Biting Into an Unripe Permission

Here’s a helpful hint for all the “women’s empowerment” types out there: if you really want to catch my attention, I respectfully suggest you moderate your language. I don’t mean the four-letter words that no decorous lady would have deigned to utter in my grandmother’s generation; I mean the ones with real destructive power. Words like permission, deserve, and allow.

My great-grandmother’s generation grew up with women fighting for the vote, and wishing like the girl on the old recruiting poster that they could join the Navy. My grandmother’s generation did join the Navy—and the Army, and the Air Corps. My mother’s generation fought for equal pay and equal rights. My own generation has seen women flying combat missions and serving in the President’s cabinet. And what has all this progress gotten us? Reminders that we deserve chocolate.

Listen, people, when I see the chocolate that’s actually worth flying into combat for, I’ll accept that context for the word “deserve”. Until then, I see no reason why chocolate should be a merit issue. And even if it were, such reminders hint at a truly poisonous dynamic, with the gurus in the role of benevolent parents offering treats, and ourselves as the children who have to be bribed into doing what’s good for us. Sorry, everyone, I’m not buying it. And that goes ditto for bubble baths, new shoes, naps, and anything else we’re supposed to “deserve”.

It’s not just the gurus who propagate this stuff; too often, we do it to ourselves. Consider what we say to a female friend who’s looking ill or just run-down: “You should take better care of yourself!” We dispense this advice as though it were a synonym for, “Try some Echinacea,” or, “Don’t forget to drink plenty of orange juice,” but it’s not. There’s nothing personal about these measures; a woman is not going to lose ego points over it if she’s never tried Echinacea or if she hates orange juice (and there’s a reason I know this). Telling a woman that she should be taking better care of herself, however, implies that you think she isn’t doing so. There’s a sort of scolding tone to it, an undertone of I-told-you-so, as though getting sick were somehow preventable, an occurrence that she could have avoided entirely if only she’d done what she was supposed to do on the front end. Yeah, that’s what I need when I’m flat on my back and as sick as three dogs—a good scolding to remind me that the whole situation is somehow all my fault.

And then there are the assumptions we make when it really is all her fault. Like when she staggers into work, punch-drunk with fatigue, after staying up until 3 AM the night before to get the house ready for holiday company. We shake our heads at another sister who has apparently been caught by the perfectionist trap. Never mind that they guy in the next cubicle staggered in the same way, after staying up all night to put the kids’ bikes together. His motives pass without question--he was living up to his responsibilities. So why do we assume that she got trapped by hers? With that one assumption, we disparage her ability to make responsible choices, turn her hospitality into drudgery, and turn her considered sacrifice into an act of victimhood.

Women of America, we have got to cut this stuff out.

Now, I am not suggesting that we all become the Thought Police. Words like deserve, permission, and allow do have their proper places. We deserve fair pay for fair work. We give our doctors permission to release information to our insurance companies. And yes, we even allow ourselves that piece of chocolate cake on occasion. But these things seldom require outside authority to confirm our choices. That’s not to say it’s never needed; I hope we all have good friends who speak up for us when really are settling for unfair treatment or being a little too permissive or too stingy with ourselves. But there is a world of difference between a good friend saying, “You have great business instincts—have you thought about an MBA?” and the motivation industry’s poisoned platitudes, such as a recent e-mail “tribute” which stated approximately, “but if there’s one flaw that woman has, it’s that she doesn’t know her own worth.”

The solution is simple—not fast, not easy, but simple. If we don’t choose to be perceived this way, then we must confront these perceptions whenever we encounter them. It doesn’t have to come to open warfare, just a quiet declaration of strength in the face of those who would unwittingly undermine it: “Of course it took all night, but it was worth it.” Or, with gentle perplexity, “What makes you think I don’t take proper care of myself?” And while there may be little that we can do about the legions of advertisers telling us that we deserve only the very best, we can remind ourselves that they are targeting our self-worth only as an access to our wallets. The real “very best” that we deserve is respect—and it’s much better than chocolate.