Rewind to last month. It's a Sunday morning, I'm in my kitchen in some mismatching pjs, drinking tea and planning to get dressed at some point, and I'm
perusing
(as you do) the Guardian's website when I stumble across an
article from Hadley Freeman. I say stumble across; I read pretty much
everything she writes fullstop (along with Charlie Brooker, obv).
Anyhoo, and losing the present tense cos it gets old, fast. This
particular article was a list of
ten awesome women. Any
list that includes Miss Piggy and Nina Simone AND Katherine Hepburn wins
so hard. So I was already delighted and mentally agreeing with
everything she said, and adding Nora Ephron and probably Anita Rodik to that list,
when I noticed a little note at the bottom of the page that this was
from none other than a forthcoming book,
Be Awesome.
So I promptly pre-ordered it (Kindles are wonderful and terrible things).
And last weekend, I finally had some time to stop, connect said Kindle to the internet, download said
Be Awesome, make a big pot of tea, sit down and load that bad boy up.
Be Awesome is a collection of essays about being a woman. More specifically, trying to be a woman, a feminist and general all round good egg today. It rails against the nonsense pigeon-holing and stereotypes happening to us, and gives a lot of good advice about general life-activities (case in point, the essay: But do you like him"). From surviving the office, to what to expect when your friends have sproglets, to eating disorders, confidence, sex, relationships, and the lies that the media- movies, TV and particularly women's magazines throw at us every single goddam day.
That may sound heavy, but it's fast paced and funny as all hell. I devoured it all in one sitting and have been flitting back to some of my favourite essays ever since.
The strongest essay of the book has to be "There will always be something wrong with your body, which means nothing is wrong with your body." Seriously, re-read that sentence five times and let out a sigh of relief. I have most of it highlighted. The essay reminds us of the absurdity of cankles and lady garden bumps and wrinkles and freckles and whatever magazines, designers, columnists or anyone else has designated as the new "problem". It's hard not to buy into this rubbish, but remember this "underneath
any article and any advert that suggests a woman should look like
anything other than a human woman lies a hot and sticky swamp of
misogyny".I feel dreadful when I read women's magazines- I hate my body, my size, my skin, my wardrobe, my inadequate bank balance. Why? Why do we spend money and time and effort to be told what's wrong with us? When the truth is that there is
nothing wrong with us*. This is not just about accepting who we are and what we look like, it's about telling people who believe it appropriate to tell us that that's not good enough for us to be functioning members of society, to go and stick it somewhere.
There is nothing wrong with my body. There is nothing wrong with your body. Buy this book, read this essay, print it off (sorry Hadley...) and give it to every woman and every
girl and every man and every boy that you know.
There are many other reasons to buy or otherwise acquire the means to read this book (don't nick it, that's just rude). The most important of which I think is that as a collection, it reminds us that we can and should reject assumptions and stereotypes projected onto us. The world is busy trying to sell us the emperor's new clothes, and we're letting them in many instances. And we are quite often
not awesome to ourselves as a result, even as we nag and exhort our friends to live by that standard.
We claim who we are for ourselves; no one else gets to decide that. It depresses me that a significantly large amount of
people reach my blog by searching for "things a 16 year old girl should
know/do". While I hope they have food for thought from what they find
here, I hope they reach Hadley Freeman soon.
(*nothing except my horrendous hay fever anyway)
