by Karen Karbo
But there’s good, very practical news.
You really can wean yourself off compulsive phone checking. Make some rules for yourself—not too many, or it will start seeming like self-improvery. Figure out ways to make it inconvenient to pick up your phone. Fling it to the bottom of your purse so it’s a hassle to dig it out in public. Remove all but the essential apps. Vow to check social media only on your laptop and give yourself a time limit. On Instagram hide every sponsored ad that makes you feel even a wee bit lousy. (I always also report the ad as being inappropriate, just for kicks.) I’m not suggesting that you delete your social media accounts or trade in your smartphone for a flip phone. We’re too far down the digital road for that. But the fewer times you pick up your phone, the fewer times the fire hose of advertising blasts you with messages that make you doubt yourself, the less power it will have over you. The less power modern consumer culture has over you, the greater your chances of becoming reacquainted with and reclaiming your True Self.
Chapter 3
It’s Complicated: Self-Improvement for Girls
To be feminine is to show oneself as weak, futile, passive, and docile. The girl is supposed not only to primp and dress herself up but also to repress her spontaneity and substitute for it the grace and charm she has been taught by her elder sisters. Any self-assertion will take away from her femininity and her seductiveness.
—Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
I didn’t give a thought to self-improvement until seventh grade. Before that I wanted to do stuff better. Surf, ride a unicycle, walk on my hands, draw a box in perfect perspective, hone my jump shot, make a bomb using a Strike Anywhere match and a tennis ball. But once I’d acquired breasts and a box of Kotex in the cupboard beneath the bathroom sink, I was informed by my mother, and mass culture, that looking better should be my goal. My mother’s primary concern became my height, weight, complexion, furry eyebrows, and “thunder thighs,” all of which conveyed to me that whatever basic human strengths I might possess, feminine charm was not one of them.
Oh, how I longed to portray myself as some preternaturally self-possessed teen who knew her self-worth and thought her mother was a sad relic, pushing her sad outdated ideas. But I was cursed with a pragmatic nature. My mother was totally right. In the small world of my Southern California public high school, it was plain to see that the boys I liked preferred girls who were pretty and deliciously docile, with their long eyelashes, silky hair, and bewitching impassivity. And anyway, by then my veins were thrumming with estrogen, and I was happy to bid adieu to the snarly haired, cuticle-chewing, too-short, pants-wearing tomboy galumphing around the neighborhood.
A witty feminist quote about the tyranny of being born female and the pressure to conform to codified standards of beauty would fit in nicely right about here, but it’s a cliché. Regardless of how many waves of feminism roll through, for women, beauty was and is the coin of the realm. Yesterday I asked my stepdaughter how her stepdaughter was managing middle school. She laughed and shrugged. “She’s having a great time. She’s thin and blond.”
The summer between seventh and eighth grade I figured out how to iron my hair, got myself (well, shoplifted) some Bonne Bell lip gloss and Bain de Soleil (for the St. Tropez tan), and saved up my lawn-mowing money for a yellow velour bikini. That accomplished, I thought I was one foxy lady.
Nothing could have been further from the truth, and here is where I was introduced to the great paradox of being female in the modern world. I may have possessed a mass of curlywavyfrizzy hair, big shoulders and hips, and strong legs and not-big-enough-tits, but I had a small waist, skin that tanned beautifully, and dimples. Especially with my newly glossed lips and bronzed complexion, I thought I looked hot. But whatever beauty I possessed—and without even looking at an old picture I can assure you it was the innate radiance of the young and healthy—it was not the right kind of beauty. You know the one I mean—the one that is always impossible to obtain, manage, and maintain, regardless of the era.
My mother was aware of both the prevailing beauty standards of the day, and the degree to which I failed to measure up to them. In sixth grade, we were required to be measured and weighed by the school nurse. I was five foot eight, the second tallest girl in the class. That I weighed 115 pounds mattered not. I was clearly on my way to becoming an unlovable colossus. This calamity was no match for Seventeen magazine, to which my mother had already subscribed me. She panicked and took me straight to my pediatrician. The unacceptability of my glorious, healthy female body required medical intervention.
“What can we do?” she asked Dr. Swift (his real name). “What if she gets taller?”
“You could try giving her coffee,” he said. As if I wasn’t standing right there.
“What about cigarettes? I read where smoking could stunt a person’s growth.”
Dr. Swift, who was known to light up in the exam room on occasion, pondered the idea before suggesting we all just “wait and see.”
At the time, I was merely confused: weren’t cigarettes a grown-up thing, like taxes? It wasn’t until sophomore year in high school when we saw a film in Health about how smoking could kill you that I put two and two together: I was so monstrously tall that my mother and my fucking doctor thought the risk of lung cancer was worth it if it would shave off an inch of my adult height. I never took up smoking, by the way. I was, and still am, five foot eight.
Worse than being too tall and flat-chested was my insistence on “carrying on,” my mother’s catchall term for being boisterous, competitive, obsessed by “cockamamie” topics (hummingbirds, Cleopatra, the French Revolution), and incapable of sitting still with a pleasant smile on my face. It was clear that not only my appearance, but also my personality needed a makeover.
My mother knew I was smart and determined. She also knew that unmitigated, these traits would drive away the men of the world, like the Godzilla monster terrorizing the tiny citizens of Tokyo. However—happy news!—I could leverage my intelligence and drive to completely remake myself. I could discipline myself to appear less than, which would increase my attractiveness to boys. I could transform myself into an innocuous female clever enough to hide her intelligence and savvy enough to know the exact moment when, in the company of boys or men, to become charming and ineffectual. I could “watch my figure” and read books like How to Get a Teen-Age Boy and What to Do with Him When You Get Him, which my mother thoughtfully gave to me in my Easter basket after her unilateral decision that I didn’t need any more yellow Peeps, jelly beans, or hollow chocolate bunnies. I recall feeling distressed and frustrated by this. My mother’s message was clear: my True Self was unlovable. Boys were drawn to a very specific kind of girl, and only with a great deal of work could I fashion myself into that girl. And she wasn’t wrong. No one asked me to the eighth-grade dance, and my crushes of that year all went unrequited.
My mother didn’t have much to say about feminism. She was in her late thirties when the second wave crashed on the shores of our conservative California suburb, and however much she enjoyed having a credit card in her own name, she still believed the best way a girl could get ahead was by marrying well. She was interested in style, in her suburban middle-class way—she had a staggering collection of dangly earrings—and fully understood the quiet, doe-eyed appeal of Julie Barnes, the character played by the exquisite Peggy Lipton on The Mod Squad. She completely got the allure of Joni Mitchell, the long flaxen hair, fetching overbite, skinny arms, and baby voice.* She was smart enough, my mother, not to try to squeeze me into the housewife mold she’d squeezed herself into as if it were a longline girdle.
Even so, her mandate was clear: that my goal in life, the thing to which I was supposed to devote my time and energy, was becoming a human being who lived to please everyone around her. All this self-improvement was not for me, per se, but for the reactions it would elicit in others—not just boys, although they made up the main audience, but also teachers, coaches, friends and their par
ents, and the boss at the dog grooming place where I worked at sixteen who liked to rest his hand on my ass.
I was too much and never enough. Too much curiosity and stubbornness. Not enough bubbly receptivity. Too tall. Not dainty ever, or at all. Too me. Not enough Julie and Joni. My mother was disappointed when I wasn’t invited to the big school dances, or when, at teacher conferences, my American history teacher Mrs. Quigley said I could be “a bit outspoken” in class. To further break her heart, I was voted Most $@#^*! in our senior class, loosely translated as Most Infuriating, our school’s moniker for class clown. It seemed that no amount of hair ironing or dieting or pretending to be interested in any banal remark that fell out of a cute boy’s mouth made a difference. My snarky, willful, rambunctious self would find a way to express herself, and thus ruin my life.
By sixteen, I felt perpetually at odds with myself. To be myself meant failing at culturally sanctioned femininity; to succeed at culturally sanctioned femininity meant failing myself. I felt alone in this ongoing anguish, but I was not. As I’ve grown up and older, I’ve discovered that many, if not most, smart, competent women possess a similar story.
Until very recently, self-improvement hasn’t really been much of a practical concern for men. Cogitating on how a man might improve himself used to be an occupation of the educated and the wealthy. Plato lounged on his thinking pillow in ancient Greece and advised his students: for a man to conquer himself is the first and noblest of all victories. The man in question here is literally a man, not the old-school pronoun that also included women. Marcus Aurelius, Confucius, Descartes, Benjamin Franklin, and all the other guys who spent their lives pondering how we should then live, were addressing men. (Women, less valued than livestock, were off sewing curtains for the menstrual hut.)
But, for the most part, men improve themselves by gaining skills. They are rarely pressed into completely retooling their personalities to succeed in a way appropriate to their gender. Consider my husband’s upbringing. When I asked him about his experience of self-improvement as a child, the first thing I had to do was clarify what I meant by self-improvement. This pretty much answered my question. He was born in 1975, the eldest of four, and his mother thought he was a princeling. She enjoyed his company. She taught him to ride a horse and together they took tap-dancing lessons. His father, a busy real estate attorney, worked long hours. However, he did coach Little League. The only thing my husband recalls having been ordered to do by his father is choke up on the bat and get in front of the ball, standard coaching directives. Regarding school, he was told he needed to “focus,” which frustrated both him and his parents; at fourteen he was diagnosed with ADD. What was utterly lacking in his experience was the ongoing drama of who he was. He wasn’t subscribed to any advertising-heavy magazines devoted to teaching him about how to be a perfect boy. When he was in sixth grade, he was short and chubby, but his parents assumed he’d grow out of it, and lo and behold, he did. He was pressured to do things better, but there was no expectation that he would completely remake his essential self to make himself more likable.
Fast-forward to 2020, where men, unless they’re among the very rich, are now feeling a lot of self-defeating feelings that women have long lived with—that they’re not good enough, that they need fixing. They are being marketed to like mad, and so, like women, are now experiencing the anxiety-producing pressure of self-improvement.
Scroll through the comments on novelist Jessica Knoll’s New York Times op-ed “Smash the Wellness Industry: Why Are So Many Smart Women Falling for Its Harmful, Pseudoscientific Claims?” and you will see modern men possess their own brand of distress.
Emanuel from St. Louis sums it up nicely: “If you think that men aren’t self-conscious about their bodies and are not victims of the wellness industry, you are very wrong. Men see male models and movie stars with lean muscular bodies and feel inadequacy just as women do. Though I do not know how women feel in comparison to men on this issue, I can say that if men seem to not worry about their bodies, it’s because it’s a very ‘unmanly’ thing to complain about.”
In Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials, Malcolm Harris’s defense of that beleaguered generation, it becomes clear why men are starting to embrace the fantasy of self-improvement. A millennial himself, Harris points out that even though people born between 1980 and 2000 are the world’s most educated and skilled generation, the market can’t accommodate them. It is no longer enough for a guy to show up to a job interview in an ironed shirt with a proofread résumé and a can-do attitude and expect to be hired at a wage commensurate with his education. In the gig economy, all those enriching math camps and Mandarin classes mean nothing. One of the fallouts of life under late-stage capitalism, where the world’s top twenty-six billionaires (collectively worth $1.4 trillion) own more than the poorest 3.8 billion people, or roughly half the world’s population, is that men are now feeling a pressure to fix themselves in a way that looks very familiar to the gender that has been pushing the self-improvement rock uphill since middle school. Welcome to the club, guys!
Marketers and advertisers, always ahead of the curve, are right there, offering guys a competitive edge. Men are pummeled with messages about “personal optimization,” how to be more productive, more organized, more stoic (stoicism is very hot right now), all in the pursuit of You 2.0. A January 2019 article in Men’s Health recommended that to improve themselves men should set (more) goals, learn something new (by watching YouTube tutorials), make a rainy-day fund, hang out with friends, and “reorganize a bit.” Intermittent fasting has been adopted by dudes, and more men than ever are displaying signs of eating disorders.
Depending on their proclivities, men are going vegan and training for ultramarathons, or awaking at 4:00 a.m. and organizing the shit out of every minute of their lives to be more productive. Those who haven’t given up, retiring to their mom’s basement to pwn noobs* on Overwatch or anyone who has it better on social media, are now forced to improve themselves if they want to get ahead, or even tread water.
I asked a politically minded friend what she thinks of when she hears the word patriarchy, and she said she sometimes imagines a gigantic, windowless Las Vegas hotel conference room where powerful men assemble and make decisions that benefit only other men. I mentioned that famous John Trumbull painting of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, where wealthy, well-educated, landowning white men stood around looking pensive in their white wigs, while crafting a document that didn’t include the rights of women and slaves. She laughed and said, “Exactly!”
But the concept of patriarchy in 2020 needs some tweaking. I fear we’ve stereotyped patriarchy to everyone’s disadvantage but the ultrarich.* Patriarchy isn’t the monolith we presume it is. It’s not a rocky cliff against which the evolving waves of feminism crash and disperse. I’m pro–smashing the patriarchy, but only insofar as it means smashing every injustice issuing from the poison fruit of old institutions guaranteed to keep money and power in the hands of the very wealthy. Most of these institutions serve not only privileged white men, but also their women. Let us never forget that 52 percent of white women who voted in the 2016 presidential election, according to exit polls, voted for Donald Trump.
A simple survey of the regular joes in your life is more illuminating than a thousand think pieces about how patriarchy is going for the 99 percent. Wages have stagnated, good jobs are scarce, and forget about gratifying long-term careers with reasonable benefits. How many men do you know who have multiple jobs? How many have side hustles, a trendy name for what is just more low-paid work, performed at odd hours? During the writing of this book, I conducted an informal survey of Lyft drivers. One hundred percent had other jobs. My husband is a computer network engineer who works as a “consultant.” He’s available to his clients all hours of the day and night.* He has had to cut his hourly rate to stay competitive, and obviously has no benefits, including health insurance. His side hustle is as a fix-it ma
n.
I know it’s hideously unfashionable to have any sympathy for white men, but the Trump presidency has made things worse for these lower-rung stewards of the patriarchy. His monumental tax cuts favor only businesses and the wealthy. Everyone else, including millions of other men, can suck it. Men have been sold out by their brethren, and their remaining option, after blaming women, people of color, and members of the LGBTQIA community, is to improve themselves. It doesn’t occur to them, poor darlings, that the perpetrators of this mess, the masterminds behind the collapse of decent jobs with modest benefits and the increase in the already astronomical costs of education and health care, are other men. Either that or “bros before hos” is simply baked into their DNA, and if that’s the case we’re pretty much doomed.
Thus, to succeed under late-stage capitalism, men must improve themselves by becoming lean, mean machines of self-optimizing productivity. They must learn the ten rules of success and the seven habits of highly effective people, successfully embrace change and change their mindsets, identify their self-sabotaging beliefs, and overcome self-imposed limitations. It would be nice if they would also trim their toenails, but real change takes time. As you can tell, I’ve now exhausted my empathy for men. I’ve said yeah, no, not happening to pretending I have an endless supply. Back to our regular programing.
All this is to say that while twenty-first-century men have joined us in the complicated dance of self-improvery, their steps are much easier to master. They want to go for something, they go for it. They want to get better at something, they try to get better. Whether they succeed is something else. They want to up their game at the office? They work to up their game at the office. They don’t have to mask their ambition, or that they’re angling for that promotion and the corner office. Absent in their quest for self-betterment are the paradoxes at the heart of female self-improvery that ensure we are always simmering with confusion and self-recrimination.
