Part 8 (2/2)

6. If men crave a chocolate bar, they don't eat fourteen rice cakes. Plus a bag of carrot sticks, some leftover chicken, and a bowl of Tofutti-then break down and eat the chocolate bar anyway, hating themselves for it the whole time.

Men are stunningly direct in their needs. When they're hungry, they eat. When they want a cheeseburger, they eat a cheeseburger. When they want ice cream, they say, ”Hey, I want some ice cream.” They don't go, ”Hey, does anyone here want ice cream?” then stew if n.o.body else does because now it means they can't have some, either.

And this modus operandi of theirs extends beyond food. Men are not afraid to ask for what they want, period, for fear that ”n.o.body will like them.” Whether they're asking a secretary to write a letter for them, a waiter to take back a lousy steak, or their boss for a raise, they express their needs clearly and directly. And, big surprise, they tend to get what they want more frequently than women who hem and haw, hoping the world will ”get it.”

7. When men go on diets, they don't make a career out of it. They don't buy calorie counters, tiny food scales, and join support groups with weekly weigh-ins en ma.s.se in which they discuss ”strategies for holiday eating.” Doctors-or significant others-tell men what they can and cannot eat, and the guys pretty much take it from there.

At restaurants, they shrug their shoulders and say to the waitress, ”Nope. Can't eat burgers. Doctor says I can't have red meat. Guess I'll have the heart-smart fish-fiesta platter.” Then they shrug their shoulders, pat their bellies, and say, ”Yep, I'm getting a gut. Guess I have to cut back on the beer and do a little NordicTrak.” When we ask them how much weight they want to lose, they shrug their shoulders again: ”I dunno. Coupla pounds. Enough so I can fit back into my jeans.” End of story. The next forty-five minutes are not spent in an orgy of self-flagellation and calorie parsing.

8. Men do not insist upon HTA (Home Toilet Advantage). Okay, I know this isn't ladylike, but if we're going to talk about improving women's lives, at some point we've got to mention ”going to the bathroom.” I don't like it either. I'm as prissy as they come when it's time to visit the Scatology Department.

But let's face it, most gals I know would sooner throw up in somebody else's bathroom than use it for anything more than a quick pee. (I mean, the doo-doo taboo is so pervasive that ”s.e.x and the City” once based an entire episode around the fact that Sarah Jessica Parker's character finally ”did a number two” in her boyfriend's bathroom.) Granted, the lines in ladies' rooms are long enough, but I know women who are so uncomfortable doing their business in any other bathroom (i.e., dorm, office, in-laws) that they develop some serious gastrointestinal problems. Men will take a dump anywhere-and their bathroom lines are still shorter and faster (go figure). To that end, men also do not refuse to pee in the middle of a romantic moment for fear of ”ruining the mood.” Perhaps this is one of the many reasons they get fewer bladder infections than we do.

For the sake of our health, we may be wise to take a cue from them and, ahem, lighten up a little.

Anyhow, these are small things, I know. But in their own way, they have the potential to improve how comfortable we feel in our own skin and in the world at large. And the beauty of it is, while we're learning these behaviors from guys, it absolutely in no way interferes with guys learning stuff from us.

And what might this stuff be?

Oh, just about everything else in the world that's not on this list.

Chapter 15.

Family. Oy.

How to Survive Your Relatives

I was on a corner the other day when a wild-looking sort of gypsy lady with a dark veil over her face grabbed me on Ventura Boulevard and said, ”Karen Haber! You're never going to find happiness, and no one is ever going to marry you.” I said, ”Mom, leave me alone.”

-KAREN HABER They begin in November, just before Thanksgiving, and their symptoms usually last until a few days after New Year's. I'm speaking, of course, about those dreaded winter afflictions known as parentus horriblus, siblingus tensus, and relativus overloadus, otherwise known as ”holidays with your family.”

”Well, I'm off to Bosnia,” my co-worker Jamie groans. ”Bosnia” refers not to the former Yugoslavia but to her parents' house in New Jersey, where her mother stops chain-smoking just long enough to say things to Jamie like, ”Tell that no-good father of yours to pa.s.s the f.u.c.king latkes.”

Mariel calls me. ”That Woman just telephoned again to ask why I'm not coming to Boca a day early to help her clean the garage. One more call from That Woman and, I swear, I'm joining the Hari Krishnas.”

That Woman, by the way, is what Mariel calls her mother.

Then my girl Barbara drops by. ”Guess what I'm getting for Christmas?” she announces. ”A new stepmother. Dad's girlfriend number three. The one who's two years younger than me and works at the roller rink. Got any Prozac?”

”Time to spend Thanksgiving with the Mouth from the South,” groans my friend Chris, referring to her sister. ”Five days of listening to her brag about how much her furniture costs.”

Aah, family.

Face it, anyone who advocates ”traditional family values” has obviously never spent any quality time with their relatives. If they did, they'd realize that most people's families are such a Piece of Work, they deserve their own patent. They'd see that Tolstoy was basically dyslexic. It's not that ”each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” It's that, in their own way, each family is capable of making us, personally, really, really miserable.

If you disagree, by the way, you can stop reading this chapter immediately and climb back on your s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p.

Sure, it's comforting to have a group of people who are either genetically or legally required to look out for us. And sure, they can, on occasion, provide unparalleled strength and comfort. But let's face a few facts here. First of all, most families today are shaken-not blended. And on a day-to-day basis, when everybody is in okay health and there aren't any disasters looming, the traditional family values that most folks practice are things like Nagging and Silent Treatment, Guilt and Fighting Over the Check. Yelling and Paying Backhanded Compliments Like That New Haircut Looks Good It Really Hides Your Double Chin.

Nothing, but nothing, can shred a girl's self-esteem as easily as our families can.

Forget high school. No one rattles our cool, fuels our insecurities, criticizes us, or makes us revert back to an eager-to-please seven-year-old more quickly than our relatives. Even when they aren't around, we feel perpetually watched and judged by them. They're perched on our shoulders like those angels and devils in the cartoons-our father in a red catsuit with horns and a pitchfork; our mother in a white tutu, a lopsided halo bobbing over her head-everyone who's ever raised us hovering above us in a choir of critics whispering: That's what you're wearing?

It's about time you cleaned your apartment.

So when are you going to find someone nice and settle down already?

You know, something like that is no longer cute at your age.

This is the dirty little secret that's so often ignored by traditional feminism: The patriarchy may promote all sorts of s.e.xism, but often these values are instilled in us not by Rush Limbaugh but by our mother's holier-than-thou sister Darlene whose unofficial mantra is, ”Keep acting like that and you'll never get a husband.”

We don't learn gender-role stereotypes from the Southern Baptist Convention, Playboy, or Phyllis Schlafly. We get them from a catty, compet.i.tive older sister who announces, ”I'm the pretty one. You just have personality.” Or a father who routinely tells us to ”go help grandma” in the kitchen while he and our brothers watch the Super Bowl. Or a mother who says, ”If Jeffrey is. .h.i.tting you in the playground, that's just because he likes you.”

The sad truth is that the people who share our home turf, if not our DNA, can do more damage to a gal's sense of personal power than all those fartbags at the Heritage Foundation combined.

Recently, I attended a women's forum lead by Regina Williams, chairwoman of the Michigan chapter of the National a.s.sociation to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA). The young women in the audience were of all ethnicities and backgrounds, but, truth be told, Williams was the only sister in the room who clocked in at three hundred pounds. Interestingly enough, she was also the only sister in the room who'd posed for a magazine in a leopard-skin bathing suit (but that's another story).

Compared to her, the rest of us looked svelte, as my grandmother used to say. Nonetheless, when Williams asked us, ”How many of you think you're overweight?” at least eighty percent of us raised our hands.

”Now, to me, all of you appear to be of average weight,” Williams said. ”Where do you get the idea that you're heavy?”

The obvious answer, of course, would have been the media. And at first, I admit, we gals indulged in a little Calvin and Cos...o...b..s.h.i.+ng. But then the majority of us began talking about our families. And talking. And talking. It didn't take Buffy to find the real demons.

”Every time I go home for the holidays I tense up,” one woman confessed. ”I know that as soon as I walk in the door and take off my coat, my mother's going to give me the once-over. She won't even have to say anything. I'll know just from the way she raises one eyebrow that she thinks I've gained weight.”

”I have three brothers, and we all have hearty appet.i.tes,” said another. ”But my stepfather always makes these snide remarks at the dinner table, like, 'Wow, look at her shovel it in. She's a regular John Deere backhoe.' ”

”Every family get-together becomes a search-and-destroy mission,” said a third, who identified herself as an artist. ”First they ask me why I'm so heavy. Why haven't I been taking care of myself, they ask. When I tell them I'm fine, they say, 'How can you be fine working at Starbucks?' I say that Starbucks is great-it covers my health insurance and gives me time to paint. Then my uncle goes something like 'Paint, schmaint. You can't pay your rent with a picture, you know.' At which point, my mother always jumps in and says how I should be in law school. Lawyers make real money, she says. And then, my aunt adds something about how all the good single men are in law school-maybe I'd finally get a boyfriend. At which point, of course, the discussion comes full circle, because then my mother says, 'But who's going to want to date you when you're so fat?' ”

What's a girl to do? Intellectually, of course, we may realize that our families' criticisms of us are not actually about us, but them-their life choices, their disappointments, their hopes and fears, and so forth. Yet this is cold comfort when our own demons start emerging after Halloween each year. I mean, it's one thing to know that your family is a tin of a.s.sorted nuts like everybody else's. It's quite another not to let them actually sap us of our confidence.

How do modern chicks rule the world when we feel cowed in our own roost? How do we recuperate from our relatives?

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