Wonder Women - Debora L. Spar - Part 5

Wonder Women - Debora L. Spar

2017 Reading Challenge - Day 78

  March 19, 2017 

Book 24 - Wonder Women - Sex, Power, and the Quest for Perfection
by Debora L. Spar (2013)
 Part 5 - pages 203-248
Reading Time - 60 minutes

Aging... ah yes... apparently men age with grace while women just get old. After the age of 35, women are done for. No longer sexually appealing. Men, on the other hand, somehow manage to keep it all, even with their balding, dyed orange comb-overs, potbellies and skinny legs. Go figure. And so women are pressed to stave off the aging process: botox, make-up, tummy tucks, facial tucks, dye jobs - anything that will deny the reality of growing old. Someone we have again, come to the point, of aiming for some perfectionism that never really exists.

The funny thing is, feminism was supposed to give women "the freedom to life one's life apart from any prescribed pathway". It sounds like we just traded in one set of expectations (perfect housewife at home) to a whole other series of expectations (perfect career, perfect wife, perfect mom, perfect homeowner). No wonder we are stressed out! The bar has been raised so high that no one can reach it. Feminism was supposed to free us from unreasonable, impossible demands... not sure what happened there.

The thing is... feminism isn't about personal perfection... or privatized feminism. It's about the political and communal. We are the self-help era, always looking to improve ourselves... to be more productive, to procrastinate less, to have better self-talk... just more pressure though. We end up paralyzed by options and choices... have a career, have kids, with or without a partner. The truth is that having it all means giving something up. What if we took whole chunks of activities off of our to-do lists and even made some things "do-less-of-this"? After all we have finite energies for infinite demands.

I know that for myself, I can't be everything and do everything that I want to do. I want to volunteer but I realize I don't have the time or energy. If I want to do that, then something else has to give. I only have 24 hours in a day. I only have so much energy. I need to pick and choose where I want to devote my time, my energy, my passion.

The author concludes that we can move forward but we need to set systems in place to support women in the workforce and at home. We also need to aim for fewer individual good works and more collective efforts. Efforts that will change the world for the better... instead of focusing on getting our brows wrinkle free. Something to think about....