Not that they won’t try. Try hard. Christ, in a desperate situation, they might even read The Rules, or its sort-of sequel, the new “Surrendered Single,” conduct guides for the twenty-first century, as if interpreted by Helen Gurley Brown. But chances are they’d just crack up and throw those books across the room. Where they would land either on the dry cleaning or on a pile of unsorted clothes.
A SINGULAR FURY
Many real-life single women have read The Rules, and now The Surrendered Single, if only from an “anthropological” point of view, or else as a kind of joke. Because how could any intelligent life-form take this best-selling advice as less than hilarious?
Act as if you were born happy!… don’t leave the house without wearing make-up. Put lipstick on even if you’re jogging! If you have a bad nose, get a nose job! Grow your hair long. Men prefer long hair…. Men like women. Don’t act like a man, even if you are the head of your own company…. Don’t tell sarcastic jokes. Don’t be a loud knee-slapping girl.
The Rules and Rules mentality—manipulate, grovel, and lie to get a man—or the Surrendered Single stance—no control, give in, just lie there—does not strike everyone as hilarious or even mildly funny. It makes some women angry. And this angry woman—a New Mad Woman for the Modern Age—gives us a final, more decisive if less adorable archetype than the bemused Ally/Bridget slacker spinster.
“The concept of a person who is out to land men in a deliberately manipulative manner, suggests a frightening dream world,” says Marjorie, twenty-five, unwed, and “seriously not sorry. I’m a documentary filmmaker. I travel all the time. And as a woman I couldn’t take the time out to plot ‘Getting Men.’ This isn’t junior high. Wear lipstick when you are jogging? If this is to be the basis for a relationship, then you might as well not bother…. At least you’d better stop reading. It is so sickening and unfair.”
For these women—the documentary filmmakers, med students, marketing executives, serious artists—dodging the media has become a task as basic to everyday life as recycling plastic seltzer bottles.
For example, there is nothing on the single calendar more irritating than holidays, with all their attendant advice about what it is the single person should do to “survive” them. At least as far as other people are concerned. One particularly annoying festival is the national day of single dread, Valentine’s Day. How many times can a grown woman be expected to read (and I quote from last year, a major newspaper): “Single in New York and Looking for Love: A Special Report on Dating in the New Century,” which here sounds remarkably like the old. A small excerpt:
Looking for love in New York City is harder than finding a seat on an F train to Queens at rush hour. You can get swamped on the platform. Somebody can cut in front of you. The train can go out of service. When it comes to finding that special person—and we’re talking about relationships here, not just sex—a lot of New Yorkers never leave the station…. [these] are a complicated time for singles, between crushing work obligations and confused notions of how men and women should relate to each other.
“It really makes me want to puke,” says Helen, twenty-six, a currently unemployed copywriter who has lived through many Valentine’s Days and found them “more oppressive than Christmas.” She continues:
There is always the huge Valentine story—about how the creative guy proposed to his girlfriend by glueing letters to a Scrabble board. And they are as a couple so urban chic. They are only twenty-three, and yet they live in some amazing loft in TriBeCa and the skinny-girl delicate little bride-to-be is called Amelie or Chantal and she designs, oh, laced gloves or petite evening bags for dogs. And He, the man, wears those nerd glasses and has on a tie for some reason…. You think, these aren’t real people, or these people are models. And of course they have been styled. To get your attention. And to get your goat. TO PISS YOU OFF. I shouldn’t let it happen, have that response, but it’s just very effective advertising.
There’s a kind of story, a series of images, even more bothersome than the corny all-alone holiday story. That is the thousands of stories, in every known form of media—“the relentless hailstorm,” as one former colleague put it—all about having babies and raising kids.
“I think it started with thirtysomething, in the eighties,” says Gail, thirty-nine, a nature photographer.
It was that horrible Hope character bouncing around with a baby in a forty-room house…. I don’t dislike children, please! I just can’t stand the way you are forced to “react” to them in a way that somehow expresses wonderment with a hint of jealousy because you don’t have any. It’s so sad! Another sad reminder…. I feel like I’m watching [on TV] old fifties footage of the baby boom in the ’burbs only it’s set in the present…. You walk down the street, you’re late and rushing, but wait, you can hear it in the distance getting louder—it’s a stampede! Strollers. And these women never think to move their triplets’ stroller. It’s like, okay, I obviously have the right of way, and the culture supports that. You are just a woman who does not have children, is not married, and either you move or you will get run over.
Some, like Gail, call this confrontation “pure arrogance on the part of anxious younger women… the there-but-for-the-grace-of-God shit.” Some wish only to clarify their own views on the child issue. Martha, forty-four, says:
I’m not childless, I am child-free. And neither is my dog a substitute child. My dog is a fine dog. I am not confused on this point…. It’s hard to believe, but I like my life…. I feel like I earned my life and my feelings about it. Because believe me, living in this culture, it is hard not to feel horribly about yourself when you are young and not following the feminine script…. I write nothing permanently out of my own personal script! I’m ready now to do these things, if they come up. I just wasn’t before and that doesn’t make me a monster or a rule-breaker or a bitch who just, obviously, doesn’t like kids because she complains when she is nearly flattened by strollers on Seventy-second Street…. Mothers take a perverse pleasure in punishing nonmothers. “How dare she speak that way? Oh, that hostile body language! She must not have any children!” That’s the refrain of our age.
The media refrain has variations, but in essence it remains the same: No matter what the single woman says, she can’t really be happy. Her life is barren and disappointing. Friends consider her a social exile. She is in danger at all times when on her own, and she could miss out on becoming a mother. She is, as Anthony Trollope wrote of his thinned-out, run-down Lily Dale, “blank, lonely and loveless.” She is living the “long afternoon of unmarried life.” I quote from a classic 1930s spinster noveclass="underline" “Librarians never marry. And they never die.”
Repeat.
Well, it makes for terrifically grim and sorry copy. And for a long time, I think, women believed it. Or at least they understood there were restrictions, a unique system of singular Jim Crow—unwritten laws concerning where they could go, when, for how long, and with whom. Through the 1960s these matters were actually spelled out in terms so precise the syntax and wording seem borrowed from Deuteronomy.