Japan does bathrooms better than anywhere else, including public toilets.
Singapore – June
We went to Singapore (first time for both of us) because Brendan was co-chairing a SREcon, but we took some extra time to sightsee and get together with friends and fellow alumni of Woodstock School.
I’m doing some electronic file cleanup today, and ran across a piece of writing my dad must have sent me years ago but I have no recollection of reading.It’s an interesting window into the lives and attitudes of my grandparents and great aunt and uncle, all of whom I barely knew.
. . . a small piece of meat, bone, and gristle went flying out the kitchen window.
‘What was that your threw out? I asked.’
‘A piece of somethin’ that floated to the top of the gumbo, why?’
‘Shape a little like a banana with a little bone inside o’ it?’
‘Yeah, but so what?’
‘You idjit! That was the penis bone from de possum we trew in de gumbo!’
‘Animals do not have a bone in their dicks, Uncle Louis.’
‘Louis! You see now what you’ve got the boy doing with your filthy language?’ said my mother still in her housecoat.
This interview took place a few months later, and was shown on a local channel this week, you can also watch it above. It was fun and, of course, I’m always happy to have an opportunity to talk about Woodstock!
I also enjoyed chatting with the evening’s other guest, Asha Sharma, author of American in Khadi: The Definitive Biography of Satyanand Stokes. Stokes was her grandfather, a fascinating character. The only American to be arrested for participating in the struggle for India’s independence, he also introduced apples to Himachal Pradesh, where they are now a major cash crop.
As a child, I was accustomed to drawing attention because I looked different from most of the people around me: I lived in Bangkok, where Thai women were constantly pinching my cheeks and exclaiming over my fair skin and blonde hair. I assumed they were merely intrigued because I looked strange to them. I didn’t think much about my looks one way or the other; I’m not sure whether that was unusual for a girl of my generation.
Then, around age eight, I started wearing glasses. Glasses weren’t cool in those days, and there weren’t many style choices, especially in kids’ sizes:
^ these were called granny glasses – just what a 9 year old wants!
7th Grade
Through the 70s and 80s, glasses styles just got worse.Then there was my hair…
Fine, blonde, and uncompromisingly straight, it would have been “the look” in hippie days. But in the big hair era, it refused to respond to curling irons, and was badly damaged when I tried having it permed.
All this is by way of saying that, during those crucial teenage and young adult years, I rarely had any sense of myself as attractive. Shy and geeky, I also didn’t have the outgoing personality that gains a not-conventionally-attractive girl attention. Nevertheless, I briefly had a sweetheart in 7th grade, until our classmates teased us so much that being together was not worth the bullying.
Studio Portrait, 1984
I was 13 and somewhat behind the development curve of my American peers when my family moved to Bangladesh. During my year there and subsequent four years at boarding school in India, I grew accustomed to either too much male attention, of the wrong sort, or none at all. At school, it seemed as if every boy I got a crush on immediately became interested in some other girl, without ever noticing me.
Okay, yes, I eventually grew into this body:
donning a sari for graduation, 1981
…but I was growing up in India, where local standards of modesty required women’s bodies to be covered by loose clothing.
Woman and Wife
We judge our own looks by the looks of the people we are able to attract. “S/he’s out of your league,” we tell ourselves. Or we feel smug when someone whom the world acknowledges to be hot thinks we’re hot, too. I had a cute boyfriend my first year in college, but my fundamental geekiness kept me out of further relationships until Enrico. Who was (and is) very handsome. Was I in his league? Well, he liked my body, but wanted everything else to change: I should wear contacts instead of glasses, and grow my hair long. This is why, in my wedding pictures, I didn’t look much like the me of before.
Or after. The contacts were a failed experiment: my eyes are too dry and allergic. My fine hair, when long, simply becomes limp. Though I lost my pregnancy weight within a year or two, I ended up heavier than when I got married – and so did Enrico. This seems to happen to a lot of married people. Age? Laziness? Complacency? Or maybe just feeling that no one actually cared what I looked like. I put on a lot more weight when I started traveling for Sun and spending more time in the US: by mid-2008 I weighed around 170 lbs.
Weight aside, I was learning how to look better.
I had started buying designer glasses, and let my hairdresser and my daughter talk me into livening up my increasingly dull-colored hair. 2007
I learned how to wear makeup. Colorado, 2008
And started having fun with my look. 2009 (portrait by Shawn Ferry)
Weight loss is a well-known consequence of divorce. In my case, it could have been taken as an early warning sign. I left Italy in March, 2008, but at the time was not ready to acknowledge that my marriage was effectively over. By January, 2009, I had begun to lose weight, without even trying very hard.
In August, 2009, Enrico and I went on a road trip together to some of the great national parks of the US southwest. I think we both knew this would be the end. We had largely failed to celebrate our 20th anniversary on May 28th of that year, even though we had been geographically together that day: we went out to dinner and he bought me some beautful jewelry – my friend Sue forced him to.
Though I still weighed close to 160 lbs, I was, I thought, looking pretty good. Others had been letting me know that they thought so, too – a novel experience for me. At a Gap store in Aspen, I tried on a miniskirt and low-cut shirt. I twirled in front of Enrico, looking for a compliment – something he had not given easily for years.
“How do I look?” I demanded.
“You’re holding up better than any other 46-year-old I know,” he grudgingly admitted.
Twitter forces me to realize that this incident was confused in my memory with a later one, when I actually put on that outfit to go out to dinner. After days of hot, dusty driving and hiking, staying in cheap motels, we spent two nights at Bally’s hotel in Las Vegas, and I wanted to celebrate the relative luxury. Cleaned up, made up, dressed up in my new clothes, I once again tried for a compliment, some acknowledgement that my husband of 20 years still felt any spark of attraction to me.
The silence stretched. He seemed to be going through an immense inner struggle, as if to say anything nice to me would somehow cede power in the relationship. I don’t remember what he finally said, but, in that long pause, I knew that my marriage was over. I went to bed angry that night, and woke up thinking: “I can’t care anymore what he thinks, it hurts too much.” By the end of the month we had had “the conversation.” Of course this was far from the only factor in our breakup, but it’s important to feel that your partner finds you attractive – and I hadn’t felt that for a long, long time.
Here and Now
December 2009
March 2011
December 2011
I’ll be 50 in November, and I’ve never looked better (for one thing, I dropped another 20 pounds). I’m still not used to the idea but, actually, I look pretty damned good. Which is an unexpected gift at this stage in my life. Will it last? Of course not, at least not in its present form. I may always look “better” than some average of women my age or women in general, but I will certainly age. The alternative is to die young (which I’m currently trying to avoid).
The Future
What about what Belle de Jour once called “the cycle of self-hatred and frantic desperation that plagues many women as they age”?
To me, having beauty feels a bit like having money once did. Twelve years ago, at the crest of the dot com boom, I was making (for me) awfully good money. I flew business class from Milan to California four times a year. I took my family on vacations to the Caribbean and out to eat in expensive restaurants. And I wondered: would I feel bad about myself when the good times stopped rolling?
Which they did. From 2001 to 2007 I spent down my savings as I was less and less able to find meaningful and gainful employment in Italy. I was frustrated and didn’t like going broke, but I didn’t feel any worse about myself. I prefer the security and ease of mind of having money, but it doesn’t define who I am; lacking money doesn’t affect my sense of self-worth (though it causes other stresses).
I hope and expect that I’ll feel the same way about my looks. I’m enjoying what I have now, but it doesn’t affect who I am. Indeed, feeling confident that I am a worthy and interesting person independent of my looks probably contributes to my attractiveness, and that kind of confidence tends to come to women only with age, regardless of whether they grew up beautiful.
Update
Headshots from a portrait session with Shawn Northcutt, April 2013:
“To get ahead in business, women need to speak up, blow their own horns, and always negotiate their salary offers. In other words: act like men.”
Women hear this sort of thing often. I’ve said it myself as well-meaning advice to other, especially younger, women. We heard it from many speakers at the WITI summit, successful women who were presumably giving this advice because it had worked for them. Research shows that it can be effective in getting that raise, VC meeting, promotion, or next job.
There are two problems with women emulating men in this way:
The social rules are different for men and women. A man who is assertive and self-promoting is considered, well, manly. A woman who does the same is more often considered a bitch. Both men and women react negatively to “pushy” women.
Because of Point 1 or for socialized reasons, most women feel uncomfortable behaving this way. As a male friend pointed out, telling women to behave more like men is similar to telling introverts they should behave like extroverts. It implies a judgement that the extroverted or “male” way is the “best” mode of human interaction, and we should all strive to emulate it. For some, this may be harrowingly uncomfortable – for some, it’s downright impossible.
There are reams of advice given on doing business in other cultures: how to fit in, how not to offend, how to negotiate with someone who may see things very differently than you do and may not give the cultural cues that you expect. Such advice stresses understanding and compromise, and we all agree that it would be unproductive and gauche to expect our counterparts from other cultures to adapt entirely to our ways.
So why is it acceptable to demand that women take on the modes of interaction more native to men (or introverts to extroverts)?
I have read articles about how even hirers are frustrated at the way women “leave money on the table”. To paraphrase a piece written by an anonymous hiring manager: “I’m authorized to give a higher starting salary, but only if they ask for it. The women never ask, the men always do.”
The women in these situations say, if asked, that they felt the offer was fair – i.e., they assumed the employer would treat them fairly – and/or they didn’t feel comfortable making a counter request and being perceived as pushy broads before even starting a new job. But if they later learned or guessed that they were paid less than a man (or another woman) for the same job, you can bet they resented the hell out of it, and felt betrayed by their employer.
Avoiding “politics” of this kind is a big motivator for many women to found their own businesses: when you’re the boss, you can ensure that your employees are treated fairly.
My own feeling is: if you (my employer) think my job is worth $n, that’s what you should pay me; I should not have to ask. (If you don’t know what the job is worth, I may not either – why don’t we figure it out together?)
Telling women that we’re leaving money on the table by not asking is blaming the victim. Paying higher salaries to those who merely ask rewards negotiating skills, not professional merit or hard work in a particular role which may have nothing to do with the ability to be an aggressive bargainer.
The same applies to introverts – which, by the way, often describes some of your most valuable staff: programmers. Many male engineers are naive, young, introverted, and/or socially awkward, which puts them in a similar position to women at the bargaining table. They may accept your first offer and not subsequently question their salaries, as long as they can pay the rent.
But, in a hot job market, you’re taking a risk when you pay people less than you can afford and know they’re worth. Your best and brightest (men or women, outgoing or introverted) get job offers every week, and if you’re paying them at the low end of the scale, it’s easy for someone else to make a better offer. Company rules may “discourage” your employees from discussing their salaries with each other*, but a recruiter may be happy to say: “Oh, we pay a lot better for that position.”
If you value an employee and want to keep them, it’s in your best interest to deal with them transparently, honestly, fairly, and in a way that accommodates their individual character and style. If that’s not already part of your company culture and policy, perhaps it’s time to revisit those things and think about what kind of company you want to be, in order to keep your best and brightest, and attract more like them.
* In California, it is no longer legal for companies to prevent or penalize employees discussing their salaries. Furthermore, “California’s newly effective (January 1, 2017) pay equity law indicates that reliance on an individual’s salary history does not justify a pay disparity, but the law does not specifically prohibit employers from soliciting the information on applications.”
Especially in light of a recent (April, 2017) court ruling which seems to undermine that law, the best advice is never to give recruiters any previous salary history. However, it can be difficult to avoid doing so. When I interviewed for a job at Google, before I could go there I had to fill out a web form that required me to fill in a “previous salary” field, along with a statement that falsifying any part of the form would end forever my chances of employment with them. That was only the first of several red flags around that interview, I didn’t get the job and that was probably for the best.
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