"What’s a girl to do when a bunch of dudes have just told her, in front of an audience, that she’s wrong about what it’s like to be herself? I could talk to them, one by one, and tell them how it felt. I could tell the panel organizers, This is why you should never have just one of us up there. I could buy myself a superhero costume and devote the rest of my life to vengeance on mansplainers everywhere.
Instead, I round up some girlfriends and we spend hundreds of dollars in a hipster bar, drinking rye Manhattans and eating tapas and talking about the latest crappy, non-gender-blind things that have happened to us in meetings and on business trips and at performance review time.
They toast me for taking one for the team. And when we are good and numb, we Uber home, thinking Look at all we’ve earned! That bar with the twinkly lights. That miniature food. This chauffeured black car. We are tough enough to put up with being ignored and interrupted and underestimated every day and laugh it off together. We’ve made it. This is the good life. Nothing needs to change."
! numbing ourselves with signifiers of success.
I had a very similar conversation with a friend once, about being non-White in America and our options for survival and we were feeling deeply cynical (our conversation was probably in the context of some white person recently having killed some brown person/people) and we came up with: (1) go back "where we came from" even though it would be bad for all kinds of different reasons, (2) develop deep-seated identity disorders while conforming utterly and completely to whiteness in an attempt to hide, or (3) develop a nice, numbing opioid addiction.
I don't know the way to live fully without experiencing pain because of persisting social prejudices. I'm lucky that I'm too anxious about intoxicants to develop an addiction (... well, to anything besides caffeine).
FB: Despite the title, this is a really revealing and pithy essay "Maybe women are so busy faking it — to be more like a man at work, more like a porn star in bed, more like 30 at 50 — that we don’t trust our natural responses anymore. Maybe all that wine is an Instagram filter for our own lives, so we don’t see how sallow and cracked they’ve become... The longer I’m sober, the less patience I have with sexism"
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