Sex and the Pity
After reading through the book's first 100 pages, I don't want to know what women think anymore. In fact, I'm not even sure I want a woman at all. Give me the name of some charity organization for American Women Over 35 and I'll send them a check; have Bob Geldof and Bono throw a Wembley Stadium charity concert for them, I'd support it?but no way in hell am I letting one of those things into my apartment.
Imagining these women eagerly, happily accepting the book's concept that love and image can be framed in purely business terms, I felt myself drowning in a flashflood of misogyny. But then the most depressing statistic of all is cited: There are 28 million single women over 35 in America, and only 18 million men. Here the misogyny turned to pity. Not nice pity, but debilitating pity.
After reading Find a Husband After 35, all those millions of over-35 women seem to be victims who were suckered into their miserable predicament simply because they were gullible enough to believe our culture's biggest lies, the ones about "empowerment" and "choice." They thought they were doing the right thing?they were just acting out what they were told to do.
But there is little choice and no empowerment for most Americans?women most of all. There are only narratives: a discredited, miserable June Cleaver narrative, and the far more dangerous Murphy Brown narrative, which is worse precisely because it's a lie that's still alive, a lie the culture still believes, protects and nourishes as if its very existence depended on it. To suggest anything else?to say that the Murphy Brown "option" is a cruel hoax played on millions of unsuspecting American women?is to risk being branded a heretic.
So the victims keep piling up, year after year. Like the millions of potential readers of Greenwald's book. Twenty-eight million desperate suckers for this vampire-author to tap.
Greenwald is not ashamed of being a vampire. Here's how she describes herself in relation to her reader: "This began as a hobby. I felt so fortunate to have found my own husband, and to be so happy, that I wanted my single friends to have the same experience."
Greenwald is happy and happily married. For her, dabbling in husband-catching is merely a happy diversion in her happy life, like Lady Di visiting Cambodian landmine victims. She is, in other words, the complete opposite of her target reader. And not only because she's happily married. She also has a Harvard M.B.A., as she reminds the reader a billion times. And she's thin and pretty for a woman of her age. Greenwald is everything her reader isn't but wishes she could be.
So why would a lonely, aging, presumably fat and insecure and non-Harvard-M.B.A. woman buy her book?
It was this question, and contemplating the answers to it, that made this book the most depressing thing I've ever read. The fact is that no woman who reads this book, with its 15-step program on how to create your own "brand" or how to "maximize your husband-seeking efficiency," will ever find a husband. But she will be able to spend time with a plutocrat-of-happiness like Greenwald. And for some lonely over-35 female office slave, for 28 million of them, spending time with someone happier and better than they is its own reward.
Of the many depressing things that this book suggests about her readers' lives, one is that few of these women have friends with whom they can talk. Nor do her readers even know how to talk to friends in any meaningful way even if they know people. (This isn't uncommon at all?I know too many women in this country who have acquaintances, but not friends.)
Greenwald is there to tell them what it's like to have a friend. In the section on finding a "Mentor"?sort of like an AA mentor who helps guide and motivate the husband-seeker through the book's 15-step, 18-month program?Greenwald lists several criteria. One criterion is "Has Time Available: Everyone is busy with their own lives, but some people will have a little more time to give you than others. Your Mentor should be able to commit at least two hours per week for you?"
My god, is it really that hard for the 28 million lonely women to find a best friend willing to give them two hours a week? That's only 17 minutes per day!
Next, Greenwald instructs her reader to draft a one-page "written agreement" to be signed by husband-seeker and her best friend. There's even a copy draft of this agreement. Imagine this: a lonely, whiny 47-year-old single woman nervously calling her best friend, who is likely married, happy and cold, and asking her to be an official "Mentor" helping her to find a husband? And then asking her to sign a written contract binding her to this depressing burden! Among the contract agreements: "2. Speak by phone, e-mail or in person at least once per week."
Do lonely over-35 American women need a contract to get a best friend to speak with them once a week? This isn't even funny.
If Greenwald's wretched readers had problems keeping friends before reading this book, then following her advice will be the easiest way to closet-clean the last acquaintances out of said lonely, American women's lives.
It gets worse. Greenwald pens complete transcripts of make-believe conversations between the reader and her chosen Mentor on how to get her (or him) to agree to help. The conversation includes imaginary responses by the prospective Mentor, then the reader's imaginary responses to the imaginary responses. It's like some depressing spinster's dream conversation within her head as she sits in a musty, dark apartment.
This was when I realized that Greenwald's target reader doesn't at all intend to find a husband; rather, she just wants to fanaticize about what it's like to find a husband. Her target reader wants the process to be long, tough, grueling, guided by an ultra-successful Mentor like Greenwald, and in the end, successful.
Find a Husband After 35 isn't a self-help book in the practical sense. It's a modern 21st-century fairy tale for all the Murphy Browns who don't have television cameras and the eyes of a studio audience fixed on them. And this fantasy is given richness with imaginary conversations scripted out for the lonely single over-35 woman, all overseen by the Greenwald-vampire, a perfect master for the downtrodden 28 million. It is, in other words, a book of perfectly refined masochism.
Americans are an incredibly lonely, fearful people, and Find a Husband After 35 unintentionally exposes part of this lonely terror. We are only comfortable selling things to people?because that gives us a fair excuse for talking to them. Hence, the framing of this book in M.B.A. marketing terminology. Either selling to people, or else slaughtering foreigners?neither involves social skills. We're the world's ogre: lonely and violent and just wanting to be loved.
This loneliness is brutal on the individual, although most of us don't consciously know it thanks to effective cultural propaganda. Our loneliness also, it must be said, makes us a great imperial people, a successful conquering nation. That's the trade-off: misery on the individual level, greatness on the national-imperial level.
Which brings me to the biggest question that the book raised in my mind: What keeps these 28 million lonely women alive? Why do they go on living? I honestly can't answer that.
In the novels of Dostoevsky or Celine, these characters wouldn't live; they'd commit epic suicide, they'd be tragic. But in America, they rarely do the sensible thing. Instead, they go on living, miserable, lonely, chin up all the way to the nursing home.