Happiness is a Cheerful Housewife with a Housekeeper and a Sitter...
This story is insane!
This is what I was trying to write about in Bluebird... but there is often this push-pull weirdness when you are trying to write about an issue that should have been settled a hundred years ago. But this bizarre traditionalist perfectionism is still being shoved down our throat. This top-selling book for American women "shows," according to its author, "that you don't have to do something radical."
This is what I was trying to write about in Bluebird... but there is often this push-pull weirdness when you are trying to write about an issue that should have been settled a hundred years ago. But this bizarre traditionalist perfectionism is still being shoved down our throat. This top-selling book for American women "shows," according to its author, "that you don't have to do something radical."
It's funny, because my local snarky newspaper sort of panned Bluebird, saying, "Can a woman be smart, empowered, and happy?"..If you've got half a brain, you've already figured it out..."
But this is what I get when I open the The New York Times...
It's the happiness project from hell:
Don't worry your pretty little head about doing anything radical.
Clean your closets.
Hire a personal trainer.
Put artificial sweetener on your salad instead of that bad fattening oil.
Speak with good cheer.
It's really so exactly like the Victorian good-wife manuals I read up on... I do not know what to say.
I mean, am I the only one who thinks this story is frightening? Or is it just like "Yeah. yeah, Ariel, go on a diet and maybe you'll understand."?
posted by Contact at 9:19 AM
8 Comments:
Nope, you're not the only one:
http://grassrootshomeschool.blogspot.com/2010/03/reply-to-ariel-gore.html
OH DEAR GODDESS! If there is a hell, I imagine it to be the life that Rubin has created. Even the picture to illustrate the NYT article makes my skin crawl and I may need to go flush my eyes out.
Classist white privilege on full display only serves to alienate so many. Makes me wanna puke.
I loved especially how in the NYT article, she talked to Sandra Day O'Connor to get advice on happiness and she said that one becomes happy by doing meaningful work. So the author takes the advice and uses it to make up an f'ed up crazy job creating an industry aimed at making women nuts by getting them to make 92 New Years resolutions per year, etc. Which is something that would only even occur to someone to do if they were bored and had no meaningful work.
Hi Ariel...thank you for this message. It's amazing how some people do, in fact, believe this to be true.
I am an idealist to the core of my soul and with that idealism I do believe that women can be empowered, happy, independent, beautiful, successful and anything else they want to be. I've seen it and am living it to the best of my ability.
Sadly, I have also seen the flip side of this. Women trade in things like empowerment and independence to be beautiful, or happiness and independence to be successful. Why can't women have it all?
The truth is, we can! We simply have to rid ourselves of our self limiting beliefs and create new ones.
Thank you for this post!
Hugs,
Farrah
The first time I heard you talk about this I thought "yea yea, just an other feel good book; whatever."
This time I read the article and NO Ariel, it's not just you. What's she on? Makes me want to push her in an ice-cold lake. Wake up sister, stop taking those anti-anxiety drugs!
...Or, she's smarter than the rest of us and knows how obsessed American women are about finding the 'perfect' way of being, and wrote a book with a prescription that's so mind numbing that it actually not only take the blues away but every ounce of individuality too. Happy happy joy joy.
I was actually reasonably comforted that the Times was careful to point out that she has paid help and that she lives in a three-story house. I realize that doesn't have the same impact outside of New York that it does in New York - NO ONE has a HOUSE in MANHATTAN unless they are very, very, very well off.
We could all be happy if we didn't have to worry about working and paying bills. I know it's not that simple. But she is very unaware of her privilege - she hides it well in the newsletters but not in this article.
@Amanda EXACTLY!!!
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