I think that Penelope Trunk sometimes gives great career advice. I like that she values being lost, being open and honest, and making interesting mistakes on the way to finding an interesting and happy life. And even when I strongly disagree with her she never bores me.
She really pisses me off sometimes, but she never bores me. Until last week, when she basically tried to pass off “make it your life’s ambition to find and keep a husband” as groundbreaking life advice for women.
I debated posting about her “Blueprint for a Woman’s Life,” which is a plan she wishes she had followed between 18 and 45 and now wants to give to young (straight, educated, wealthy) women (who want marriage and kids with a wealthy man), because I think she’d loooooooove to have the attention of pissed-off feminists. But then I started reading all the blog comments that were like “OMG, this is the best and wisest thing that you could ever have said!” and then I Feminist-Hulked out.
PENELOPE TRUNK TELL YOUNG WOMEN: "CONFORM TO PATRIARCHY TO HAVE HAPPY LIFE!" AS IF THIS IS NEW IDEA. GOOD THING HULK WORE PURPLE SHORTS UNDER PANTS TODAY.
Trunk argues that women should get plastic surgery to make themselves prettier and go to B-school right out of college to find smart, wealthy husbands (the MRS degree: it’s not just for 1965). Even though she thinks that gender-diversity is bad for startups (because she cries at work and is difficult to work with, ergo, all women cry at work and are hard to work with), women should try to find men to do startups with because men focus on work while women are distracted by their families. I guess all-lady startups will never get any work done, due to crying?
Among other things, she also argues that:
Let me interrupt this post to say thank you to my parents for not home-schooling me! I am so glad that I was raised by a badass woman who went to work every day and had a great career that made her happy, and who gave me the opportunity to learn from such a fantastic and smart and caring group of teachers without the emotional baggage of our constant mother-daughter power struggles!
Yay for teachers! Yay for working moms! Yay for stay-at-home moms! Yay for home-schooling! Yay for Feminism! Yay for choices!
Boo for another way to make women feel like shit if they don’t completely yoke their own lives to their children’s lives all day every day!
Ahem.
I now return you to Penelope Trunk’s list of what women should do.
.
I’d like to offer some suggestions to young humans that might help you live a happier life.
1. Fuck the research.
When it comes to most life choices, data points are not a prescription. There are many possible right ways to live your life, and playing a game of Family Feud where you try to figure out what most other people would do is not going to guarantee you a happy time on this earth.
Especially fuck the research when it’s presented as “Well, women don’t even want to do _____ because research shows that they really want to have families” and given as a reason not to hire women into competitive fields (that’s called discrimination).
This is literally the exact same sexist argument that people have given about why women can’t be (insert any career in the world that actual women now do). Doctor. Astrophysicist. Supreme Court Justice. And since it’s close to my heart, every year around Oscar time we get the very concerned “Why aren’t there more famous women film directors (even though now there are lots of women finishing film school and making shorts and features and generally doing excellent work that shows that women are just as talented as men in every possible way)?” article which eventually puts forward the argument that “Well, most women don’t have what it takes since they want to have families so they drop out?” even though there are plenty of men who both direct films and have children?
Let me just write next year’s article for you with my own blood harvested by Occam’s razor. “Why aren’t there more big women directors?” “Because: Sexism.”
Whatever the research shows (and however loudly it’s trumpeted when it confirms existing prejudices), it is only descriptive and cannot predict what any given person actually wants to do or should do.
When I hit a big dilemma, I ask myself “What will Old-Me wish I had done?” I picture Old-Jennifer, all grizzled and shriveled up, lying on her deathbed, turning over old memories. I try to choose the thing that will make her look back with the least amount of regret. It usually sends me towards challenge and adventure, though doesn’t mean that the safe choice is always the wrong choice. It doesn’t mean I never fuck it up. Mostly it means that she’s the one I’ve got to please. She’s the ONLY one I’ve got to please.
2. You look fine. No, you look great!
Whether and how much appearances *should* matter is obviously a subject of hot debate in feminist spaces. For the purposes of this post I’m going to accept that whatever face and body you were born with, fashion (clothing, hairstyle, personal grooming) is a means of expression and communication that *most* people can make *some* choices about.
If fashion and beauty are important and inspiring to you and you want to use them to express something about yourself or the world, rock on!
And if your workplace or chosen career has a dress code, you will do yourself many favors early in your career by a combination of figuring out how to make that dress code work for you to the extent that is is possible for you and doing work that is so awesome that people don’t care. If you obey the dress code, you will communicate to your bosses and clients and coworkers “You can trust me to get it and fit in here. Let’s focus on work.” And from there, choose your battles. Definitely fight ridiculous and harmful double-standards (like mandatory makeup for women, because the idea that our faces must be painted but men’s faces can be naked is just crap). Definitely fight for diversity and freedom of expression and for the right to be judged by the quality of your work.
That said, the less you ask yourself the question “Am I pretty enough?” and the less you think of attractiveness as something you must attain and perform before you deserve good things in life, the more personal power and freedom you will have and the happier you will be. Stop tearing yourself down. Stop tearing other people down. People who try to remind you that you are not good-looking enough are trying to get you to buy stuff or put bullshit in between you and the things you deserve from life. Don’t listen to them. Your face is a good face and your body is a good body. You look fine. Go do your thing.
3. It takes two to make a thing go right.
Boundaries and reciprocity are important in relationships. Your relationships (marriages, friendships, family, colleagues) will be better if you can learn how to directly ask for what you want from other people. Figure out what your needs and boundaries are and honor them. Communicate your expectations. If people are bad at communicating their expectations, ask them to spell it out for you.
One of the most powerful questions you can ask someone you’re disagreeing with is: “In a perfect world, where you get everything you want, how does this work?”
Make them spell out a positive vision rather than just picking part yours. Start your negotiations with the best case scenario.
And listen – you can compromise, you can forgive, you can tolerate, you can try to “make it work”, you can invest, but there is no way you can heroically “save” a bad relationship by completely effacing yourself and putting 100% effort into pleasing the other person. Don’t make yourself smaller to preserve a relationship. That shit is bananas.
4. Don’t make your happiness and economic survival contingent on your romantic relationships.
What disturbed me most about Trunk’s post was the extent to which she emphasized hunting for a successful man and then “keeping him happy” as strategy for economic security and happiness.
If it’s your dream to get married and have children, and you can’t imagine your life without them, then make it a priority for yourself absolutely without apology and look for partners who want the same thing. Feminism = choices, and I don’t think Trunk is entirely wrong to say that if you want to have children, make sure you choose it and make it a priority.
But also make sure you are exploring your own intellectual and creative interests in your 20s and at every age. Work really hard in school and get addicted to learning stuff and excellence. Make sure you become financially literate and can support yourself financially. There is no guarantee that you will ever find the right romantic partner. There is no guarantee that if you do, that love will last, or that you’ll be able to have kids.
I’ll admit that I am one of the women who thought “Bah, kids, whatever, it will happen eventually if it’s meant to happen” and did not make it a priority….and now I’m unexpectedly and suddenly single and 37 and I do not have kids. Which maybe I would have if I’d made it more of a priority? But I’m definitely glad I didn’t do that with any of my exes? And do I even want kids? I can’t lie to you – when I ask Old-Jennifer about it, she has awkward questions, like, “Who is going to visit us and change our adult diapers now?” and I have to say “I don’t know, Old-Me. I’ll try to at least make a lot of money so we can hire some hot young people to take care of us.” Ask again later, Old-Me, the reply is hazy.
And for the love of Mike, if you do decide to form a permanent pair-bond and become a parent, don’t just rely on “traditional” ideas about how to handle money and divide housework and parenting duties and assume it will work itself out according to some script. Don’t assume how it will be, decide how it will be. Write the script. Negotiate how you will handle money. Plan for what happens if the one partner becomes unemployed or unable to work, or if the relationship fails.
5. We can do better.
We can fight. We can argue. We can strive. We can win, or maybe we can lose really creatively and interestingly and still end up better than we were. We can risk.
We don’t have to accept or conform to a fucked-up status quo as a tradeoff for some promise of security and happiness.
If your dream is to be really pretty, marry a fellow b-school graduate, and work to keep your marriage happy while you homeschool your kids and try to figure out when to start your Botox treatments, go nuts! Feminism = choices.
I’ll be over here with Old-Me, looking forward/back on the times when we will be/were one hell of a film director.
In closing, readers, I think Penelope Trunk’s “blueprint for a woman’s life” is really narrow and small and not forward-thinking or cutting edge and all. It’s basically “be Betty Draper, but have an MBA and maybe start a small business to keep you interesting to your husband while you home-school your kids.”
So I’m curious to know, what does your Old-You wish you would do with your life? In a perfect world, if you get everything you want out of life and everything works out the way you want it to, what happens? What does your blueprint for humans look look like?
The irony is that I distinctly remember that she wrote a column about 5 years ago saying that no one should go to business school because most MBA programs were over-rated scams.
So apparently she wants her readers to go marry…easily scammed men?
I love that you not only gave really compelling critiques but provided a viable, feminist-friendly alternative list. Well done =).
I had a hard time taking this article seriously. I thought it was all sarcasm.
Sometimes I forget why exactly I read Penelope Trunk’s blog, but, to quote this post, “even when I strongly disagree with her she never bores me.” She has some interesting perspectives. Of course, she also has a tendency to make massive blanket statements about how Everyone should do Everything a Certain Way because it’s what works for her.
That said, I’d tell my younger self two things: “Mistakes are important – make them! And stop caring about what other people think!”
(ok one other thing: get more tattoos – when you’re “old” they may look like crap, but who the hell cares by then?)
Mine or hers? Mine definitely is guilty of sarcasm.
Captain A. – I read hers first, and I thought it was totally sarcastic. So then I thought yours was just playing off her sarcasm with more sarcasm.
Yes! Yes!
I used to ask 13-year old me what she thought of me, and she wrinkled her nose a lot and said things like, “Why didn’t we get THIN? I want to be THIN.” I got tired of telling her to stuff it, so I think I’ll start talking to old me instead. Old-me will probably chuckle a lot, and in pensive moods may ask now-me why we married someone eight years older to which we would say, because love. And why didn’t we have kids? Because we didn’t want to. Also, because we were too busy being the Best Aunt Ever!, which is a pretty fun job.
Articles like Penelope’s make me sad. Guard your marriage obsessively? Actually, that one makes me laugh, because I picture myself huddled in a cave, Golem-style, cradling my wedding ring and eying my husband suspiciously. “Is The Precious cheating?” I would ask. “How does The Precious feel about the state of our marriage? THIS IS IMPORTANT.”
Penelope is definitey hit or miss…and this is miss!
This is a “middle class white chick’s guide to life” and does not reflect the experienced of working glass women, especially women of color that I have had the pleasure of organizing with for years.
This item is really special – “if possible, women should hire household help” — she can’t be serious, right? Her article needs a significant disclaimer because it doesn’t resonate with the millions of women who ARE the help or for whom the idea of hiring help is nothing more than a fantasy and completely outside of their grasp.
No offense, but why didn’t you use She-Hulk instead?
Old-Me will, I think, look back and wish she had adventured more in her youth instead of burning through graduate school and networking her ass off in her twenties. I have a job, but no stories to tell.
Also, Old-Me says we should have gone to the zoo more.
Am I only the person who remembers the song “Mother’s Little Helper”? Even when white middle-class women en masse followed advice like this, it made enough of them miserable that valium was something like the number 1 prescribed drug in the US at some point (yes, yes, don’t you love my specific citations? Me too. I bet it’s something I read in The Feminine Mystique at some point.).
The best thing about She-Hulk is that when she hulked out, she stayed super-smart, which made her unstoppable! And eventually, she decided to bag the whole being-a-lawyer thing, and just be She-Hulk full time, which she said was “Much more fun,” to Dazzler at one point (I had the crossover comic). So She-Hulk did not take Penelope Trunk’s advice! She-Hulk went for the fun!
Not even that. I’m friends with a whole lot of middle-class white chicks, and I don’t know a single one who would find this life-plan even slightly appealing. It’s a guide to life for wealthy women who have not learned a damn thing from history.
Don’t make yourself smaller to preserve a relationship.
This is the best relationship advice I’ve ever heard, and it goes for any relationship, whether sexual, romantic, or none of the above. When I got out of a certain bad romantic relationship, in the months that followed, it was amazing how much bigger I felt. Freer. And I wished I had known that that feeling of being smaller, duller, it’s not about keeping harmony. It’s about compromising, in the worst way.
I think Old-Aydan will have the same concern as Old-Jpop: more adventuring instead of straight to grad school. But I got a great financial offer and no guarantee of getting it again next year, so… I guess I will just have to make grad school an adventure!
In a perfect world, if you get everything you want out of life and everything works out the way you want it to, what happens?
I want to travel a lot and help a lot of people with my research. I want to write lots of fun novels. I want to get to spend lots of time with my friends. I want… a partner. Not necessarily a sexual or romantic relationship, but either way a friend, who will be a priority in my life the way I am a priority in hir life, the way people generally prioritize spouses and significant others.
I’m not interested in business school, Botox, or giving birth!
I love the idea of thinking about what Old-Licious will say. I find this post especially timely in many ways, as I am in the middle of a ‘quarter life crisis.’ I have two undergraduate degrees, I’m in the middle of grad school, and while I like what I am doing, I crave action and adventure.
I originally intended to be a music major, but due financial constraints of growing up poor, that wasn’t to be for me (tubas are hella expensive!). I am now thinking that I would LOOOOVE to make documentary films, combining the academics I am doing now with a love of television and film. Of course, I am absolutely terrified to make such a change, go back to school again, and end up with more crushing debt. So, in reality, Old-Me will likely look back and say “I wish we had pursued that exciting film-making avenue.” But I also think Old-me will say “I am so proud that we rose above everyone’s classist expectations and completed grad school like we always wanted to.”
Probably because She-Hulk is She-Hulk all the time and keeps her intelligence and humanity. While Hulk gets the whole funny-talking, purple pants rage thing when he gets angry. Fits more with the anger and sputtering rage one might feel when reading this shit.
I should not have taken a big swig of tea before reading her article. That’s just… what the ever-loving fuck?
Old-me currently wishes that Young-me wouldn’t have put quite so many bugs up her (our?) nose and had taken a few more baths, but when Old-me-now becomes Young-me-then, Old-me-someday will probably wish that I hadn’t burst so many forehead blood vessels over the crap some people decide to believe.
But thank you for your rebuttal – one would hope it wouldn’t have to be said, but there you go.
Penelope Trunk writes polarizing, interesting posts for clicks and the discussion of the posts provides her notoriety. She’s clearly done a good job of selling herself- for example, we are discussing her now. I try not to waste my energy mentally reacting to her but it is strangely addictive to see what kind of stuff she will come up with next. The articles are like, what can I write that is counter intuitive and will make a lot of people mad or surprised? Then she writes it and the predictable result it becomes sensationalized.
Granted, not all of it is bad. A lot of it is good or interesting. But I dislike how she assumes that all women want to be SAHMs. If that is what you really want to do, yeah, her advice to focus on getting married before you are 30 would make sense for example. But for those women who are not interested in having children at all, it is horribly annoying advice. And thus feathers get raised, and we cluck per her plan.
A lot of her supposed straight-talk isn’t even practical.
To nitpick just two assumptions:
1) Much of this is based on notions of credit that are becoming outmoded: borrow lots of money to get an expensive graduate degree right after your expensive college degree, then get investors to pay for your startup. Loans and capitol are becoming much harder to come by for those who are young in 2011.
2) Her assertion that public schools are bad, period, and that the only good private schools are $40,000 or more is simply out of touch with reality. There are certainly bad schools out there, but the key determinant in a child’s success remains parental involvement; since homeschooling necessarily demands intense parental supervision, it is natural that homeschooled children test higher on average. This does not mean they have an advantage over children with two involved parents who are public school or low-end private school students.
Research on academic success on parenting, if you apply common sense to it, just provides a strong argument for an equitable division of labor when it comes to parenting: even in homeschooling families, I would argue.
It’s amazing what people can get away with arguing when they pass it off as brave and honest.
Also, save us from a world where everyone (or at least every woman) has a business degree. I mean, seriously – a strong workforce in our current system needs diversity, not a universal MBA-mindset. I work with people from all kinds of fields, and something I’ve noticed is that everyone brings their own professional biases to the table, so while no one is perfect, the real death knell for a project is when the biases aren’t able to compensate for each other – too many academics, or too many doctors, or too many social workers, or too many administrators, or MBAs, etc. (you get the picture), and everything goes lop-sided and straight to pot. The idea that everyone should be getting an MBA staggers me.
Grad school is awesome! You just have to decide what you want out of it, and then make it into an experience you’ll always value. I may be taking an extra year to graduate but I had a great time, grew, learned, made friends, developed skills, and travelled extensively for two summers to make up for not doing so after college.
I found the Trunk article deeply disturbing and offensive. I am sick to my stomach. I’m so enveloped in my liberal academic bubble that I forget that there are people in the world who think like this. That most people probably think like this. I won’t begin to list the horrible things I read there, because I think that’s been covered. Wow, I’m really upset…
Beautiful response.
@licious, you definitely do not need a film school education to pursue documentary filmmaking.
You need an idea, access to a character who will help you get that idea across, some kind of camera or sound equipment (can be borrowed), some kind of editing software, and a lot of time. A few willing bodies to help you out.
There are some good books on Documentary = Michael Rabiger’s Directing the Documentary, Dorothy Fadiman’s “Producing with Passion: Making Films that Change the World.”
Read a book, watch a bunch of documentaries and think about how they are structured, take some photos and practice framing and using the camera, and go. When you finish one, screen it for some people and take notes. Then go and re-edit it a bit. Screen it again. Re-edit. Decide it’s done, put it out in the world, and go and make another one. Aim for a total running time of 8-10 minutes for the first one. Build up from there.
You could start tomorrow.
Old-Me wants to tell you a secret: You’ve a stable life that will be the basis for many adventures going forward. The best is yet to come. That is hard to do and you should feel good about it.
I hope Old-Kim is thinking “How did I ever get to be on this motorcycle with a chimpanzee as a sidekick, about to jump over a canyon to save meerkat civilisation from extinction by blasting them into space? It must be because I spent my 20s perfecting that stick date pudding recipe.”
I know that’s not good for feminism. But none of this post is.
None of it’s good for people, either. Seriously, WTF?
@Evil Fizz, “but have you considered really making the status quo work for you? I’m just trying to tell you the truth here!”
@Evil Fizz, “but have you considered really making the status quo work for you? I’m just trying to tell you the truth here!”
I’m trying to be funny in response, but it’s too depressing to contemplate. I’ll be over here in the corner trying to line up the needle to shoot the paralytic toxins right by my eyes.
In theory, Old-Me wishes he had gone adventuring in his youth, but in practice, Old-Me can’t think of which year in his 20′s thus far that would have been worth giving up for it, especially since Old-Me knows that all of them were a part of where he is today.
Thanks for shooting this shit down, Captain. It’s just so sad that someone would read that advice and not find it depressing. And it’s not just “being real” because so many women are living better lives than this. Better, more principled, more interesting, more useful, happier lives. And a bunch of those women have partners (with whom they have negotiated more sophisticated relationships than “I exist to keep you happy”) and even babies. It’s all around us. So fuck “I’m just being real”.
I’m currently at a life stage where Young Me and Old Me are having regular fist-fights in my head. It’s weird. I’m not convinced that I should be following Old Me’s advice, since she seems to be urging me to put security before adventure and to avoid risks. Maybe I’m imagining an Old Me radically different to the person I’ll actually become when I’m older? But thus far, following the voice of Young Me has worked out much better for me, and while her suggestions sometimes initially seem unwise, they tend to work out better than expected.
Trunk’s voice, however, I’m going to mentally label That One Really Conservative Aunt Who I Never Liked Who Was Always Miserable With Her Life And Determined To Make Other Women Be Miserable With Her. Reading posts like hers always makes me incredibly grateful that I also carry the internal voice of my Mum in my head – when I told her, age 8, that I didn’t want kids because I was worried that if I had them I’d end up tied to the house and stuck in a role that didn’t allow me much freedom she said “yeah, you’re right, you’d be bored to death”. And she had the wisdom to understand that I wasn’t criticising her life choices or saying that she had made the wrong ones, or that the choices she’d made led to me loving and respecting her less.
I feel like people like Trunk are sorely lacking that sense of “what works for me may not work for everyone”.
Captain Awkward – If Now You is this wise, then Old You will be like Yoda.
this.This. THIS.
And the rest of course. But wow, I wish Now Me had told this to Young Me.
I think the one that actually pissed me off the most (right off the bat!) was “Do less homework.” After that, I almost ignored the regressive gender roles after being blinded by the intial burst of anti-intellectualism.
Actually, in my mind this list is pretty much a checklist for “Why America is starting to decline in the 21st century.”
You know, I really like the Old-Me concept as well. I like to think a lot about what I want to be like when I’m older – it actually guides stuff like my fitness plans. I have this image of myself with long white hair, pedaling my bike down a city street with a basket full of vegetables. THAT’S who I want to be when I’m old.
It would be nice if I had an adorable Old-My-Boyfriend to pedal home to and maybe some grandkids to get on FutureSkype (with 3d holograms maybe?) and talk to. But you know… we’ll see.
Old-Me is what reminds Current-Me to work her ass off in grad school, because Old-Me wants a professorship and tenure and a maybe a Nobel (or at least a huge pile of high-impact publications). And to still somehow have time to play video games and write fantasy novels. Old-Me doesn’t sleep any more than Current-Me does.
This post really made me smile, too (the end of it), because I recently was in a position where I had to make a very hard choice about whether having kids was going to be part of my life in the future. It was listening to Old-Me that helped me make that decision – that I absolutely do not want to be a mother – and be at peace with the current cost of that decision.
I don’t have conversations with Old-Me. I have conversations with Twelve-Year-Old-Me. Twelve-Year-Old me is like “you know Greek and Latin! And play guitar! And run two reasonably popular blogs! And are learning how to play Magic: the Gathering! And have casual sex! And protest Michele Bachmann! OHMIGOD I AM GOING TO GROW UP TO BE SO COOL.”
Old Me says to quit cutting our hair. Crones are supposed to have lots and lots of long white hair we wrap in braids around our head like crowns, and she really wants that. We’ll never get there if I keep chopping it off when it hits the ears.
She says worry about the fictional people less and the real people more. Enjoy your mom for the (short) time she has left, likewise your dad. And the kids for the last 7 years they’ll be home.
She says lose the weight so the knees and ankles will work, wear the armwarmers so the hand will keep working in winter, and not to sweat the day job.
She says stay on the day job as long as possible, we need the hills I drive daily like we need air. Remember our divine Lover lives up there and sing to him as we pass.
Write the cookbook. Lead the coven. Make the transition to Matriarch and Cronehood unafraid.
No matter what you choose, we’ll all have regrets. Life if just too short to do everything we want to do.
This lady just doesn’t understand that.
Also, I laughed me ass off at the Golem-style worrying about the “precious”, nice one.
I love how Penelope Trunk uses data when it helps her, and makes shit up when it doesn’t.
Plastic surgery makes you richer? Can you produce that study, Madame Trunk? (Plastic surgery correlates with a higher suicide rate among women? Yeah, that study exists.)
Also: homeschooled kids will rule the world in the future. uh-huh. Magic Future Scientist told me so!
fave quote:
“Men like women who are smart but not making more than they are. (I do not have a link for this. I have instinct.)”
OHHHHHH. okay then.
The link to the original article should have provided a trigger warning for narcoleptics…I myself dozed off twice while trying to read it and I’m not one.
went to pee, decided I actually like the bit about “game-changing” private schools better.
game changing! Because raising children is a competitive sport and physically tackling other people’s kids is like, subject to the off-sides rule! So you have to use “game-changing” strategies instead!
(note to PT: if the gajillion dollar private school of your choice *also* considers such a crackpot coaching cliche a persuasive child-rearing metaphor, possibly it’s just a cozy lair for rich lazy buffoonery. YOU may not mind, but think of the children.)
With the exception about kids, how did you get into my brain and steal my words?? (I may have to make a decision like that in the future for mostly biological reasons, and whichever way it goes, I think listening to Old-Me will be particularly helpful.)
On the other hand, PhD! Professorhood! High-impact research! Video games! Novels! (Storm-chasing on a Mars colony after becoming emerita?)
I don’t read advice columns so I have no idea whether this kind of fuck-the-facts anti-feminist approach is normal for Trunk or if it is perhaps the sarcasm suggested upthread, but if she’s anywhere close to serious, then we need to round up a party punchbowl that’ll serve almost 7 billion + 1 dead Hegel because Penelope Trunk hath become Absolute Knowledge.
::choir of sarcastic angels sings that old Enjoli jingle about bringing home the bacon, frying it up in a pan, and never letting you forget you’re a man::
Yowza. I read Trunk’s piece a few days ago, and I think it was the first thing she’s written that I actually read. I don’t think I’ll go back for more, even if some of them are okay. The parts about making a making a marriage work were the worst for me. It’s so true that “It takes two to make a thing go right.” What Trunk seems to mean about making it work is making it last. A marriage might be completely dysfunctional because one (or more) party is completely miserable, but as long as it is still a marriage, people like Trunk will say that it’s working.
I think I use a variation of the Old Me strategy. Since I was in high school, or maybe since earlier than that, I’ve often had an image of what I want to be doing with my life five to ten years in the future, and I try to base all of my major decisions on getting closer to doing what that person is doing. Looking back now, I think the only decisions I sort of regret (and I don’t even really regret them, but whatever) are the ones I made when I was thinking about what someone else wanted me to be doing in five to ten years, not what I wanted to be doing.
wow, that “ask old-me” idea is fascinating to me. So far in my life it’s always worked the other way around, I work hard at accepting myself now, and my previous selves from when I was younger, naiver, less experienced, less certain, less comfortable in my own skin and less confident and don’t think much about the person I will be in the future. I forgive myself for being weak in the past and now and for making the decisions I made. (I’m not even going to start saying they were or were not the best decisions. They were MY decisions, and I own them and their consequences.)
So I guess I always presumed I would keep doing this and Old-Me is going to look back fondly on myself now, and she’s the one who will forgive me. I don’t *owe* her anything particularly much, especially not a particular life path. She’s going to be happy no matter where I end up because the trip through life is going to be so fascinating.
Anyway… that’s what I consider a blue print for a good life, to do fascinating things and to be kind to yourself. Seems to work so far, but I’m still pretty young.
*grin* I’ll see you on Mars!
I thought her advice was spot-on. She didn’t say “if you want to be happy, follow these steps.” She didn’t say anything about being happy. She offered advice to women who want a marriage and babies more than they want to be liberated. The women in my life who have long-lasting marriage and generic kids followed this exact formula. Sure, they have unhappy, unsatisfying marriages and hate their kids, but none of them ever made a decision based on happiness, but on the option that would get them down the aisle and into stirrups as fast as possible.
Penelope addressed it to the monolithic “Woman,” which is problematic, but eh, that’s her style.
@Rodeo, I’m confused –
Everyone you know who followed this advice is unhappy….and yet her advice is spot-on?
[...] brilliantly funny rant against an advise columnist suggesting women should get plastic surgery to keep a man, from the brilliantly funny Captain Awkward. Towards the end of the article she writes “We can [...]
Correct. She’s advising people on marriage and baby-having. If you want a husband and babies, then her advice is spot-on.
Happiness is a red herring for the women to whom this advice applies. My friends/family who went this route, they never said they wanted to be happy, they just wanted the generic American Dream of Least Resistance.
Yep – it’s called “trolling” and the people who do it for the MSM are called “trollumnists”.
Plastic surgery? Spot-on?
I do not think that means what you think it means.
Are you being deliberately obtuse? Yes, advising women–who spent most of their life conforming to what men want in a wife and mother so they can get married and impregnated before they’re 30 years old–to continue to conform to what men want, this time in terms of a female employee, to get plastic surgery is solid advice because it WORKS.
There’s data out there proving it, but I also have anecdata:
After one of my friends started receiving first interviews but no second, she opted for Botox and some kind of minor eyelifting type of surgery. I think all of her interviews after that turned into second interviews, and she ended up with two job offers.
Sure it feels icky to me (and her as well), but the reason Penelope suggested it is because it works, not because it’s feminist or because it will make you happy.
So while the misplaced condescension is adorable, I know what spot-on is, and it’s Penelope’s advice. (Except, perhaps, homeschooling. Not sure what that was about.)
[...] Trunk’s blueprint argues that because statistics show most women derive most of their life’s joys from their families, women should approach building a family (finding a suitable partner and having children) with the same ambition they do their careers. [It also says things like "[plastic surgery] is the must-have career tool for the workforce of the new millennium,” which I brush off as Trunk being Trunk, and I realize it’s unfair that I’m giving her a pass that I wouldn’t to most writers. If you’d like to read a well-reasoned feminist response to the piece, try this on for size.] [...]