Rachel’s Musings

You can now connect to other single women via an email group: The Footloose Femails.

“footloosefemails” has been created as a place for single women to connect with each other and talk about issues that we face as we “fly solo” through life – the types of things that we often can’t talk about with others. And hopefully along the way we’ll be making new friends who can relate to everything we say!

So wonder over to Yahoo and sign up! Well, assuming you’re a woman and single by choice: “the group is not open to men or even women seeking anything other that friendship.”

Big Spinster Hattip to Onely!

A new reality show is out! Fortunately, there is hope for all of us single women. Phew! Because as Sarah Haskin tells us “It is a truth universally acknowledged that the worst thing a woman can be is single. Worse than leprosy you ask? Yes. Because lepers live in a colony. Single women live alone.” Hold on! Wait for the last sentence (yeah, I was ready to kill her, too): “So, follow those [dating] rules, and you’ll see that first date turn into a second divorce in no time!” While she’s poking fun at the show, the show is real! And I would bet that it’s premise is exactly what Haskin suggests: Being single is so horrible that we need to do whatever we can to “land a man.” Plus, being with a man – any man – is better than being single.

The women in this boot camp are desperate and single, but can’t figure out why. The cast is composed of classic archetypes of the single woman: the ‘too much too soon’ romantic, the ‘gold digger’, the ‘fixing the wrong guys’ victim, the late 30’s ‘Lone Ranger’. To call the women out on their issues, Steven labels each woman with a moniker that correlates to her main problem. From “Miss Picky,” the woman who is too caught up in a list of impossible expectations, to “Miss Wedding-Obsessed,” the girl that tells guys on their first date she’s looking to be married within a year.

Of course! It’s the women’s fault that they’re single – if only they were to follow Steven Ward’s rules, they’d be happily married by now. Maybe he needs to read Dr. Karen Gail Lewis’ book and get a clue that women have a right not to settle. And we can be perfectly happy without a man, thank you very much.

The methods employed by Steven, with his “brutally honest approach to matchmaking,” are reminiscent of dog training: ” the ladies [get] zapped by an ankle bracelet when they bring up inappropriate topics on a date; or [they learn] how to pose in lingerie in an episode on sex.” Glancing through an interview with Ward, he is suggesting that dating is a game and being honest will prevent you from being in a relationship. He is perpetuating this game by training women to play into it (what happens after they land a guy, he doesn’t say – I guess the game has to continue indefinitely). Unlike Lewis who tells women that it’s okay to be single rather than playing to a man’s notion of what a woman should be like. Rather than degrading ourselves, we should demand that men grow up and be honest. Let’s add another “classic archetype of the single woman:” The happy spinster who proudly doesn’t settle!

I thought I’d write biased summaries of the book “The Challenge of Being Single” as I read it. Here are the first two chapters.

The first chapter addresses the question “how come you’re not married?” Edwards suggests that society’s theme song toward singles is “there’s something wrong with you.” She goes further than identifying this, though: “This social contempt eventually brings about self-contempt. Like any group that has been constantly ignored or downgraded, singles come to believe what others say about them.” (18) She suggests that we are learning to create a need that is experienced so strongly that it feels as basic as the need for food and water: “Psychiatrist Roderic Gorney, in the Human Agenda, says that from babyhood on, we in the Western world have been overfed and overstimulated on a diet of intense emotional relationships so that what is actually an artificial need is experienced as a basic, urgent, almost physiological one. Intense emotional involvement – with mother, father, siblings, friends, and later lovers, spouses and children – is so taken for granted that questioning it would seem to be denying our need for such essentials as food, water, and oxygen.” (21) This outlook leads to the Eternal Search for a partner. Edwards lists two errors that she sees as underlying the search for the One-and-Only: 1. There is only one such person and 2. Finding the One-and-Only will solve all your problems (31). After presenting a positive vision of being single – including mentioning some developments in the legislative arena, which appear to have disappeared – Edwards suggests that as singles we ask ourselves the question of why we’re not married. Not as a question to determine what is wrong with us but as a question to explore why we are making that choice, what we find positive about being single, and what we might be missing.

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The Pew Forum presents an interesting chart showing what people think about global warming: If it occurs and if so, what causes it. All this is broken out by religious affiliation. Overall, 71% of the US population agree that the average temperatures are rising but only 47% of the population (or two-thirds of people who agree with a warming trend) think that this is mostly due to human activity. So, one-third of those observing the warming trend think it’s caused by natural patterns. Apparently, they know better what’s going on than the experts… But fully 21% don’t even notice that there is warming going on – I guess it’s cooler when your head is firmly in the sand.

If you look only at the religiously unaffiliated, the percentage of warming by human activity folks increase to 58%, or 77% of those who think there’s global warming. Looking at the chart, clearly religion has an influence on temperature perception and attributed cause. The more religiously conservative, the less likely a person is to notice the warming and attribute it to human activity. Religious influence is endangering our life support system in (at least) two ways: Ignoring the problem of climate disruption (if you think that it’s either not happening or we’re not the biggest contributor, you’re not going to do anything about it) and multiplying fruitfully without regard to overpopulation (the more people there are on the planet, the more consumption happens, contributing more CO2 to the atmosphere).

Last week, an ice bridge broke off in Antarctica. And at work, we started a new recycling program. Each day, I notice the recycables in the trash and the trash in the recycling bin. How hard can it possibly be to get this right? Sure, some things are confusing but what is more obviously recycable than newspaper?!? It is frustrating! The Antarctic is falling apart but people are too lazy to recycle.

Ever since I wrote about Bella DePaulo’s interview with Jaclyn Geller and the ensuing discussion about using “spinster” to describe ourselves, I’ve wondered about the history of the word “spinster.”

Let’s start with some definitions.
From Merriam-Webster:

1 a: woman whose occupation is to spin
2 b: an unmarried woman and especially one past the common age for marrying
3 a: woman who seems unlikely to marry

2b is also the definition given in the New Oxford American Dictionary.

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