Difficult and important read. I’m not sure where I stand these days, as I face down 70 in a few years, but one thing I have learned over time: those people who were held up as ideals for my generation as well as yours no longer interest me for many of the same reasons. Perhaps it’s in part a function of age. I’ve no idea. I grew up with that notion that women could have it all as it were, we were all going to be Superwomen. We’d all be beautiful and successful and have kids and the perfect man (or not), and we’d be able to juggle it without sweating. I sweat. And in sweating, I stink. So clearly I am not Superwoman, not only because I didn’t find The Perfect Man and Have the Perfect Kids and Live the Perfect Life, but I bucked so much of society that I ended up an outlier. And oh my god much happier for it, but not without bemoaning my failures first. I think that each generation has its own template. It has to be in part that lie that whatever, whoever we are individually isn’t enough. That, of course sells a shitload of products, but nothing much changes because society doesn’t. Not yet. The rise of #MeToo is, like Civil rights and Voting Rights, an agonizingly slow sea change that bears fruit in an impossibly far away future, for generations far ahead. First we have to fight for the changes, we get a law passed, then society fights back with everything it has to resist because said change threatens the status quo (patriarchal control, religious control etc) then over decades and decades, other inevitabilities start to validate those changes (birth rates, immigration etc) and eventually, whether society likes it or not, what was right about those Rights begins to become a norm. I won’t be around for much of that. I can only speak for myself, but for my part, the increasing failure of the EWW and ridiculously fake Influencers like the Kardashians, about whom I know nothing but for what I read in the long/short line at my local Safeway, is proof positive to me that holding up any ideal from the Kardashians to Paltrow is just. ….stupid. We need to carve out our own paths. It’s hard, dirty, sweaty and stinky. We can’t be those people. We have to be our own best versions of ourselves. And, ultimately, deeply, richly satisfying. If I don’t take much time to attack the carefully curated uber rich who are held up as my ideal, it’s because I’m too damned busy living a ridiculously interesting life of my own, without riches to manage, a staff of dedicated blemish-removers and highlight-maintainers, and plenty of dirt under my poorly-manicured nails. Great piece, Sady, as always.