A trickle of articles recently have addressed the usually sensitive topic of sex and the single female boomer. Gail Sheehy’s new book Sex and the Seasoned Women appears to have prompted this new spate. Sheehy’s new book addresses the myth that menopause ends women’s sexual life by replacing it with a new ‘truth’ that menopause is actually a ‘second adulthood’.
Daphne Merkin’s article in last Sunday’s NYT magazine (What’s So Hot About 50?) tells us that sex and the female boomer is not quite as hot as Sheehy makes it out to be. The reality, as Merkin sees it, is single men seeking women much younger than themselves. Barbara Kantrowitz’s article in Newsweek, Sex & Love: The New World, takes a look at the larger picture: male and female boomers in a world where internet dating, STDs and unconventional standards are the norm. While Kantrowitz’s article offers full-of-promise stories of boomer women thrilled with their single status hitting the dating scene with success, fun and glee, I thought that things seemed a little too glossed over, especially for the women dating. I think the reality is more of a balance between Merkin and Kantrowitz: some female boomers are thrilled, dating actively and believe that they are in a ‘second adulthood’, other female boomers feel at a loss in this new scene, unsure and to some degree unwilling to venture into the scary world of dating in a new century.
As usual, to some degree, the individual woman’s level of self-esteem plays a critical role in her decision to put herself out there and meet new people. The female boomers that I know who are willing to try this new dating world have higher self-esteem than those who are not. With the comment, “Their feeling is: if I’m naked and smiling, what’s your problem?’, who could challenge the essential role that self-esteem plays in the decision to date. After all, what woman, except a woman with high self-esteem, is going to utter such a confident comment? Love it!
Malcolm Gladwell’s articles always touch a very human cord. Gladwell, in fact, makes a point to make complex problems understandable to everyone. So, his article (Million Dollar Murray) in the Feb. 13 & 20 issue of The New Yorker is another particularly well-done exploration of how common problems like homelessness are actually easier to eliminate than to chronically manage.
The power-law problem essentially explains that a small, intense fraction of a certain group (homeless people as one example) accounts for the majority of the social costs associated with the said group. Gladwell ends the article by discussing the challenges of power-law solutions (giving free apartments to chronic homeless people as one solution) working long term: a shortage of resources given the number of deserving individuals; lack of support from the left and right wing; the tendency to revert to the familiar, old way even if it is less effective, etc.
Gladwell says that ‘Power-law problems leave us with an unpleasant choice. We can be true to our principles or we can fix the problem. We cannot do both.’ I think that we can do both. The solutions that Gladwell uncovered almost exclusively deals with the physicality of the problem (setting up homeless people in free apartments; identifying the top dirty vehicle offenders instead of targeting every vehicle) but what about addressing the personal issues behind the problem? People problems like homelessness, I believe, are best addressed by dealing with the concerned person’s personal issues not just by changing their location. Herein lies the dilemma. There are not enough resources apparently (money and people) to create and maintain systems which facilitate the personal change needed to create social change long-term.
I really believe that almost all of our life choices are rooted in our self-esteem, including homelessness. Murder on the rise in small cities for example…the police are baffled because the reasons for the crime are so ‘insignificant’; people being killed because the killer felt that they were looked at the wrong way; they were ‘disrespected’ or because someone was looking at their girlfriend. These reasons certainly aren’t the traditional major motives for murder (revenge, partnership gone wrong, drugs, robbery, etc.) but when we look closely at them, we observe that the motivations behind each of these ‘insignificant’ crimes are based in low self-esteem. Each of our life choices is connected to our level of self-esteem: interviewing for a new job; deciding to divorce our partner; committing to a cycling trip across Tuscany. Plopping a homeless person in a new apartment rent-free is akin to giving someone a job for which they didn’t interview and have no experience in. How can it succeed? Any success that does occur is pure luck and cannot be counted to continue long-term.
But if we were to address the issues behind the issue, luck would cease to be a factor and success would be more of a given. So, in essence, we can fix the problem and be true to our principles. Addressing power-law problems are easier to solve than to manage. Let’s look at the ‘why’ behind the issues in addition to the ‘how’.
Fortune’s Andy Serwer spoke with supermodel-turned talk show host, Tyra Banks in the February 20 issue of Fortune. Serwer comments that “people” are comparing Banks to talk show great and genuinely fabulous person Oprah Winfrey. Banks shrugs off the comment. I think she may need some serious growth in this arena before she can really be compared with Oprah. Banks’s shows tend to be pretty sensationalized & glamourous (real life Brokeback Mountain; celebrity gastric bypass and superstar singers highlight next week’s Tyra Banks Show). While The Oprah Winfrey Show highlights plenty of movie stars, the heart of her show and the passion behind her work are real people showing their Authentic Self to the world. With her Angel Network, Book Club and more, Oprah reaches out to the world in a way that no one else possibly comes close to. She doesn’t do it to build her brand, she does it because these causes are important to her: reading, community outreach, service. It’s hard to get a sense of exactly what causes are important to Tyra Banks. Most of the resources about her online are about her modelling career or tv show. She does have a long way to go but with a friend like Oprah guilding and advising, she may yet become a woman who lives her Authentic Self, as Oprah does.
The gossip article in the December issue of Psychology Today is frighteningly off-target. Columnist Jennifer Drapkin’s article, The Dirty Little Secret of Gossip, contends that gossip is one of “life’s most undervalued-and instructive-pleasures”. Huh. That’s one way to look at ‘death by language’ as Roland Barthes describes gossip. Gossip consists of words that we wouldn’t share about someone else to their face. If a compliment can be detected in gossip, it is usually a backhanded one, a jab at someone in an indirect way.
Here’s a brief blow-by-blow of some of Drapkin’s contentions:
· ‘Gossip builds fame and legends’, Liz Smith tells us. While I would agree that gossip does contribute to fame, I cannot agree that it builds legends. People and action build legends. Words alone cannot make someone a legend.
· ‘News of others travails actually helps us cope with our own difficult situations’. While other people’s difficulties might empower us to make changes within out own lives, I cannot conceive that this factor exists independently i.e. if we didn’t hear of other problems, we wouldn’t be able to cope with our own situation.
· ‘Turning a deaf ear to gossip is a shortcut to alienation.” This is completely false. Ignoring gossip certainly may keep you out of the nasty social climbing 
loop of your life but women who value their Authentic Self certainly will never be truly alienated by their choice to ignore language that deliberately damages others.
· ‘Gossip is pleasurable because it is necessary for survival’. Gossip is not necessary for survival in life; it’s a nasty habit that serves to hurt others. Labelling gossip necessary for survival is like saying sex is pleasurable because it is necessary for survival. Sex is great but we don’t need it as we do food, water and air to survive. How could gossip be necessary to our survival?
· ‘Some people deserve bad reputations’ so gossip is good for that reason. Ah-ha, we hit on it here. Finally an admission that gossip can damage and harm. Gossip can cause irrevocable damage. Who, even someone who cheated on his wife or was in jail briefly or stole money from their employer, deserves a bad reputation for life? So, from Drapkin’s assertion that some people deserve bad reputations, we can assume that no one should ever deserve to be in a relationship again, be released from jail or receive a 2nd chance. Kind of harsh, isn’t it?
· Gossip is educational, serving as ‘intergenerational glue’ for parents and daughters to talk about whether or not oral sex was actually infidelity. Suddenly the whole country ‘feels closer’ as they discuss the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, Jessica Coen Editor of Gawker.com, tells Drapkin. How disappointing that Coen feels discussing other people’s personal lives is a way that she and her family can grow closer. It’s always safer and much more comfortable discussing other people’s lives than our own. Instead of judging other’s actions (i.e.gossiping), perhaps we could take a good look at our own as a point of authentic discussion and closeness.
Drapkin would have served Psychology Today readers better by interviewing some experts who have actually spent time and research looking at language instead of focusing on the ‘glamorous’ aspects of gossip. Phyllis Chesler, author of Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman, would have served as a terrific resource to testify to the ruinous nature of gossip and the damage that mere words can inflict on someone else. Seth Godin would also have been a terrific resource to speak to how words create buzz and information travels through sneezers. Drapkin’s glamorization of gossip gives the reader a false impression of the real intention of gossip. Make no mistake, gossip is intended to harm not to help or educate. That is how we know that it is gossip. Other thoughts?
Author and modern feminist movement pioneer, Betty Friedan, 
died Saturday on her birthday. She was 85. Friedan was a suburban housewife in 1957 hoping to get together a magazine article out of her Smith College classmates as she prepared for a class reunion. She prepared a survey and discovered that her highly intelligent classmates were all asking ‘Is this it?”. Unable to get her article published in a magazine, she continued her research and turned it into the revolutionary book, The Feminine Mystique. The Feminine Mystique made Friedan famous and ignited the modern feminist movement.
Friedan later went on to found the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966 where she staked out positions on issues such as abortion, equal pay, maternity leave, gender neutral help wanted ads. She also helped found NARAL Pro-Choice America and the National Women’s Political Caucus.
For all of her accomplishments and awards, she tends to be remembered as the housewife who started a revolution by exploring the ‘nameless, aching dissatisfaction’ that women everywhere were feeling, a bewilderment later to be coined ‘the problem with no name’. Friedan gave women permission to think about a life for themselves, a life where their self-esteem is not completely tied up in the housework and maintenance of a family.
Three women in Massachusetts with affiliations to the reproductive health and/or women’s rights fields have filed a lawsuit against Wal-Mart 
stores claiming that the store has violated state law by refusing to carry emergency contraception. The women who are supported by Planned Parenthood and other reproductive rights groups tried to fill prescriptions at various Wal-Marts in suburban Boston. They were told that the stores did not carry and cannot order the drug known as the morning after pill.
What was the reason that you still shopped there, dear reader? I’m not sure if anyone who calls themselves a feminist can, in good conscious, continue to shop at this evil megastore.