How to Do What You Love. January 2006 To do something well you have to like it.
That idea is not exactly novel. We've got it down to four words: "Do what you love. " But it's not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated. The very idea is foreign to what most of us learn as kids. And it did not seem to be an accident. The world then was divided into two groups, grownups and kids. Teachers in particular all seemed to believe implicitly that work was not fun.
I'm not saying we should let little kids do whatever they want. Once, when I was about 9 or 10, my father told me I could be whatever I wanted when I grew up, so long as I enjoyed it. Jobs By high school, the prospect of an actual job was on the horizon. The main reason they all acted as if they enjoyed their work was presumably the upper-middle class convention that you're supposed to. Why is it conventional to pretend to like what you do? What a recipe for alienation. The most dangerous liars can be the kids' own parents. Bounds Notes. Sandra Hawken Diaz: Do Girls "Run the World" if They Do it Half-Naked? When I was 13, I made a list of the 28 parts of my body that I had to fix in order to be happy.
I kept the list in a lavender envelope under my mattress, together with ads I clipped from women's magazines -- pictures of perfect, sexy models. According to my list, my breasts were too small, my butt wasn't perky enough, my thighs were too fat, and my ankles were embarrassing. My ankles. When I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, sexy "beer babe" ads were everywhere and blondes with bouncy boobs were used to sell cars. I didn't buy the beer or the cars, but I did learn to hate my body and wish I were someone else. Today, some people act as though sexism has disappeared. But if that were the case, why is my young niece bombarded with media images that make those beer babes look as innocent as Minnie Mouse? As my niece grows up, I don't want her to suffer from the same obsessive worries and self-loathing that I did.
In some ways, it's more confusing for girls now than it was for me. Antigurús con falda. Guía de lectura para la mujer moderna. Para Nora Ephron fueron los desodorantes vaginales.
A Caitlin Moran lo que le saca de quicio son las ingles brasileñas. En 1975, Ephron –periodista, guionista y directora de películas como Cuando Harry encontró a Sally y Tienes un e-mail– publicó Ensalada loca, una colección de ensayos autobiográficos y humorísticos en torno al feminismo y lo femenino. Dentro de unos meses, Anagrama, que ya la publicó en su día, editará en España Cómo ser una mujer, de la periodista británica Moran. A sus libros los separan más de tres décadas, pero tienen muchas cosas en común. Comparten una mirada entre incrédula y exasperada sobre lo que viene a ser la condición femenina y su absurdo cotidiano. Ephron, en su día, reflexionó sobre la llegada del desodorante vaginal a los supermercados estadounidenses a finales de los años 60. La periodista británica no está sola. «No recuerdo cómo surgió el título», rememora Heti, la autora de Cómo debe ser una persona, «pero siempre quise que pudiera ayudar.