The Individual in the Woman

I’ve seen a worrisome trend among the women I know and meet – most seem to be trying to outdo one another at cooking, baking, gardening, experimenting with a plethora of lifestyle products and activities, traveling, decorating their homes, shopping, gathering valuable information about clothes, exotic food and what have you (it’s like living the TLC!), fitting all these easily into their already busy lives, and as importantly, letting the world know. Women today are racing to do more, see more, be more - competing with one another at being super-women - all this, while working 9 to 9 high-pressure jobs.

When inviting friends over becomes an exercise in showmanship, when there is a very definite strain of “How much do you do with you day?” ominously making its way around every living room, I can’t help wondering if we’re somehow channeling the garden parties of the Victorian era. There is nothing wrong with doing so, I might add, as long as we resolutely fight the tendency to expect uncomfortably more from ourselves and others. Life has always been a race to reach higher and farther (except for those lucky enough to have oodles of that enviable commodity called contentment) – and now the definition of success has expanded to include various lifestyle parameters, hard to define, but easily measured in that matter-of-fact manner owned by young people today, and used as a yardstick to judge, and sadly, stereotype - albeit in a subtle, smiling way.

The interesting thing is the way men see it - even the more liberal among them do consider women who like to wear all these different hats as more accomplished, more evolved. Those women who can’t, or prefer not to, stand the risk of being labeled one-dimensional, lackadaisical or worse, lazy. ‘A lady must be industrious!’ – she is likely to hear (again, from someone channeling a character from an E.M. Forster novel). Hey, I’d take an amazing movie - nameless romcom, Tarantino or Bergman, I don’t care - over baking, any day. I don’t quite understand most gourmet food, I don’t mind what I eat as long as it is healthy, my definition of good wine is ‘tasty, not bitter, gets me drunk’ - so even the little time that I invest into putting together my meals, is time I could spend doing something else (reading, perhaps). I am happy spending most of my weekends sleeping a lot, doing a couple of chores, watching my favourite shows on TV, reading a little, and going out for a bit now and then. Throw in a bowl of Maggi and a bar of chocolate, and that is indulgence for me. I listen to the same music I’ve always been listening to (no UK Top 40 for me, thank you!), I don’t shop unless I find myself running out of food, clothes or shoes, I watch a lot of TV and I don’t talk to many people. Despite it all, I’ve had a pretty normal, peaceful and fairly engaging personal and social life. But guess what? It’s beginning to become very difficult to live life this way! While I’ve always had to work a little at fitting in but have usually managed it without too much trouble, my social standing now is dependent on how busy everyone else’s weeks and weekends are! My weekly engagements, much as I hate to admit it, now relate to how well I network my way into the web of planned spontaneity and creative activity, and hardly at all to real friendships, or a peaceful conversation or two about the few things I actually do well!

It would be easy to look at this as a purely encouraging development – a celebration of the diversity and resourcefulness that women exemplify - did it not have undertones of the beauty-pageant-syndrome. Until now, women were accused of trying to look uniformly beautiful by aiming to fit into a template that defined good looks; now, that template has become a framework within which they are beginning to talk, think and act alike, all navigating eerily similar paths on their way to self-actualization. It makes me wonder how much further I will feel forced to push myself out of my comfort zone, whether I will ever be comfortable with being among those who are always invited to the home-cooked dinners and seldom the one to invite, or with being the partner who only cooks for her husband on birthdays and anniversaries (and usually doesn’t venture beyond pasta) and wonders whether this makes her any less attractive or desirable in his eyes - whether being exactly who I am will one day go completely out of fashion for ever. I find that being cynical about the growing expectations surrounding my being a woman goes some way in helping me stay in touch with my elusive individuality, but I can't help secretly wishing that I liked to cook - it would make participating in the gentle politics of the social gatherings of today a whole lot easier.