Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's ＂Learned＂(2)
I spend the sixty-five cents required to take the book home. In the car I show it to my friends like it’s a decorative joke, something for my shelf of kitschy trophies and Sears photo-studio shots of strangers’ kids. This is our hobby, appropriating meaningful artifacts and displaying them as evidence of who we will never be. But I know I’m going to devour this book, and when I get home I head straight to bed, shivering under my patchwork quilt, an Ohio snowstorm swirling in the parking lot outside my window.
The book is from 1982, and on the inside cover is an inscription, written in ballpoint pen: “To Betty! Love, Margaret, your Optifast friend. ?” This moves me, the idea that the book was handed from one woman to another in some long-ago weight-loss support group. I extend her message in my mind: Betty, we can do it. We are doing it. Let this book take you to the stars and beyond.
I race home from class every day for a week to devour Helen’s teachings. I’m electrified by the way that, in Having It All, Gurley Brown shares her assorted humiliations and occasional triumphs and explains, with Idiot’s Guide precision, how you too can be blessed with “love, success, sex, money, even if you’re starting with nothing.”
Most of her advice, it should be noted, is absolutely bananas. She encourages readers to eat fewer than a thousand calories a day (“crashing is okay, so is fasting … Satisfied is out of the question. You have to feel slightly uncomfortable and hungry during your weight loss or it probably isn’t happening”), avoid having children if you possibly can, and be blow job ready at all times (“the more sex you have, the more you can tolerate”). Helen has little tolerance for free will in this department: “Exhaustion, preoccupation with a problem, menstrual cramps—nothing is a good excuse for not making love unless you happen to be so angry with the man in your bed your eyes are darting around their sockets and your teeth are grinding.”
Some of her advice is a little more reasonable: “Always leave for the airport fifteen minutes earlier than you could. It will save your valves wearing out,” or “If you have severe personal problems then I think you go to a shrink for advice and support. I can no more imagine not going to get your hurting head and heart taken care of than one would go around the streets with blood spurting out of your throat …” But her frank wisdom loses some of its power because it’s forced to occupy the same space as gems such as “to me, avoiding married men totally when you’re single would be like passing up first aid in a Tijuana hospital when you’re bleeding to death because you prefer an immaculate American hospital some unreachable distance across the border.”
Having It All is divided into sections, each section a journey into some usually sacrosanct aspect of feminine life such as diet, sex, or the intricacies of marriage. But despite her demented theories, which jibe not even a little bit with my distinctly feminist upbringing, I appreciate the way Helen shares her own embarrassing, acne-ridden history in an attempt to say Look, happiness and satisfaction can happen to anyone. In the process she reveals her own unique pathos (a passage about binge eating baklava stands out in my mind), but maybe I underestimated her. Maybe that is not an accident but is, in fact, her gift.
When I found her book, I did not yet understand Helen Gurley Brown’s position in the canon, that she had been written about and reacted to by the women who would come to guide me, women like Gloria Steinem and Nora Ephron. I did not know that she was the bane of both the women’s movement and the smut-police, or that she was still alive and in her late eighties, still peddling her particular brand of chipper, oblivious help for the downtrodden. All I knew was that she painted a picture of a life made much richer by having once been, as she calls it, a Mouseburger: unpretty, unspecial, unformed. She believed that, ultimately, Mouseburgers are the women who will triumph, having lived to tell the tale of being overlooked and underloved. Hers is a self-serving perspective, but one I needed more than anything. Maybe, as Helen preached, a powerful, confident, and, yes, even sexy woman could be made, not born. Maybe.
There is nothing gutsier to me than a person announcing that their story is one that deserves to be told, especially if that person is a woman. As hard as we have worked and as far as we have come, there are still so many forces conspiring to tell women that our concerns are petty, our opinions aren’t needed, that we lack the gravitas necessary for our stories to matter. That personal writing by women is no more than an exercise in vanity and that we should appreciate this new world for women, sit down, and shut up.
But I want to tell my stories and, more than that, I have to in order to stay sane: stories about waking up to my adult female body and being disgusted and terrified. About getting my butt touched at an internship, having to prove myself in a meeting full of fifty-year-old men, and going to a black-tie event with the crustiest red nose you ever saw. About allowing myself to be treated by men in ways I knew were wrong. Stories about my mother, my grandmother, the first guy I loved who turned semi-gay, and the first girl I loved who turned into my enemy. And if I could take what I’ve learned and make one menial job easier for you, or prevent you from having the kind of sex where you feel you must keep your sneakers on in case you want to run away during the act, then every misstep of mine was worthwhile. I’m already predicting my future shame at thinking I had anything to offer you, but also my future glory in having stopped you from trying an expensive juice cleanse or thinking that it was your fault when the person you are dating suddenly backs away, intimidated by the clarity of your personal mission here on earth. No, I am not a sexpert, a psychologist, or a dietitian. I am not a mother of three or the owner of a successful hosiery franchise. But I am a girl with a keen interest in having it all, and what follows are hopeful dispatches from the frontlines of that struggle.