>be me

“It’s funny how she’s scared of things in advance — quite frantically so — but then absorbs them. She’s scared of herself in a way: scared precisely of her life being reconstructed in a different way — scared of the future she knows she’d like to have.”

‘When the restless, isolated, bored, and insecure housewife fled the Feminine Mystique for the workplace, advertisers faced the loss of their primary consumer. How to make sure that busy, stimulated working women would keep consuming at the levels they had done when they had all day to do so and little else of interest to occupy them? A new ideology was necessary that would compel the same insecure consumerism; that ideology must be, unlike that of the Feminine Mystique, a briefcase-sized neurosis that the working woman could take with her to the office. (…) Somehow, somewhere, someone must have figured out that [women] will buy more things if they are kept in the self hating, ever-failing, hungry, and sexually insecure state of being aspiring “beauties.”’