The Female Artist Solution

Hmph. Pretty Lady has just returned from a Panel Discussion on the place of Women in the Art World, and she has some sincere advice for female artists.

If you wish to have a fulfilling career in the Arts, the one thing you must be careful to do is to avoid Panel Discussions on the place of Women in the Art World.

For it seems, darlings, as though very little has changed since Virginia Woolf ate beef and prunes at the ascetic Women's College, in nineteen-twenty whatever-it-was. The gallery hosting this vaunted Panel had no air-conditioning, and wholly insufficient seating. Valuable works by Women Artists were held to the walls with pins. The P.A. system was non-functional. And when the ludicrously excessive number of Women Artists on the panel were invited to share their thoughts, they sat there--glum, courteous and silent--as one of the two male panelists gave an extempore and stultifyingly dull treatise on C.I.A. history, and the rise of suburbia in the nineteen-fifties.

Pretty Lady was not nearly as depressed about her Career Prospects before attending this panel as she was afterward.

For she noted, early on in the discussion, that the word allowed was used, more than once, in a negative sense. As in, 'Women Artists are not allowed to...'. During the question-and-answer phase, Pretty Lady wished to point out the damning connotations of this phraseology; the fact that persons who are waiting for Someone Else to Allow them to do something are--willy-nilly, a priori, within their own minds--Disempowered. We, as Women Artists, need look no farther.

But Pretty Lady kept her thoughts to herself, because no-one allowed her to speak. She supposes she could have been terribly rude and masculine and loudly Interrupted, but something--perhaps an overwhelming feeling of Invisibility, as though her confident demeanor, her intense gaze, her raised arm, were being deliberately and wilfully ignored--kept her silent.

The Feminization of Power

Darlings, Pretty Lady is missing you all terribly, and feels dreadful for having neglected you. She had all sorts of wise things to say on the subject of Feminine Power, and then she sat down to think about it and discombobulated herself. Sometimes Pretty Lady thinks that this 'sophisticated wisdom' schtick of hers is all just an act.

She does believe, however, that some of us Smart Girls out there have it all wrong, when we envision packs of roving Smart Girl Gangs banding together, and taking over the government, or the economy, or even the Art World. In her experience, attempts at forming Smart Girl Gangs have always ended in unmitigated disaster. Smart Girls, it seems, are not particularly suited for gangs.

No, it seems to her that acquiring sordid sorts of Worldly Power has always had much more to do with perceptions of appropriateness, and the acting accordingly, than the brute acquisition of Power at All Costs. For example, you will all recall that last week, Pretty Lady was having a meltdown regarding some simple Web Design issues. You will all be as thrilled as Pretty Lady is to hear that these issues have been resolved; they have been resolved, unsurprisingly, by a Nice Gentleman who knows a great deal more about troublesome computer issues than does Pretty Lady. Not by a charter member of any mythical Girl Gang. Pretty Lady hates to puncture your idealism, but so it is.

For, as she pontificated to the Nice Gentleman over brunch yesterday, true Power only has tangentially to do with Authority. An ignorant person who begins issuing orders indiscriminately, at whatever level of External Hierarchy, will sink the ship and become terminally Disempowered if she does not stop to perceive and listen to Incoming Facts, no matter from whom these Facts are incoming. It may take awhile, but Worldly Power, when ungrounded in Transcendent Wisdom, is always fleeting.

Pretty Lady has learned, from sad and codependent experience, that it is insufficient to the acquisition of Feminine Power to simply support Women in Everything. It is suicidal to support some people; the lame, the ignorant, the incompetent, the narcissistic, the manipulative and the rude should be Constrained, if not Shunned, no matter how politically expedient it may seem to attempt to Empower them, or they will drag the Female Empoweress to a watery grave. Conversely, the Competent and the Kind ought to be accorded positions of High Respect in one's personal Power Canon, however white, male and upper-middle-class these persons might happen to be.

This is not to say that Great Leaders may not be both Female and Feminine. This is to say that mature Feminine Power may not look at all like common, military-variety notions of Authority; it may blossom into some other paradigm entirely. It may be serene, rather than strident; delegatory, rather than authoritative; ruminative, rather than frenetic. Above all, it should recognize the strengths of every person in the spectrum, and create a structure wherein these strengths may be depended upon, not merely attempt to inject power where power is not.

The Myth of Frailty

Bobert labors under yet another misapprehension about Pretty Ladies:

Unless you are a lot stronger and bigger than your photo indicates, you're talking about raking gravel around.

Ever try to move--much less lift--a cubic foot of solid stone?

Bobert, Bobert, Bobert.

Pretty Lady has memories of the days when she was young and frail; in the sandbox days of art school, the days wherein she amused herself by picking up cubic feet of solid stone at a little-known marble shop in Oakland, transporting them to the yard outside the sculpture studio, and whacking away at them with mallet and chisels, cheerfully if inexpertly, stopping every now and then to contemplate the view of sunny Alcatraz.

The resultant sculptures made good doorstops, as early sculptures are wont to do. Such are the atrocities a youthful idealist inevitably perpetrates, in service to the Creative Process.

As Pretty Lady has mentioned, however, those were her days of demure, flowerlike Youth. Having subjected herself to twelve years of classical ballet training, at an academy whose main aesthetic influence was that of Balanchine, she had not yet achieved maximal upper-body development. George Balanchine was an odd fellow; he liked for his dancers to exude the illusion of sylphlike ethereality, even as they performed superhuman feats of athleticism with legs and feet. Thus, the formation of visible biceps was Frowned Upon. Fellow dancers would exchange secrets for rendering their bodies above the waist ever more skeletal, while maintaining the illusion of femininity onstage, with artificially painted cleavage-lines on their sunken chests.

Horrifying, indeed.

But those days are far, far in the past. For nearly a decade, Pretty Lady has been earning her living, quite literally, manually. She carries large, heavy, cumbersome objects cheerfully up and down three flights of stairs. She instructs people to undress, then pounds them into jelly. She has been known to cause career bodybuilders to whimper, and request that she lighten up a bit.

(To be fair, this is at least as much about Leverage as it is about Strength; also, it seems that it is always the strapping muscular dudes who have the lowest pain thresholds. The petite Filipina ladies eternally instruct her to 'bring it on, harder!')

To be certain, Pretty Lady herself has not completely adjusted to the notion of Self as Amazon; she is frequently amazed when she catches a glimpse of herself emerging from the shower, pectorals rippling. For she has never particularly focussed upon strength training as an aesthetic end in itself; it merely happened, as she went about this fascinating business of living.

For it seems to Pretty Lady that whatever a person's mind requires, the body will eventually deliver, within rational limits. If the mind is enthralled by the notion of marble caryatids, the biceps will come. She imagines that this is equally true with cobblestone pathways. A person only has to manipulate a single cobblestone at a time; what is so all-fired difficult about that?

Lady, with Power Saw

The Female Gaze

Pretty Lady has commented before, in passing, on her impatience with those pusillanimous, victim-type females who quail, rant and whine about the objectifying and aggressive qualities of the Male Gaze. It is her firm opinion that those who are reduced to impotent fury by a mere rude gesture on the part of another are beyond any reasonable assistance, whatever Draconian Legislation or re-vamping of Societal Mores might take place as a result of their activities.

And seeing as how she has been on an Old Movie binge of late, she is delighted to discover that Anthony Lane agrees with her.

Film theory has dwelled, with justice, on what is called the objectifying male gaze—that is, the power of the camera to ogle and depersonalize, and to encourage the viewer to follow suit—without always remembering that, at Hollywood’s height, there were plenty of people who could take that gaze like a punch and throw it right back. Stanwyck, by her own account, had practiced the response long before she stared into a lens: she recalled meeting the playwright Willard Mack in New York and regarding him “with impudent assurance, just to keep from turning around and running away.” Master your own fear, in other words, and you end up frightening others.

Pretty Lady is no Barbara Stanwyck, to be sure. But she rather doubts she will ever again be seriously intimidated by Latino construction workers, Italian limosine drivers, or knots of callow adolescents who are inclined to express their appreciation of her person by hissing, whistling, or using coarse epithets. For she has never once experienced any negative consequences from the simple act of nodding courteously at her admirer and walking on; occasionally she will even bestow a smile or a wave on the fellow, which is deeply appreciated.

You see, ladies, it is paramount to understand that a vulgar male who behaves this way is not serious in his attentions toward yourself. It is, simply, Not About You, except in the most tangential way. He is attempting to prove his masculinity to his peers, express himself as a True Male in the world at large, and giving tongue to his inarticulable feelings about the female in general.

It is then entirely your choice as to how to receive this chance attention in passing. You may choose to rail against nature, biology, and the vagaries of social class; you may choose to engage on a social, political and emotional level with these immutable forces. You may get All Worked Up, and have your day ruined.

Or you could think, "Yes, that's right, I am the most gorgeous thing you've seen today," and leave it at that. Because in Pretty Lady's experience, it is statistically improbable that the vulgar fellow, thus encouraged, will chase you down and assault you. In fact, he is much more likely to be intimidated.

In Praise of the Maiden Auntie

Tsk, tsk. Little Voxy-poo is all Up In Arms again, about the disaster which is College Education for Feminist Non-Brood-Mares. It seems as though fully one-third of college educated women are failing to breed! The horror!

Or perhaps not. Sometimes it seems to Pretty Lady as though her anti-feminist friends have two parallel brains; the brain that sanctifies the female as the Nurturess Over All, and the one which allows that some women are Fiends Incarnate, who should have their fallopian tubes cauterized at birth.

Really, boys! How many psychotic, neurotic, frenetic, generally messed-up females have you have the priviledge of knowing, and do you really think that all of these women ought to be in charge of babies?

It has been Pretty Lady's unfortunate experience to have encountered a great number of messed-up persons of both genders, Pretty Lady being a magnet for that sort of thing. And the sober conclusion that she has come to, after knowing these sorry people in an intimate way over a long period of time, is that some people should not breed.

One of the most interesting things she has noticed in her ad-hoc psychoanalytic adventures is that the vast majority of persons who were permanently scarred by a Mommy from Hell had mommies with abnormally high IQs. Pretty Lady doesn't know whether female valedictorians are more likely to mess up their children, in an orgy of thwarted ambition, or whether they merely are able to do so in more flamboyant ways.

Be this as it may, it strikes Pretty Lady that providing college educations to all potential Fiends Incarnate is a grand filtering process for weeding out the psychos, and safely installing them in civil-service middle-management positions, where their sadism can find a relatively harmless outlet. Ultimately, this race of twisted pseudo-humans will die out, or morph into cool-ass Maiden Aunties, an archetype for which there is ample historical precedent.

Because in Pretty Lady's considered opinion, the way to save Western Civilization is not to produce more forcibly Western Civilized humans at all costs. It is to produce stable, well-adjusted humans, who are pleased with their lot in life because they voluntarily chose it, and wish to pass this well-adjusted bliss along to the next generation. Creating a generation of traumatized individuals who were unwillingly raised by Mommies who would much, much, much rather have been backpacking through Nepal does not serve this end.

Ladies Only--or--Why Women Are Not Running the World

Gentlemen, Pretty Lady is afraid she is going to have to ask all of you to look the other way today. Go look at pictures of sports cars, or fighter planes, or Anna Nicole Smith or something. Today she is only addressing the ladies. Thank you ever so much! Ta-ta!

All right, girls. Pretty Lady must have a very, very Serious Talk with you.

She sees, here and there, a certain amount of Carping about how Men are Keeping Us Down; how institutionalized sexism is the reason for low female wage rates, glass ceilings, and male-dominated industries and professions. She endures Sad Stories of hate speech on the Internet; she contemplates the ever-present threat of rape and sexual harassment. Confidentially, she is also aware that the boys have a bit of a head start on us, when it comes to World Domination, due to their superior upper-body strength, engineering skills, and low rates of maternity leave.

Let us take this as read; let Pretty Lady inform each and every one of you that Men are not our biggest problem. Women are.

Sit down and shut up. Pretty Lady is not Pandering. She sent the gentlemen out of the room, remember? She is merely telling it like it is. Women are going to have to learn some cold hard Facts about Power Politics, or we as a gender are Toast. She is sorry to be so harsh with you, but there it is.

The fact is, men know a few things besides incorporation, and how to fix a carburator. They know that to Maintain Power, other habits are necessary. Habits such as loyalty, competence, healthy competition, and the realistic nurturance of these things in the younger generations. They may shout, they may punch each other, but they take care of it in the alley and go out for a beer afterward.

Women, on the other hand, are never really satisfied until an inconvenient rival is divorced, bankrupt, unemployed, universally ostracized, and living on the streets with a bad haircut. Look into your souls, ladies. You know it's true.

Pretty Lady, in her own professional life, has noted over time that it has proven nearly impossible to find a Female Mentor. That is not because there are no older women in her profession, or that Pretty Lady lacks the competence to attract the attention of such; it merely means that when she does, she has had to Watch Her Back in a very big way. Without boring you with too many horror stories, let her break down her experience into a few basic categories of Poisonous Women to Watch Out For.

1) The Poisonous Professional.

This woman is one of the few women to have succeeded in a male-dominated profession, in the Early Days of Feminism, and by God, she's going to make sure it stays that way. Her demeanor is tough, competent, and reasonable, with an undercurrent of vicious rage. She surrounds herself with flamboyantly attractive younger men, and actively promotes their careers, in a motherly sort of way. Should any talented, hard-working young women take her class, work as her assistant, ask her to supervise their thesis, or request a recommendation, these young women will be treated with competent, reasonable, vicious dismissal.

2) The Poisonous Administrator.

This woman, thwarted by social pressures, timidity, and possibly an early encounter with the P.P. above, has ended up in the Development Department of the profession that she would never admit to wanting a starring role in. She is pretty, well-dressed, and charming; she is socially well-connected and consoles herself with the fact that she, at least, earns a steady paycheck. She is proud of the fact that she knows and supports so many talented young fellows, and is the center of attention when she goes with them to parties. When she meets a woman around her age who is still pursuing the Main Profession, she is charmed by that girl's sweet little hobby, and makes sure the grant goes to one of the boys.

3) The Callous Opportunist.

This woman will be your Best Friend. She works four jobs, never takes a vacation, maximizes her credit, and founds organizations in the same field as she stars in. She is a Phenomenon, and everybody says so. She will take and take and take, collapse in your living room, cry on your shoulder, then ditch you and stab you in the back.

4) The Smarmy Communist.

We're all sisters! We love each other! We support each other! We swap skills! We are all Equal! Her skills are valued at full retail markup, of course, while those of her sisters are calculated at discount wholesale, or better yet, free.

5) The Cool Girl.

She doesn't seem to have many female friends, somehow, she doesn't really know why. What was your name again?


Now. This is not to say that there are not splendid women out there; women who balance Support with Healthy Competition, who understand the delicate art of networking, who will listen understandingly when you are in crisis, applaud your successes, purchase your commodities, talk you up to important people, and write a feature article about you. They will edit your grant application, show up at your door with a pitcher of sangria, take you out to dinner when you are broke, and get you a massage for your birthday. These are the Flower of Womanhood, living proof that all is not lost; that women, with nurturance and training, will one day be capable of just about anything.

But first we have to kill those bitches.

The Competitive Female

Pretty Lady must apologize for having become Hot Under her Collar for a moment. Ordinarily she likes to maintain a Balanced Perspective, in order to open her soul to the infinite truth and forgiveness of the Holy Spirit. This, she has found, is the way to remain happy, healthy and keep her complexion in tiptop condition. The cosmetic benefits of allowing the Holy Spirit to rule one's mental landscape cannot be underestimated.

But occasionally someone presses a Sore Button in Pretty Lady's serene psyche, and she goes ballistic. Such a one, unfortunately, was this:

Are you being extraordinary, or are you being competitive?
Men want to marry women who display the characteristic of loyalty.

Pretty Lady must say it again. Hmph.

It has been Pretty Lady's sad experience that men, in general, are largely oblivious to the flagrant signs of unhealthy, vile, underhanded, backstabbing Competitiveness in Females. Men are simple souls. Show them a winning smile, a winsome pout, and utter a few bland clichés about Home and Family, and they believe a woman to be everything she touts herself as, and more. This same winning, winsome woman may utter Malicious Lies, Cutting Remarks, and Wholesale Betrayals of Confidence freely before this same man, and he will not even notice. He will merely think she is perspicacious and clever; he may even honor her malice with the label of 'loyalty.' Loyalty toward himself, of course; obviously she is merely protecting him from the designing hussies who surround him on every side.

It never appears to occur to him that a mind which sees malice under every rock may be seeking what it wishes to find; moreover, that it sees the thing it is steeped in.

Pretty Lady, when very young, was taught this maxim by her mother: "If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all." With a few regrettable and notorious lapses, she has endeavored to live up to this precept during her entire adult life. More than this, she tries mightily to look for the best in people, and to understand where the worst might be coming from. This habit of hers has led her to make some egregious errors in the selection of her intimate friends. Preoccupied with her industrious treasure-seeking, she has been dismissive of, or honestly blind to, aggressive destructiveness of character in others.

That is, until the full force of her self-deception hits her right between the eyes; then she is wont to reconsider.

Far from being Competitive herself, Pretty Lady has always believed that vulgar scrabbling between females for the attention of a man ought to be avoided at all costs. If a man is so distractible that he cannot be bothered to remember that he originally asked Pretty Lady on a date, when another woman invites herself along and clings to him like glue, chattering engagingly, Pretty Lady will not remind him. She politely and ironically excuses herself and catches up on her sleep. When a man decides to be a big cocky jerk and invite her to lunch as the tall half of a set, she does not attempt to command his attention with seductive gestures; she thanks the two of them, grapes and all, and heads to the studio. Pretty Lady has neither the time nor the inclination for such egoistic games. Either a man perceives her obvious singularity of character, or he does not.

Pretty Lady takes the concept of Loyalty very seriously indeed. If her friend is interested in, dating, or married to a man, he is Off Limits in Pretty Lady's universe, until five years after the divorce. In fact, if a man is previously attached at all, even to her worst enemy, he is equally Off Limits, even if his wife is flinging him at Pretty Lady's head.

Thus, although she generally maintains a tight-lipped reticence on the subject, Pretty Lady's deeper opinion on women who regard the intimate relationships of their close friends as fishing grounds for their own purposes, is that these women are poison. No matter how many times they disingenuously declare, "It just sort of happened, and I feel terrible about it."

Pretty Lady's Position on High Heels

Teetering and unstable, darlings, is always counterproductive. Even if it were not for an ancient injury, which makes high heels an exceedingly unwise option for Pretty Lady, she would largely eschew them by virtue of the fact that she lives in New York. If one lives in New York and has not the resources to take cabs everywhere one goes, even one block, the wearing of high heels is an indicator of either madness or masochism. Pretty Lady wears Furry Boots in winter, and Fetching Sandals or Funky Walkers in summer.

This does not mean that she does not enjoy the wondrously Dominant feeling of towering over the masses, on the rare occasions when she finds and dons a pair of heels which are both comfortable and appropriate to the occasion. Indeed, during one distressing bout with plantar fasciitis, a certain pair of high-heeled boots was instrumental to both her physical and emotional recovery from her hobbled state.

Thus, Pretty Lady is sorry to say that she must take her Nemesis to task once again, upon issues both trivial and grand, incisively as these issues are couched.

Look, claiming to love your high heels because they appeal to you in some comprehensively objective, lofty aesthetic sense, separated by a million brilliant intellectual miles from the culture of femininity that spawned’em, is a cop out....Women whose continued existence depends on capitulation to the feminine directive will get no argument from me. I often use “survival skill” as a synonym for femininity. The structure of patriarchy, which places anyone with a vagina in a continuum of femininity whether they like it or not, is such that the daily opportunities for self-deception and self-betrayal are mucho, relentless, and — with a frequency that depends on class, skin color, and proximity to domineering male godbags, drunks, and pervs — often unavoidable.

Pretty Lady says, hmph.

Once upon a time, when she was young and foolish, Pretty Lady met the Frenchman, in a café, for a trial coffee (as per the Rules.) Her initial impression of him was that he would do. (Lest this sound like an underwhelming recommendation, let it be known that Pretty Lady's impression of 99.8% of males she has encountered in this lifetime is that they Won't Do, for her at any rate. She is not judging these gentlemen in any way; she is simply persnickety.)

She almost fled, however, when he näively announced that he was looking for a 'feminine' woman.

If Pretty Lady had been just a wee bit younger, she would have leapt down his throat. "What do you mean by that?" she would have declared, aggressively. "Do you mean that you want a woman who is passive, agreeable, namby-pamby, and helpless? You think you're such hot shit? You want someone with no brain and no opinions, who will defer to your dominant masculinity in everything? Up yours, asshole!"

Thus might have spoken the Young Pretty Lady. And she would have missed out on a quite staggeringly enormous amount of fun.

Thankfully, the slightly older Pretty Lady decided to chalk his conversational faux pas up to cultural differences, and suspend judgment until she got to know him better. Also, he called later that week and invited her skiing, all expenses paid.

Gradually, as she chatted with the Frenchman on ski lifts, and in top-flight restaurants, and over bottles of exquisite claret in the penthouse overlooking downtown San Francisco, she came to understand what he meant by 'feminine.' He meant 'feminine.' Graceful, courteous, kind, nurturing, unflappable, engaging, adventurous, versatile, easygoing, expressive, charming, and lovely, in other words. The notion of passivity, stupidity or helpless dependency as attached to these characteristics had never even occurred to him.

In fact, as time went by, it became clear that although the Frenchman may have initially been attracted by Pretty Lady's prettiness (though even this is in doubt. He confessed, years later, that he couldn't make out the photograph terribly well on his monitor), what kept him around, and what nearly drove him to distraction when Pretty Lady decided, regretfully, that he wouldn't quite do after all, were her characteristics of (she blushes to admit) brilliance, creativity, initiative, confidence, independence, and leadership.

For example, when she performed a spontaneous solo thrash-belly-breakdance at a club in San Francisco, he chortlingly embraced her in a state of high excitement, declaring, "I was very proud to be your man this evening." When she cheerfully discussed art, politics, economics and religion at his friend's bungalow in Nice, he stated, "You outshone those other pathetic little women by an order of magnitude." When she picked up and moved to another country, in order to think things through, he threw a few tantrums, then decided that this was a splendid idea, and invited her motorcycling around the world.

It is most important to understand that if Pretty Lady had succumbed to psychological passivity, helplessness, or dependency at any point, this relationship would have been toast much sooner, and not in a good way. Pretty Lady's rock-solid internal confidence and self-esteem were what carried the day. Her proof of this was when the Frenchman came to her, hat in hand, bearing the physiological signs of extreme distress, and declared, "You know when you said that you are an extraordinary person, completely unique, and that if I don't love you exactly the way you are, then somebody else will? WELL, IT'S TRUE."

So there.

You see, my dearest most misguided Twisty, 'femininity' is neither a negative, nor a characteristic defined solely by its opposite. It is also only incidentally and superficially associated with aesthetics. True femininity is a positive force of grace and power which may well be inborn, but which must also be nurtured with all the powers of discipline and intellect at one's disposal, in order to make us capable of moving mountains and healing the world. Mere brute aggression quails and capitulates at the slightest whisper of mature feminine nature.

Also, indulging one's genuine aesthetic attractions for the shiny, the lacy and the hyperbolically flowery can be an almost indecent amount of fun. ;-)

Biological Differences

Pretty Lady's cuñado recently alerted her to a grave oversight in her oeuvre. Whilst the two of use were packing for the day's kayaking expedition, he casually declared, "I'm not hungry, now, so we won't pack any food. Okay?"

Well, no.

Pretty Lady declared, "I am a female person. I go into Low Blood Sugar, every four hours on the dot. We shall pack food. This is a central issue."

Her smart-aleck cuñado retorted, "Well, it must not be that central, because Pretty Lady hasn't written about it."

Horrors. She must rectify the situation at once.

Gentlemen. You must understand. The vast majority of ladies are not camels. We are not exclusively carniverous mammals, either. The tigerish habit of saving up our hunger for six or eight or twelve hours, then consuming two thousand calories all at once in a frenzy, does not suit our temperaments. If truth be told, it doesn't suit yours, either; but nevertheless, many of you seem determined to force it. Thinking that it's 'macho' or something.

Gentlemen, it is in your seriously vested interests to understand this simple fact. The vast majority of feminine snapping, snarking, carping, nagging, backseat-driving, headaches, rolling of eyeballs, and expelling one's breath loudly in a suppressed huff could be avoided, by the simple expedient of Stopping for Lunch. Now. Not in an hour and a half when we're closer to that Perfect Spot. Not in four hours when the famed stuffed pizza joint begins serving. Now. The stuffed pizza can wait.

This, gentlemen, is not a Weight Issue. Weight Issues are an irrelevant tangent; they are a scurrilous means for insecure persons to maintain an illusion of moral superiority. In fact, Pretty Lady has noticed that there is a direct connection between the person who responds to the statement, "I'm hungry," with "Oh, I never eat before two," and the person with a serious weight problem. People with weight problems never acknowledge hunger to be a valid issue, because they themselves have utterly separated the concepts of 'food' and 'hunger.' Food, to them, has become a means of covert control.

(This holds equally true for persons whose weight problems comprehend anorexia and bulimia. There is nothing at all more draining than attempting to share a meal with a recovering bulimic. Trust me, it leaves no room for civilized conversation.)

No, Low Blood Sugar is a pedestrian phenomenon, which happens to more or less all of us. It simply is. There is no moralizing to be done about it; there is simply the obtaining of Lunch. Which is cause, indeed, for celebration; not an onerous task at all.

Style, fashion and thrift

Pretty Lady had occasion to buy a new pair of jeans, recently. She wandered into a tony boutique on Fifth Avenue, and was swarmed upon by an officious helper. She mentioned her interest in jeans, and was soon supplied with a large stack and a dressing room.

(As an aside--what IS it with this ridiculous 'hip hugger' look? The affectation does not flatter any woman but those with the figure of a twelve-year-old boy. She has even seen them doing severe damage to the figures of girls who DO somewhat resemble twelve-year-old boys. They create unattractive pooches at the hips and belly where none were originally, and give the general impression of badly-stuffed sausage. Unfortunately, this seems to be the only style currently available.)

So Pretty Lady tried on her stack of 'hip-huggers,' further adorned with patches and embroiderings, in the style of late-sixties do-it-yourself flower children, which she does not much object to, though it is not one of her favorite eras. She found a pair that did not distort her excellent figure too terribly badly; the sales helper pronounced them "cute." Then she looked at the price tag, and laughed. Pretty Lady does not pay one hundred sixty-five dollars for a pair of jeans.

She emerged from the dressing room and politely returned the stack. "Aren't you going to get those jeans? They are so cute on you!" insisted the helper.

Pretty Lady insisted right back. "Jeans do not cost one hundred and sixty-five dollars," she informed the dear girl, kindly. "Jeans cost twenty dollars." She thereupon left the boutique, went to Old Navy, and paid twenty dollars. Really.

It is a tragic misconception that a lady must spend large sums of money in order to be stylish. It is an even greater misconception that being stylish has anything to do with being fashionable. Style and fashion are, in fact, oppositional concepts. A fashionable person is a shallow individual with the conversational half-life of a chimpanzee. A stylish person may give the world of fashion a passing glance, out of artistic curiosity and appreciation, but selects only those items which fit both her internal sense of self and her pocketbook. Her clothing is thus unique to herself, and never goes out of fashion, for the simple reason that she is wearing it.

A stylish woman knows both her eras and her temperaments. She may have many of each, and they may overlap, but she never attempts to stuff herself into a mode which does not fit. For example, Pretty Lady has a fifties figure and a forties outlook, with the occasional dash of gypsy, grunge, witch or princess. (It is now to be stated that Pretty Lady did NOT follow the 'grunge' craze of the early nineties; the 'grunge' craze followed HER. Hmph. She was walking the streets in flannel plaid, black t-shirts and paint-stained army fatigues, years before anyone had heard of Kurt Cobain.) A stylish woman purchases an item only when she adores it, and it suits her coloring, her figure, and at least one of her temperaments.

Thusly, Pretty Lady's wardrobe is an organic, evolving entity, with items being cycled in upon discovery, re-accessorized as season and whim dictate, and retired only upon irremediable physical deterioration, not the ludicrous notion that they are "out of fashion." She obtains many of these items at sample sales, clearance racks, thrift stores, the Salvation Army, and barter among her designer friends. (One of her most prized collections is a series of classic designer hats, obtained at barter from the artist she showed in her own gallery, about a year before this artist was co-opted by Barney's Fifth Avenue; no girl of Pretty Lady's income level will ever be able to afford these hats again.)

So, to those girls who feel swamped, overwhelmed, and utterly confused by the world of fashion, she offers a few words of advice; forget about it. Go Within. Ask yourself what kind of woman your six-year-old self dreamed of being, and follow her dictates. Did she wish to appear at kindergarten and dazzle her classmates as Glinda, the Good Witch of the North? Then what is she doing in a tweed suit? Throw out the tweed and troll the Goodwill for fouffy taffeta skirts, or at the very least, soften the tweed with a Bavarian crystal necklace or two. Did she fancy herself as Pocohantas, chasing a deer fleetly through the jungle, bringing it down with a single shot of her powerful bow arm, and carrying it home on her well-defined shoulders to feed the tribe? Then put those high-heeled pumps in the back of the closet for weddings and church services, and go to work in that scrumptious pair of knee-high fringed mocassins, for mercy's sake. Nobody will fire you.

Or if they do, you didn't want that boring old job anyway. Start your own enterprise, and be at one with your true nature.

Feminine uniqueness

Indeed I have not thought of James in years. I do not know what put me in mind of him, unless it was some desultory correspondence with little Theo--a gentleman further outside my usual social circle, it is difficult to imagine.

Dear James--we met in Freshman English, and instantly recognized one another as kindred spirits. Immediately thereupon, we started trying to change each other. He encouraged, nay, pressured me intensively to become a member of the "greek" system, i.e. to join a "sorority," insofar as this would make me a sociably acceptable companion. In my turn I nagged him incessantly to de-pledge that ridiculous fraternity, and embrace his true calling as a homosexual thespian. Neither one of us succeeded in our campaigns, thank the powers that be. James and I maintained the kind of insouciant, utterly uncommitted association that is eternally restful to look back upon.

Wandering around with James, on the random occasions that both of us had the time, I slowly became aware that within James' world, there were three kinds of women. There were women you married, women you slept with, and "Pretty Lady. She's really cool." I often wondered whether or not to be offended by this; after all, I do not consider myself an utterly unattractive female. However I decided to let it pass, having no desire, myself, to become either James' wife or his concubine. As I have mentioned, he gave off a distinct aura of unconscious homosexuality, and I prefer my men to be of the 'casually fling you into the loft' variety.

Be that as it may--I also noticed, during our friendly wanderings, that every bland, boring fellow in town seemed to be a friend of James'. They were all wearing dun-c0lored Izod shirts, and they were all named Dave. If I heard it once, I heard it a hundred times: "Dave! Hey! I want you to meet Pretty Lady. She's really cool." I never saw any of the dun-colored Daves again, to recognize--I can only speculate as to what they thought of me, or if they thought at all. I rather imagine not.

I have no idea what became of James. Pre-law, pre-med, pre-going-into-Daddy's-business, it was more or less the same. The spark of creativity I distinguished in him is, most likely, going to fan the flames of a backyard barbeque with the kiddies, or manifesting in a unique way of decorating his office. I can't even Google him; or at least, I can, but the name "James Cowan" produces roughly two million hits. Best to leave the happy memories unsullied by a sordid, current reality.

But when I think of those three categories of women, it brings a wry smile to my lips. Yes, indeed, darling James, there are a few of us out there who are uncategorizable; we are the ones who are truly watching. We have no agenda; we love you for yourselves. We know you in ways that the cookie-cutter girls never can.

Professional competence

Even before dear Ms. Austen wrote her immortal novels, debate has raged fiercely over what constitutes a truly accomplished lady. In recent days I fear that standards have declined. Basic skills are neglected--I recall, only too vividly, one occasion when departing for a weeklong vacation, that not a single one of my friends was capable of moving Bessie, my beloved Porsche, across the street! Imagine! Bessie being parked upon a steepish sort of hill in San Francisco, and being a standard transmission ('stick shift' to you youngsters), every one of my girlfriends disclaimed responsibility for handling her. In other words, my girlfriends did not know how to Drive. For shame. No wonder that reactionary forces dog our every step.

Thusly, I propound my list of basic feminine skills, without which a girl may not stake a claim to true womanhood.


1. Language: fluency in at least two modern languages, and a pretense to a third. Candidates who cannot differentiate between "your" and "you're" shall be disqualified from eligibility to offer reasoned opinions in any English language debate. Persons who spell the word "endeavor," as "i-n-d-e-v-i-r" shall have their M.F.A.s revoked.

2. Self-control: the ability to consume two pints of Guinness without wincing, gagging, or slurring one's words.

3. Dexterity: the ability to negotiate one's way to the loo in a smoky Oxford pub, after having consumed the abovementioned two pints of Guinness, without trodding on anyone's toes, or engaging in verbal fisticuffs with a drunken English lout. Bonus points for persuading the drunken lout to wear a condom.

4. Cookery: the ability to throw together a palatable, nutritionally balanced meal over one gas burner, utilizing only staples such as flour, brown rice, uncooked pasta, canned tomatoes, and the spice rack, plus whatever items in season are available at the local farmer's market. Vegans who overcook their broccoli shall be forced to consume an entire raw cow in punishment.

5. Nurturance: the ability to engage six French toddlers of varying ages in constant play for three hours without knowing a word of French, except ballet terminology.

6. Social skills: the ability to carry on an animated, unflagging conversation for an entire evening with a blind date who has announced, ten minutes into the discussion, "I don't read."

7. Self-defense: the ability to extract shamed apologies from a group of Mexican adolescents who have just grabbed one's derriere in a dark alley, in a sort of consecutive gang groping. Bonus points if their mothers invite you to Sunday dinner.

8. Adaptability: the ability to camp in a college friend's living room for three weeks without destroying the friendship.

9. Manners: No whining. Ever.

10. (of course) The ability to parallel park a standard-transmission automobile on the right side of a one-way hill with an incline greater than thirty degrees.


This is a preliminary list; I am sure I will think of more.