Think Pink: The Period
Not the punctuation mark but — the monthly female event for women of childbearing age. It has been my experience that the period and the Self-Loathing Female Supervisor are not, shall we say, simpatico.
And it can cause the most egregious of problems for the young woman who is unaware that her bodily function can cause such malfunction, akin to malware, in the work world of women trying to act like men. One of my first female supervisors warned me: “Don’t call in sick with the excuse it’s your period.”
I instead said I ate some bad fish and felt sick.
The next woman supervisor was a bit more tricky in her approach to her obvious disdain for women. She had to be: she was in charge of 10 women working at word processors! Her stand-offish, put-offish, distanced demeanor was to act as if the act simply did not happen! Which was a bit counter-productive because I could have told her, long before citizen-funded government studies, that if you enclose enough women long enough in a room with only one front door in and one back door out, the pheromones are gonna start flying! And coinciding.
Talk about catty!
It was one big group PMS. I don’t recall if the “co-existing” timed Time of the Month was at the beginning or at the end, but the eating of pizza and dark chocolate was ensemble.
When I was told by a male friend in the 1990s that women make the worst supervisors, I was a bit stunned. He was a fireman, about to retire. So I guess the fire ladder got climbed, and quickly, by women too.
Now I am all for any woman doing the job of whatever and whoever she does best. I am not for any woman thinking that just because she is a woman, she gets to choose what job rightfully belongs to her by non-virtue of her being a woman. As one joke song about this type of woman chanted: “I am woman, watch me sit. And get paid quite well for it.” The World Revolves Around Her!
The women of the 1970s and 1980s who ran away from home to work in the office world have been replaced by women who have no home from which to run; or by women who understand that an office is not a home or a replacement for a life. Those women are in the office world more by choice than through an almost criminal compulsion to crusade their lives away and earn money while they are doing it.
I suppose the dinosaurs of Liberation will always be with us. Stegosaurus and her barbed tail will always be somewhere, everywhere. It’s a much smaller world, though, for that extinct creature.
It was always a bit of a mystery to me, the women who worked around me, sometimes quite literally, because they really did not have to work to earn a living. They were there to fritter away their hours, their days, because they did not want to be home with the teen-aged Daughter or Son; or they wanted to buy gaudy rings from Macy’s; or they wanted to prove to the Ex that they could earn more than him after the divorce settlement left them quite happy, not fat and happy, but happy enough so that these women could toss their big fat paycheck in his face as if to say:
See! I didn’t need you anyway!!
My silent question inevitably was: Then why did you marry him in the first place?
Miserable beings will always be miserable beings. Among the most miserable that I’ve met were the women who used work as an excuse to get away from whoever, whatever, and wherever it was that was oppressing them; to get attention; to get back at men; to get back at women; to get back at getting back. They never got ahead.
The other working gals were the busy bees, working from paycheck to paycheck, balancing checkbooks that never quite summed up. They were too scary to reconcile! While we humbler gals and babes and lassies and skirts and dolls and sweeties and chicks — and whatever other name men are not supposed to call a woman that tickles his fancy —- while we were working our little heads and tails off, trying to make a go of things, and actually getting ahead — those other women really muddied up the pinkness of it all — with their tailored-envy-green-skirt-and-jacket-suits, their lawsuit$, their pantsuits, their empty suits, and their rolling suitcases clogging up access to any airport!
Like trained seals, they moved hither-and-yon, like robots to the beat of the Business Drummer and the Bureaucratic Piper.
A few years ago a TV news reader went off on a hissy fit tear about the mere term, Breadwinner. Evidently the word got quite a rise out of her! My only thought was: What in the world is her problem?
Her behavior was so unprofessional, so pompous, so pontificating, so paltry of intelligence, so picayune of heart, so pesky, almost like a person on her period. Really, it was quite catty!
Does it really matter who brings home the bacon as long as the people eating it are happy? This malcontent media maven with her dripper earrings and little black cocktail dress, going on and on and on about the latest bee up her Queen Beehive was really a bit much. Yet another raw nerve must have been touched by reality. The sexism of this Huffy Talking Head was showing all over the place.
I felt offended by her hostility to men, to women of my ilk, perhaps to woman in general, if not to the entire world. Methinks the grievance rant worked in reverse for this hard female, but who am I to judge? I work with and for the Breadwinner of the House! In truth, he works with and for me.
The girl with the axe to grind all too often becomes the old battle-axe. So much time is wasted by any woman who thinks she will change the world or anyone. She can only change herself, and that job takes a lot of work. As a matter of fact, it takes so much energy, effort, time, emotion, and conscience, that such a female would rather focus on the wart on someone else’s finger than point to herself as having a problem, or any problem at all!
But if the Grievance Grinch gathers enough Sister Grumps, she can start a Group, a Gathering of the Grievance Gals, who can create an entire movement, meant to march against men. Oh, I think that sob story has already been written and played out. Again and again and again. That tale is filled with tears and wailing and the pout of the victim. It does not have a happy ending. It does not have an ending.
The major complaint now from such females is they do not have enough reasons to complain they are victims, except of themselves. And they lack the honesty and the dignity to fess up to that truth. Given enough time and funding, there might well be a pity party for her to attend that she is a Victim of Her Self.
Who has time for such nonsense?
I certainly had very little time for the Grievance Grumps in the office world of the 1990s. By then, I was working in the home with the many skills that I’d honed from many years of working many jobs. My paid jobs involved resume-writing and typing; contract technical writing; and sewing quilts; alongside the unpaid labor of raising two children and home-schooling them; home-making; home-remodeling; home-decorating; cooking; making and serving tea; gardening; landscaping; researching the materials that would lead to writing novels; rearing and rounding up the ever-present house hounds that were escape artists getting out of every yard and fence line that enclosed them; and, not last and not least, enforcing the Social Contract with the two cats who keep me on a very short leash.
My work (and life) experiences might seem manic; but, overall, I have managed to even out the flow of events into an orderly stream of happy times, downtimes, up-times, and out-of-the-ordinary times: a life of fun and leisure, frolic, comfort, calm industry, family tradition, enduring productivity, and even a nap in the late afternoon of a chilly autumn day.
I might not be the best role model for the gal who wants a simple, orderly life of 1 job to do at 1 time. Being a woman is a matter of balancing many needs and wants, yours along with many others. Perhaps what annoyed me most about the whining of the Modern Woman is the sense that She was the first woman ever to have to make choices in her life.
Since the time of Adam and Eve, a woman has always had to choose her path in life. I’d venture to say that the female who spends her time moaning about the path, has not been very good at trodding that path. She has failed to walk in the shoes of any other person, but especially of any pioneer who carved her own road and plowed her own furrow. Originality is the result of taking chances and making choices that few are willing to do. Time is the tool used or mis-used in that venture. And life is a venture, be it personal or business. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
It is time for women to venture toward the thrill of thinking pink and loving it. It’s more than okay to love being a woman. It’s grand to wear a fuchsia hat as if it was made for you. It’s wonderful to wear a truly feminine dress in the workplace. It won’t kill you!
And that workplace has changed, my, how it has changed! The big happy busy busy busy world of the Woman Entrepreneur is now The Home.
Yes, The Home has become The Home Base. It is the Mother Ship: the up-and-coming venue for success. Women everywhere can Dress for Success in the Domestic Goddess attire that I have been quietly donning for decades now.
And, guess, what? The Woman Liberated from Office World doesn’t have to call in sick with an obviously lame excuse about bad fish. She left that kettle behind her! The tea kettle signals her time to rise and shine!