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Girls! Girls! Settle down
Take a few deep breaths and stop the constant sniping at each other. What is this on-going, hissing, hair-pulling media cat fight all about? Over the last few weeks, from talk back radio to prestigious magazines, female commentators have been having hissy fits about the following issues: the Mummy Wars (Stay at home or work?), the Tummy Wars (to try plastic surgery or not?), the Grey Wars (to dye or not to dye grey hair), the Fat Wars (To diet or not to diet?), the Miss, Mrs or Ms Wars (to keep or not keep your maiden name), the Misguided Mammaries (to breast feed or not breast feed?), the Hot and Bothereds (to HRT or not?) and more.
In each case some self-appointed media school-ma’am has taken it upon herself to lecture the rest of us about how we should live our lives and I am over it. I’m over someone telling me how to live my life and I’m well and truly over telling you how to live yours. If you want to run a company with one hand and text instructions to your baby’s nanny’s pram-phone with the other, go right ahead. If you want to be a community-based earth-mother home-schooling your kids in an eco-friendly tee pee in the backyard, I have no objections. If you want to dedicate yourself to plastic surgery to the point where you come out looking like a reupholstered ferret with extra long lashes, I don’t care.
If you want to dye your grey hair brown, get Shirley Temple sausage curls and tap dance up and down the steps of Parliament House at 80, it’s up to you. If you decide to go on the Yes! Yes! Yes! Orgasm Diet (It’s in a women’s mag this week), I am not going to try and talk you out of it. No! No! No! If you believe that taking on your husband’s surname will turn you into Mrs Tragic-Case-Of-Lost-Identity, it’s your call. If you prefer to change your surname to your husband’s because you want your family to become the complete set of matching Mr and Mrs Kitchen Canisters, do it. I’m not going to argue with you.
If you want to breast feed your kid until they’re playing games on their mobile phone at the time, it’s your choice. If you can’t or don’t want to breast feed for your own reasons, then I’m not going to turn up on your doorstep with a tambourine singing a Hallelujah chorus to breast milk to make you feel like a sinner. You have to make decisions about your own life. We’re all big girls now. We can make our own choices.
So why do we let these media nags get away with telling us how to live our lives? I think I know the answer. According to these commentators we women are not exercising individual choice, we are making a statement. If you have children you’re giving into the tyranny of gender politics. If you don’t have kids, you’re selfish. Then, if you stay at home or go out to work, you’re taking a stand for the way kids should be raised. When you get a face lift you’re succumbing to body image pressure. If you don’t get plastic surgery, well darling, you’re past it. When a bloke gets a hair cut, it’s about the hair. When a woman gets a haircut it’s a political statement. Cropped hair you’re declaring yourself a butch feminist. Long hair you’re a babe airhead. Grey hair you’re a Germaine Greer groupie and letting yourself go. Dyed hair, you’re a post-feminist tragic and who does she think she’s kidding anyway?
We women spend half our lives explaining our decisions to other women. Girls, you don’t have to justify yourself. There are no Lifestyle Police about to bash down your door because you’ve decided not to have kids. If some member of the snipping sisterhood has a go, use the Classic Clark Gable response namely ‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.’
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