y'all are gonna make me buy a pair of ugly readers i don't need aren't you

what on earth is happening to middle aged women.

I have been waiting for years to be old. I am not old yet- merely 41- but I am now at the age where I am old enough- the kids are in school, my husband’s job is established, I have a little tree house of a studio I can escape to to write- but most importantly, I am old enough to stand on my own two feet and not need an invitation to have an idea. I am neither a potential marriage partner nor a pregnant woman nor a mother of young children- I am in these interesting years where my mind and body are still intact and I can get on with it. So I was just casually googling Eileen Fisher tunics and sensible shoes and THEN

everyone decides that middle aged women need to get down with their weird selves and LIVE IT UP. So we have Lyz Lenz sponsoring divorce and Molly Roden Winter’s “More” which frankly made almost all of its reviewers wish for less. And there are more. Miranda July’s new book fictionalizes the victorious journey of middle aged women to live their best selves now- As Freddie deBoer writes

A woman quoted in the Krueger piece says, “The character is just so determined to live the life she wants, the best, most interesting life she can…. We all toasted to that.” That’s nice, honey. But no one lives the life they want. No one lives the best, most interesting life they can.

I could look the other way at this phenomenon if it was just secular women, but I see the very same threads of dissatisfaction with the status quo mixed with feminist empowerment in Christian circles. In her recent book, Shannon Harris reflects on the ways that Christian patriarchy has affected her life. In her recounting, it has made her a shadow of what she might have been. She recounts the following:

When I was three, the Montessori teacher told my mother she was sure I would grow up to be a singer or an actress. She said that in her classroom of thirty children my voiced carried over everyone else’s… My mother thinks one of the reasons I am musical is because she was taking piano lessons while she was pregnant with me (17).

When I was five, my parents took me into New York City to see the original production of Annie on Broadway and I was never the same after that. I wanted to be Annie. I needed to be on that stage (18).

“I taught myself to sing out in the garage… I felt my own power when I sang” (18).

It is this power- intrinsic, world-class, without equal- that “they” stole from her. In Christian women’s lit, it is almost always Christian patriarchy that does this. Harris was part of the Sovereign Grace church network, which has been accused of widespread sexual abuse and misconduct. But Harris somehow deduces that this patriarchal culture robbed her of her own success. By her own telling, without the constraints of a patriarchal church, she would be the star that she was meant to be.

I actually started out reviewing both Harris’s book and Britney Spear’s book- The Woman they Wanted and The Woman in Me, respectively- but Britney’s book was so much more honest and so much clearer about the human condition that I didn’t finish the review. Let me repeat that. Britney Spears had a much more realistic view of her failures and the way they were or weren’t related to cultural expectations of her. Britney Spears! (It’s actually a great audiobook, btw. It takes a real honest person to admit she got married by mistake- meaning she didn’t know she was getting married during the ceremony).

What I am asking is for us to separate out the very-real situations of church-abuse from our own thwarted success and ambitions. The idea that patriarchal churches are both a) causing harm and b) preventing female brilliance situates both harm and female brilliance as natural states. But what if they are both outliers- harm and abuse being things that occur not-always, and female brilliance as something that itself is not a given?

This was my main concern with Katelyn Beaty’s “Evangelical Bro Code” thesis; not that abuse or a “bro code” might exist in some situations, but that (by her account) it is the natural outcome of male authority, and that it is also squashing women’s potential. This narrative of male-power-that- threatens-female brilliance is just a religious iteration of the Hot Menopausal Girl summer theme we are seeing everywhere.

(You wanna know why I am not a best-selling author? It’s because I have not put in the work to be a best-selling author! I could blame patriarchy or childrearing or household work but that would imply that without such things I’d be soaring! And that assumes things that may in fact not be true! It was in fact nice to have a decade where I didn’t need to be successful in order to be valuable, thank you very much.)

All of this does in fact connect to women’s work at home; for the very ordinariness that it presents to us through daily washing and attending to may in fact be the reality of our lives handed to us. St. Freddie again, (swear words, sorry bashful readers):

OK, but what does this have to do with declining birthrates? I think both the burgeoning attitude of “I’ll just f—k whoever I want forever, no partners for me” and of “I don’t need kids to have a good life” are united in a few ways - they are of course perfectly legitimate choices to make; they certainly work for some people; they often betray an inability to understand the inevitability of our future infirmity; they are a reflection of a deepening cultural belief that the only thing we should care about is ourselves, our immediate desires and independence.

There is nothing like the plodding ordinariness of raising young children that reminds us that life is full of a lot of tasks and tendencies that aren’t that stunning. It should remind us that we, too, aren’t as great as we thought. Perhaps the greatest gift of the Christian life is that very reminder- that you are not as special as you’d thought. Indeed that you do not need to be special in order to engage this most sacred mystery- that Christ has died, risen, and is coming again. This frees you not to greatness but to the most ordinary forms of faithfulness.

For the time being, that daily faithfulness is the most beautiful thing I have. We need to stop telling women that they are extraordinary and free them to the ordinary means of grace. The idea that female brilliance is extensive throughout the population and female power is without vice has given rise to this Charlie’s Angels vibe within Christian circles where all you have to do is Promote Women and then success will result. But you know what? It’s not true. And it’s kind of embarrassing! The fact that I can’t be just a woman who thinks but I also have to be sexy and powerful and sort of a rock star while I do it- I told you, this is my Eileen Fisher era! The year of soft pants! Could I just not pretend that am 25, seeing as I am fooling no one anyway?

As much as I will work and continue to advocate for women’s participation in spaces where it has been lacking, I will continue to resist narratives of female empowerment that claim that brilliance and success are owed to all women and are the natural result of their participation. If you are a lady theologian in training, or a writer wanting to improve, I will help you! But I am probably gonna do it with a lot of red pen.

Let’s call this the Second Naievete regarding women. We did women are equal to men, we did women can do whatever men can do, now we are doing Women Have not only Lost Out on Opportunities but Also they are Hot and Brilliant Without Exception. It is female innocence and sexual availability all over again, and that no one can see this is stunning to me. Maybe y’all need a pair of ugly readers after all.