meryl Freakin’ Streep. Is her recent wave of success really going to help other women her age to open movies and land the cover of Vanity Fair? TVGuide.com senior editor Mickey O’Connor provides the reality check: “Maybe it’s become, play a drunk grandmother and you get to work past the age of 60. Even if you’re Susan Sarandon …

I suppose the boozy grandma is better than the dotty — or nonexistent — older woman character, in that she at least has a discernible personality, opinions and enough brains to produce just the right clever, cutting remark on the spot. But does she have to be a functional alcoholic for the audience to accept those things? Does a woman over 60 — or 50, even — have to be snobby and self-absorbed to be interesting?

Et tu, Broadsheet? Do we ever categorize men in terms of their last birthday? It may be celebs we’re talking about here, but make no mistake: the trickle down hurts us all.

One of the things we talk about in journalism classes is the damage done by unwitting stereotyping – see above — often, a reporter’s form of shorthand. One of the most insidious forms that affects marginalized groups is overcompensation: “gee whiz” features on 75-year-old marathoners, for example, or inspirational series on the academic success of the so-called “model minorities”. All of which leads me back to the way that Meryl Streep’s over-50 sexual being in “It’s Complicated” or Susan Sarandon’s smoking, drinking granny in “The Lovely Bones” have been framed in the media: as novelties, the anti-stereotypes who, apparently, are the exceptions who prove the rule. The unkindest subtext of all: that they – apparently, unlike most women their age – not only have lives of their own but are attractive to boot.

Shouldn’t they be in the kitchen, wearing frumpy clothes and sensible shoes, humming 1950s show tunes?

Clearly, Streep, currently gracing the cover of this month’s Vanity Fair, is not. The VF profile of her does one great job of thumbing its nose at the stereotypical way the media treat women of a certain age. Consider this:

Any inhibitions notwithstanding, a vibrant sexuality has remained a crucial aspect of Streep’s appeal, despite her advancing years and the limitations that others might try to impose in response. When Clint Eastwood cast her to star opposite him in The Bridges of Madison County, which won Streep an Oscar nomination for best actress, in 1996, his reason was simple: “She’s the greatest actress in the world,” he said with a shrug.

That said, Streep reports, “There was a big fight over how I was too old to play the part, even though Clint was nearly 20 years older than me. The part was for a 45-year-old woman, and Clint said, ‘This is a 45-year-old woman.’”

When casting female roles, directors and producers have often applied a comically exaggerated double standard about age. With Streep now playing the ex-wife and current love interest of Alec Baldwin, who is actually nine years younger than she is, many observers have started wondering whether such old-fashioned biases are really changing in ways that will affect other actresses, or only in relation to Streep, who has always been sui generis. In any case, a good part of her aforementioned glee may have to do with her ongoing amazement that, after all these years, she’s still getting away with doing what she loves. “I’ve been given great, weird, interesting parts well past my ‘Sell by’ date,” she says. “I remember saying to Don when I was 38, ‘Well, it’s over.’ And then we kicked the can down the road a little further.”

Refreshing, no? But back to the case in point, we – that’s the collective “we” – rarely box in men in terms of their age. Did anyone but me bat an eye when Michael Douglas was paired with Demi Moore in Disclosure? When Sean Connery’s love interest in Entrapment was Douglas’s wife, Catherine Zeta-Jones? Oldies yes, but you could pull just about ANY movie made today to prove the same point: The leading man needs only a recognizable name. His costar, on the other hand, needs not only a name — but must be young and stunningly beautiful, too. Men in their 50s and 60s not only get to be leading men who still get the girl, but in the real world, they also run companies and countries. They’ve got status that is earned by (wait for it…) AGE. Their female counterparts, on the other hand, generally are considered redundant at best, silly at worst.

All of which makes me wonder if ageism holds us back every bit as much as sexism does, whether the tyranny of the ticking clock that Shannon wrote about here and here may be one reason why we agonize so much over our choices. Sure we’re raised to know that we can be or do anything. But that nasty little voice keeps on whispering: we better get it done before we turn 40.

Maybe we ought to just take it from Meryl. The best way to ring in 2010 is to silence that voice — not to mention the clock — once and for all. As Streep points out in the VF profile, Julia Child did not become, well, Julia Child until she was 50.

A Holiday Blessing

Whether you’re happy, merry, bah humbug, or undecided, well, right back atcha. Wishing you all health, happiness, love, friendship, creativity, fun, sex, success, and easy decision-making in the new year… and we’ll catch you on the flipside.

Turning the Other Cheek?

Welcome to the opening salvos of the great pants war. To wit, while we were MIA, Dockers apparently took it upon itself to reconstruct society’s trek toward gender equality with its new ad campaign for men’s slim-fit, “soft” khakis. Such the bad plan. Dubbed “Wear the Pants”, the campaign comes with its own Man-ifesto (I don’t make this stuff up. That’s what they call it. And watch for the high-rent ads on Super-Bowl Sunday.) You can see the ad on your left. They also have a Facebook page, where folks can post their ruminations on the true definition of a man. Anyhow, the copy reads as follows:

Once upon a time, men wore the pants, and wore them well. Women rarely had to open doors and little old ladies never crossed the street alone. Men took charge because that’s what they did. But somewhere along the way, the world decided it no longer needed men. Disco by disco, latte by foamy non-fat latte, men were stripped of their khakis and left stranded on the road between boyhood and androgyny. But today, there are questions our genderless society has no answers for. The world sits idly by as cities crumble, children misbehave and those little old ladies remain on one side of the street. For the first time since bad guys, we need heroes. We need grown-ups. We need men to put down the plastic fork, step away from the salad bar and untie the world from the tracks of complacency. It’s time to get your hands dirty. It’s time to answer the call of manhood. It’s time to wear the pants.

Clearly, some copywriters were jonesing for a Mad Men fix and thought they could dabble in a little mid-century irony to sell some pants. Not exactly, writes the SF Chronicle’s stylewriter, Aaron Britt:

Arch? Stirring? Silly? And more importantly, did you balk when you registered that this throw-down has come not from some edgy line of denim or gauche leather emporium, but from none other than the world’s most peaked, pathetic pants: chinos. And it’s not just any chinos calling you a sissy. It’s Dockers.

But really, I’m a little bit flummoxed. Offended, even. Deconstruct the Man-ifesto and you find that the whole campaign is just not funny. In fact, it smells more than a little bit sexist in its sub-rosa rant against the women’s movement and the way in which some of those not-really-witty one-liners play into the worst fears of paranoid neanderthals: Does gender parity mean gender-less? If women succeed in stepping up, does that turn guys into girly-men (Arnold Schwarzenegger’s phrase, not mine)? With no men to wear the pants, do small children run wild and old ladies get run over?

Left unsaid, of course, is who is wearing the pants. Those emasculating women? And what, for the love of god, have they have done to the workplace?

Now, for years, ads directed toward women have preyed upon their need to be more, well, feminine: Wear this! Wax that! Paint those! And so you can argue that it’s no more than turnabout to sell pants by preying on men’s need to be more traditionally masculine. But see, here’s the difference: Does masculinity have to equate to keeping women in the kitchen? It’s clear where the women are in the scary Dockers scenario: Wearing their menfolks’ khakis, of course, which is why everything else has gone to hell. As Jami Bernard wrote on Walletpop:

Just because the Docker ads are tongue in cheek does not mean they’re not sexist. It’s one thing to encourage men to man up, another to tell them to “wear the pants” — an expression that taps directly into the old question: “Who wears the pants in this family?” There are only two possible answers: the man of the house, or the woman who has been stealing his thunder. “Wear the pants” is a call to arms, even when used jokingly, that says the only way to be a man is to put women in their place…

The real joke, of course, is that the pants in question, writes Broadsheet’s Mary Elizabeth Williams, is “the brand that made everybody’s asses look fat in the ’90s..” Whether or not we girls (or, for that matter, our guys) are wearing the pants — I doubt they’re gonna be Dockers.

Feminista: Undecided Talks Feminism, Choices, and Having It All with Author Erica Kennedy

Readers, we’ve missed you, but we promise we’re back — and we’ve returned bearing gifts, in the form of a Q&A with the sharp, funny, honest, and slightly potty-mouthed author Erica Kennedy, whose first novel, Bling, is a New York Times Bestseller. But we bring her to you because Sydney, the main character in her new novel, Feminista*, is undoubtedly one of us. Allow me to quote:

She grew up believing she’d have it all. A Career with a capital C. A husband. Babies! She’d be the Enjoli woman, brining home the bacon, frying it up in a pan, never letting him forget he was a man! Who would’ve guessed the whole thing would turn out to be a scam, a cultural Ponzi scheme that would dupe every middle-class woman of her generation?

FUCK YOU, GLORIA STEINEM!

Ahem. I told you she was one of us. How could I not want to get Kennedy’s take on a few of our favorite subjects? It being the season of giving, she graciously obliged. Here are some excerpts.

SK: With regard to that quote [above], this feeling that it’s a scam, that we’ve all just been set up — do you believe that?

EK: In a sense, yes. But I don’t think it’s a scam. I think it’s a ‘grass is greener’ thing. When women were expected to stay home and take care of the kids, they yearned for more. They wanted to be out there, engaged with the world, making their own money, chasing their dreams. But then you get that and there are downsides to it. And then most still want to have kids and you realize how tough it is to manage both. But you can’t predict what that will be like until you’re in it.

I think that’s what the Opt-Out revolution is about. Women who got great educations because they were raised to believe they would have careers and that would be fulfilling but then they got out there and started working and realized how hard it was to juggle everything and made a choice to stay home. I know there are people who say the Opt-Out Revolution is a myth but I know many women who are living this life and many who would if they could afford to.

But that’s why “balance” is always the catchword when women are talking about their lives. Because we don’t want to kill ourselves working all the time, we don’t want to stay home forever, we want to find a way to integrate work and family (and whatever else we need to feed our spirit) in a way that feels right for each of us. And I think we’re in a time now where we are still learning how to do that. The paradigms are not in place. We all have guilt about making these choices, no matter which we choose. I think in the future, things like flextime programs will be more prevalent because that’s a way that companies won’t have to lose smart, talented women who feel like they need to make this either/or choice.

SK: So do you think the idea of ‘having it all’ is just a bunch of bullshit?

EK: To me, the bullshit is to think ‘having it all’ means one cookie cutter thing. Everyone is different and everyone has to define their ‘all’ for themselves. And do you really need it all? Can’t we be content with some? Do we always have to be chasing more?

SK: Your character Sydney is tormented by the pressure to do something amazing — the Career-with-a-Capital-C thing. Have you felt that yourself?

EK: I went to Stuyvesant, a high school for gifted students in New York. I went to Sarah Lawrence where women were encouraged to have Careers and the thought of NOT working was unheard of. I went to Oxford my junior year. So I think there were expectations that I would do something great and I internalized that and put a lot of pressure on myself. I don’t blame anyone for having high expectations of me but it goes back to what does ‘having it all’ mean? Does it mean having some fancy title, executive perks, making a lot of money, having your book on the NYT bestseller’s list? Or does it mean waking up and looking forward to your day, whatever you make of it? I sublet a place in Miami Beach when I was finishing Feminista and it was, hands down, the happiest time of my life. I would write at the beach, swin in the ocean every day, ride my bike around town. And part of that happiness came from being around people who were very chill, who didn’t define themselves by their jobs.

SK: Here’s another great quote from Feminista, variations of which we’ve heard from several of the women we’re profiling in Undecided: “Sometimes she thought, in a strange way, life was so much easier for people with no options… You didn’t sit around thinking, I could have been a documentarian or a forensic psychologist or a sitcom writer…” The angst over the road not traveled – a definite side effect of all the options. Does that affect you? How do you move past it?

EK: This has always been a huge problem for me, even now. I grew up in a middle class family where my father was a corporate exec, my mother started her own design business. Then I went to school with very wealthy kids and knew people in the hip-hop world, most of whom didn’t have formal educations but became millionaires by the time they were thirty. So nothing seemed out of reach for me. I lived in New York and knew people who were business owners and lawyers and CEOs and restauranteurs, anything you could name. And everyone knew I was this honor student, so literally every road was open to me. Which was crippling. So I floundered for many years, working at jobs I didn’t have any interest in because I didn’t know what I should be doing. There were too many possibilities.

A really big pet peeve of mine is that no one, at least in my experience, helps you identify what kind of career you might excel at. Because I think the thing that you will be successful and most fulfilled doing is that thing that you’d do even if someone wasn’t paying you. You can always find a way to make a career out of your talent or passion. But that innate thing may be the thing you completely ignore, like I did with writing. In college, no one helped me identify what my passion/talents/marketable skills were. Why isn’t that a required class?

The week before graduation, one of my professors asked me, “Where do you see yourself in five years?” And I said, “Um, married with children?” She was horrified. As was I. But I think that may have been my unconscious wish, to find someone to take care of me and make the decisions, because I was so ill-prepared, despite my ‘good education’, to do that for myself. I quit my 9-5 job at age 28 to write professionally and didn’t start writing my first book until I was 32.

And too many options doesn’t just apply to jobs but also to men and where we should live and what kind of life we should have. It’s the predicament of abundance. As women, all these doors have been thrown open for us but it’s like, Oh no, which one do I choose and where the fuck is it going to lead me?!

SK: In the book, Sydney sabotages herself, beats herself up, pushes others away–and yet, she’s extremely relatable. What do you think it is about Sydney that’s so universal?

I think what’s relatable about Sydney is that she’s trying to work it all out, what she wants and what she doesn’t want. But I actually didn’t expect a lot of women to identify with her because she’s very angry and bitter–and I consciously did that because I think we, as women, do have this anger and resentment about all the choices we have now and not knowing which to choose but we are socialized NOT to show our anger. We’re supposed to suck it up and worry about everyone else. I wanted Sydney to embody all of that repressed stuff. I hoped women would find her and they story interesting but I’m really surprised that so many women say they identify with her or that her story is their story.

*Feminista, St. Martin’s Press, 2009.

Lemons and lemonade: where we’ve been

When you least expect it, life throws you a curveball. Without getting into tedious detail, suffice it to say we’ve been dealing with an unexpected emergency this past week, which is why you may have noticed that Undecided went dark.

But we’ll be back as usual sooner rather than later, when all is well, with a little wisdom to spare: Which is the fact that when shit happens, you tend to realize that all the little things you’ve been obsessing about, in the great scheme of things, weren’t necessarily worth the angst. As one wise friend once said, “Why worry? When the bad stuff happens, it’s never what you were worrying about.”

What you also learn is that, well, it’s not always about you. We angst and angst and take our plans so seriously, without ever acknowledging that life doesn’t have much interest in our plans at all. And in fact, the choices we think we have — may not actually even be choices afterall. What really matters is whether or not you step up to the plate.

What you realize is that you can. In the unforgettable words of Christopher Robin to Pooh (Thanks, Leslie!): “Promise me you’ll always remember: you’re braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.”

Truth. I’m sure you have your own stories of resilience. We’d like to hear them. Meanwhile, catch you next week, when many of us will be making a pilgrimage to the last-minute land of the Undecided, staggering around the shopping mall with the twenty-yard stare, wondering, “Hmmmm. Would she like the red one? Or the blue one?”

Conduct Unbecoming: Playing Like the Boys

You can just imagine my glee when I flipped through this week’s Newsweek to find an essay headlined “Who You Callin’ A Lady?. The deck read “The soft bigotry of high expectations.”

Holy jumpin’ Undecided, Batman! Isn’t this what we’ve been talking about in this space for months?

Enter the buzzkill. I realized that the essay, written by Kathleen Deveny, was just one more knee-jerk apologia for University of New Mexico soccer player Elizabeth Lambert’s reprehensible behavior in a game against BYU.

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last month, you know that Lambert was suspended from her team for what might generously be called dirty playing (check the ESPN video below): She tripped players. She threw punches. She took players out with no ball in sight. Ugliest of all, she threw an opponent to the ground by yanking her by the ponytail and snapping her head back.

Let me back up. Both my daughters played soccer, at various levels. They attended a high school where women’s soccer was a feeder for top level university programs across the country. For years, members of the women’s soccer team at the university where I teach have made their way onto the rosters of the national team and the Olympic team. I’ve never played in a soccer game, but I’ve watched probably hundreds of them: Lambert goes way beyond dirty. Don’t want to take my word for it? Listen to former Olympian Julie Foudy.

Which is why I am so dismayed to see Lambert thrown up as a feminist icon, with her behavior a symbol of how society’s high expectations for women hold them back. The issue is real, but when you use Lambert as the poster girl, well, suddenly, the argument starts to disintegrate.

In fairness, Deveny makes some good points. When she gets past comparing Lambert’s suspension — and the media storm that surrounded it — to the reinstatement of football player Michael Vick, she gets onto less shaky ground:

The difference is that we expect bad behavior from men—on the field and off. (In some ways, men justify our low opinion of them: they are 10 times more likely to murder, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.) But we expect better from women. We didn’t fight this hard to be involved in organized sports just so we could act like a bunch of dumb jocks, right? We want women to be honest, compassionate, and nice—you know, like our moms.

So what’s the harm in expecting the fairer sex to play fairer? It’s what George W. Bush might call the soft bigotry of high expectations. If we insist on holding women and girls to higher standards than men, we set them up to disappoint us. It makes me worry about my 9-year-old daughter, and not because I hope she will someday pull hair with the best of them. I think she is sometimes held to stricter behavior standards than her boys-will-be-boys classmates. Those higher expectations follow us onto the job, where women are allegedly not only better behaved and more honest but cheaper—you only have to pay us 80 cents on the dollar! So why aren’t we represented at the highest levels of business? One problem is that women aren’t supposed to be aggressive or self-promoting—that’s nasty male behavior—even though it’s often rewarded. And yet if professional women are too nice and cuddly, they don’t seem decisive or tough enough to be leaders. “The ‘women are wonderful’ effect does have a terrible downside,” says Alice H. Eagly, a psychology professor and coauthor of Through the Labyrinth: The Truth About How Women Become Leaders. “If you’re too nice, you’re seen as not really appropriate for high-level positions.”

Good points. (Except that bit about Mom. Since when is Mom a synonym for soft?) But maybe we need to start thinking beyond her message. If it is true that women are held to different, and higher standards, maybe it’s not the expectations that do us in, but rather the institutional structures that support them. Playing like the boys for the past several decades really hasn’t gotten us that far. Could it be that what needs to be changed are the structures — not the women?

A few months ago, in a post on the differences between men and women and how we need to embrace them, Shannon quoted a speech by Omega Women’s Institute founder, Elizabeth Lesser:

We’ve had centuries of power and leadership where men have been at the helm. There’s some real serious gaps in representation in the world. And also the world’s in trouble. What would happen if women became empowered and could lead from their core basic values? Not just let’s put women into a structure that is about up-down power, like I have power over you. But what if women could actually influence the way power was wielded in the world, from a core feminine place. … The conversation we need to have now is no longer about women assuming positions of leadership within the existing power structure, it’s about the power structures themselves, it’s about how to go about assuming power, how to change the structures.

Which is why this whole l’affaire Lambert has me so dismayed. It’s not that she was castigated for playing like the boys — it’s that she was playing like the very worst of them.

Feminism 2.0: Enough?

When everything is on the menu, it takes an awful lot of willpower to say, you know, I’m not really that hungry. Even if you’re really not that hungry. Even if, in fact, you’re stuffed.

This being the season of the cocktail party, I’m unable to think in anything other than food metaphors, but, in this post, which concerns a recent piece by journalist/author Naomi Wolf–she of The Beauty Myth fame–I think an appetizer allegory works. The piece, entitled “The Achievement Myth,” launches with what has now become the de rigeur bashing of Marcus Buckingham’s take on the study The Paradox of Women’s Declining Happiness, emphasizing that, rather than describing themselves as unhappy:

…the women had told the researchers whom Buckingham cited that they were ‘not satisfied’ with many areas of their lives. If Western women have learned anything in the past 40 years, it is how to be unsatisfied with the status quo.

And thank god for that. Thanks to the women who gave voice to their dissatisfaction and drove the changes of those years, we’re free to seek out better: we no longer have to settle for unsatisfying jobs, bosses, or sex lives. And, as Wolf points out, we’ve gotten pretty darn good at pinpointing our dissatisfaction, and, from there, setting our sights on greener pastures. But the lure of better, the implicit promise of better, well, that’s where it gets tricky. Here’s a little more from Wolf:

But the downside of this aspirational language and philosophy can be a perpetual, personal restlessness. Many men and women in the rest of the world–especially in the developing world–observe this in us and are ambivalent about it.

Indeed, the definition of Western feminism as “always more” has led to a paradox. Our girls and young women are unable to relax. New data in the West reveal that we have not necessarily raised a generation of daughters who are exuding self-respect and self-esteem. We are raising a generation of girls who are extremely hard on themselves–who set their own personal standards incredibly, even punishingly high–and who don’t give themselves a chance to rest and think, “that’s enough.”

Enough. It’s a simple concept–and yet utterly foreign. This is the home of the All You Can Eat Buffet, after all. And when you’re told you can Have It All, well, to settle for anything short of that is… to settle. To turn in your plate before sampling the goods at every station is to miss out on your money’s worth.

Wolf suggests we’d be wise to redefine our definition of success beyond the professional and the external, to include

other forms of achievement, such as caring for elderly parents, being a nurturing member of the community, or–how very un-Western!–attaining a certain inner wisdom, insight, or peace.

…Should Western feminism deepen its definition of a successful woman’s life, so that more than credentials can demonstrate well-made choices? I believe the time is right to do so. As markets collapse, unemployment skyrockets, and the foundations of our institutions shift in seismic ways, this could be a moment of great opportunity for women and those for whom they care.

It certainly could be. And while I am in no position to demonstrate how to walk the line between satisfaction and settling, maybe we could take a lesson from the buffet line. That maybe it’s worth setting the same sort of goal in life as we do in the dining room: like the kind of awareness that allows us pass up the mini-quiches we kind of like so we’ll have room to really enjoy the crab cakes we adore, that places us fully in the moment of bliss that is a mouthful of warm brie rather than the distracted did-I-really-just-eat-14-cheese-puffs? variety blackout, that empowers us to skip the eggnog everyone else tries to shove down our throats but that we actually cannot stand, the kind of consciousness that allows us to recognize the spot where we’re full–and to actually stop there and enjoy the fullness.