Happiness
You calling me a bitch?
The guidebook for corporate women who are ready to shed the bitch and rocket to lasting success and happiness, too.
I’ve had a successful career in advertising for going on two decades even though the industry is a breeding ground for bitches. Controlling, bossy, ambitious, stop-at-nothing, intolerable bitches. But now I’d had enough and I quit.
“Talk about the kettle calling the pot black,” my friend said, dismissing my bitch excuse for quitting my job at a San Francisco agency.
I gasped and sputtered, “Are you calling me a bitch?”
“We’re both bitches,” she said proudly. “It’s why we’re successful. Remember that line from Madonna—’I'm tough, I’m ambitious, and I know exactly what I want. If that makes me a bitch, okay.’”
Yeah, I remember that line and yeah, maybe it had gone to my head. But in my defense, no one until now had ever called me a bitch. What if my friend was right. What if I was the bitch?
I called up Bernadette Boas who’s written the book on bitches—literally. It’s called, Shedding the Corporate Bitch.
Bernadette had rocketed to the top of her organization, “lashing out, venting, condescending people, disrespecting them, and being a bitch to anyone who crossed my path,” as she put it. Then after decades of high performance, she was let go.
Her story was like hearing an echo. Except in Bernadette’s case, she spent years in bitch recovery. When she emerged, she built a process, brand, and enterprise around helping people “shed their bitch to find the rich.” (You can learn more at SheddingTheBitch.com. Order the book here.)
“I was the ‘bitch of bitches’,” said Bernadette. “But I came to see that my bitchiness was a cover-up for my insecurity. I didn’t believe in my own competence, skills, or talents. That’s why I teach that the starting place for shedding the bitch is discovering your skills talents and accomplishment, or your riches.”
Now this emphasis on women taking responsibility for their bitch isn’t to say that Bernadette doesn’t understand the corporate pressures that can cause a smart, competent woman to stop believing in herself and to compensate by trying to ‘man up’ and get into the old boys club. How could she forget what she’d lived for years? Still, she says, we always have a choice. If Virginia Rometty making it as the ninth CEO in IBM’s history and its first female chief exec is any indication, I’d say Bernadette was onto something.
“I’ve been following Rometty closely,” said Bernadette. “From what I can tell, she didn’t get to the top by being a bitch. She’s strong, confident, assertive, dedicated, and dignified. She took risks, trusted in herself, and leveraged all her skills and talents to pursue her dreams and goals not just for herself, but for the greater good.”
Rometty: CEO of IBM. Me: unemployed. There is, as they say, no arguing with success. Which brings me to the obvious. Yup, it’s time to shed the bitch. I got a feeling, no one’s going I don’t to miss her.
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Loading ...How a Job can Cure an Existential Crisis
“Maybe existential malaise comes from lack of obstacles.”
–Spoken by David Mitchell, author of “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet,” in an interview with Terry Gross, host of the NPR show, “Fresh Air.”
Ever get to that point in your life where you’re sure you know what’s going to happen next–the words, “I coulda seen that coming,” ever ready to tumble out of your yawning face?
It’s happened to me a few times and when it does, I respond by shaking things up but good. Sometimes too good. This time, I left everything I knew, including my home, dog and friends, to take an advertising job in San Francisco. It wasn’t easy but enduring boredom infused with sameness and predictability seemed worse at the time.
So now I’m back to doing what I’ve done before–writing copy, thinking about brands, and coming up with strategies and tactics designed to take markets by storm (or at least get some attention). This time though, I’m finding things are different.
Though the job title is the same, the ad business is no longer the free-wheeling, crazy and creative world it used to be. Blame on lawsuits or the lousy economy but clients sure have become a whole lot more cautious and restrictive in what can be said and done to get the brand out there. So much so that I now find, I’m more of a copymover–or as a woman in the editorial department put it, a copypaster. What this means is the account team tells me exactly what the client wants, and I dutifully move the “approved” copy around the page.
Care to see my ad, doctor?
This leads to conversations like this:
“What’s the call to action?” I ask the account manager, Frank, as he briefs the team on a new ad for a pharma client.
“We want the doctors to call the sales reps,” he says.
Now what I want to say at that point is, that’s not going to happen unless the sales rep is giving out free lap dances. But as we just had a workshop on sexual harassment, I keep my mouth tightly zipped and nod seriously as though I’m thinking hard.
“I know, I know,” says Frank suddenly, waving his hands excitedly. “You can use the bullets with the new data from the clinical trial.”
As I am now a devout team player, I nod my head vigorously and dutifully return to my desk for more copy-and-pasting of approved language. Later, I will be asked to add footnotes, disclaimers, caveats, and references so that by the time I get done with the “ad,” it will look like exactly like a page in a medical journal article.
Some call it advertising. I call it torture. At which point I realize I have traded general boredom with the frustration of trying to be “creative” in a tight little box. I also realize Mitchell is right because I’ve been spending all my “reserve” creative energy trying to figure my way out of that box and in the meantime haven’t had a single existential crisis.
And to think, I get paid for this.
(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...A Sexy Attitude is Ageless
Lindsay Vonn.
You’re never too old to learn something new—like how giving up on “your sexy” is just plain old.
I was thinking about this the other day listening to an interview on NPR with Lindsey Vonn. What got me wasn’t so much her winning a gold medal in the super G, the fact that she uses men’s skis, her superstar youthful looks, or even her powerful athletic body.
It’s her attitude.
She’s direct, honest, opinionated, funny, strong, and focused. She does what she wants to. She calls it like she sees it. She is exactly, unapologetically herself.
She is, in short, sexy.
This came through loud and clear in the interview when they asked her about her decision to appear in Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue wearing a bikini and even less.
“I honestly thought it was a great opportunity,” Vonn explained to NPR. “I mean, I’m not a skinny model, I’m an athlete, I have muscles. And I think that it’s great that I’m given the opportunity to show that. It’s a lot different body image than what’s normally out there.”
Okay, stop right there. I know what you’re thinking: it’s easy to have that sexy attitude when you’re a young, beautiful Olympian.
But just consider: there are plenty of Olympian women out there who are young and beautiful but don’t have Vonn’s attitude.
Now if you can accept sexy is just an attitude, why is it so many women over forty seem to have forgotten that? It’s as though they’ve shut their sexy down, locked the door and thrown away the key. Oh sure they might still look sexy, what with all the anti-aging this-and-that available today, but they don’t feel or think sexy. They’re what I call the “pseudo-sexy.” They’ll spend a lot of money and time trying to look sexy, but it’s not to have sex—that’s the last thing on their minds. It’s to make them feel better about themselves and to get attention. Basically, they’re insecure show offs.
I know this because I blog about sex and the older woman and I get a lot of feedback, or I should say, flak, for it. The flak comes in the form of judgment, disapproval, or even behind-my-back vicious gossip.
Here’s the interesting part. What I’ve noticed about the flak-givers is they’re all members of the pseudo-sexy club. The people with the cool attitude, the ones who actually like sex, they just laugh.
So here’s to you dear, laughing readers. May you keep on with your wonderful ageless attitude, knowing that even though you get lots of sex, it’s the “pseudo-sexies” who are really fucked.
(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5) Loading ...Buzz in the New Year with Style: Best Vibrator Review
Don’t settle for just any sex toy. I review the best vibrators so you can buzz in the New Year with style and make new friends too!
Friends Come In Many Forms.
It’s not too often you meet three new girlfriends with whom you instantly click and know you’ll be friends for life. Amazingly, that’s what happened for me over the holidays. Oh sure, they’re not quite what you’d expect. Okay, I’ll put it out there—they’re vibrators. What’s the big deal? At least they’re not just any vibrators. They’re from LELO, the Swedish company that is to sex toys what Apple is to computers. Through modern design and some seriously elegant engineering, LELO has managed to elevate the embarrassingly ugly sex toy (see Exhibit A) into the “pleasure object,” an icon of “simplicity, sensuality, and sophistication.” (see pictures of my friends, Ina, Mona, and Lily).
[Note to reader: the following is a rare look into the secret sex life of sex toys. For mature audiences only. For a tamer peek into sex toys, please try this though it's not nearly as entertaining...]
Exhibit A: "hummingbird" sex toy I was afraid to use...it's the purple thing, not the drill!
I looked up from the white glossy LELO booklet from which I was reading aloud. “Is that really true, Lily?” I asked my tiny new friend.
Lily peeked her head over the edge of her black silk cloak. “Why, yes, it is, especially for me,” she said with authority. “As for Mona and Ina over there,” she nodded towards them, “Well, they can be real dicks. Especially that Ina, who, with all due respect, is a dick and then some.”
“Geesh,” I said surprised by her strong feelings. Maybe professional jealously, I thought to myself, as I reached for Ina and examined her sleek, elongated hour glass figure. Okay, yes, she’s a little phallic looking but she can’t help that. I fiddled with the chubby green thumb-like projection sprouting from her tapered waist; it turned Ina into a modern, hipper version of the old Rabbit vibrator. “Lily,” I said flicking it, “is this thumby thing you mean?”
“Precisely,” said Lily rocking back and forth in agreement. “That thumby thing, as you put it, has simply gone to her head. If I have listen to her go on again about how she’ll be a thousand times more famous than the Rabbit, well, I think I’ll just explode.” Lily went to cross her arms and then remembered she didn’t have any.
Mona suddenly erupted with a lusty, throaty bellow of a laugh that sounded like it came from the depths of her rechargeable battery. “You know,” she said with a voice sounding remarkably like Mae West, “sometimes a good dick is all a girl really needs, and a little thumby thing ain’t gonna hurt either.”
“I couldn’t agree more, Mona!” I said relieved to be changing the topic. “And bye the way,” I said with admiration, “who styles you? That purple outfit is a—door—a—bull!” Mona blinked coquettishly, which is when I noticed something else. Other than color, the only difference between Mona and Ina was the thumby thing on Ina.
“Hey, are you guys twins or something?” I asked, my finger waving back and forth between them.
“Fraternal,” said Ina speaking up at last. “And since I’ve finally got the floor,” she continued with gravitas, “I’d like to clear something up. We’re actually a very tight team. You need to know that. Okay, so I got this competitive thing with the Rabbit and it gets on Lily’s nerves. Big deal. Lily’s still the best. She’s a good egg and I love her.”
“And she travels well,” piped up Mona.
I picked up little pink Lily and stroked her. She was so soft to the touch, and yet so hard—a perfect package of ‘tough love.’
“Aw, heck,” Lily said, looking from Ina to Mona and then up at me. “Just giving customers what they want, right where they want it.”
“Amen, sister,” said Mona.
Ina crossed her thumby thing (sort of) and nodded approvingly. I sat back and surveyed my new friends. Gawd, they were a sexy looking bunch. Toned, colorful, and focused. You don’t get that too often in girlfriends. That’s when it dawned on me, I’d never thought about my girlfriends in quite this way before.
“Hey girls, I don’t mean to be getting all weird on you or anything, but,” I stumbled on my words and felt my face redden. “I, err, ah, hmmm, wonder what you think about group sex. Be frank with me now.”
“We thought you’d never ask!” they buzzed in unison. And with that the girls jumped out of their matte black boxes and between my leopard print sheets.
Five Minutes Later…
I stretched languidly on my bed, wrapped in the dome of a pleasure-sated moment. Everything had happened so quickly. One minute there was this barely audible symphony of buzzing—no, it was more like a faint purring (ant sex is louder)—followed my some moaning (mine), a few oh my gods (also mine), some eyes-rolling-into-the-back-of-the-head (mine too), high-pitched gaspy breathing (like I was about to die or something), and finally an explosion of a million little firecrackers in my groin and beyond. I raised my head half off the pillow and looked around for the girls who were strewn wildly around the bed.
“Wow, everything is tingling,” I said with a boozy drawl. Ina gave me a high thumby, while Mona and Lily stared at the ceiling, stupid little grins on their face. “I had no idea girlfriends could be so much fun,” I said trying to uncurl my toes. “You guys are amazing—and you have a speed for every need. Whaddya say we make this a regular thing?” I tried nudging them in the ribs but it’s tricky when your friends are three and seven inches high, respectively. “Nappy time?” I asked yawning.
“Actually,” said Mona all-breathy, “We were thinking more along the lines of drinky-poos, right, girls?”
“Right you are, Mona,” said Lily.
I sat up in a cross-legged position. “I can do drinks, no problem. Cosmos okay?” A hush dropped over the girls like a heavy black blanket. My hand flew to my mouth. “What did I say?” I asked, horrified at the possibility that I might have offended the sweetest little friends a girl ever could have.
Lily bounced over and almost jumped down my ear. “Cosmos…Sex and the City…The Rabbit…you follow?” Her eyes darted in the direction of Ina who looked about to burst into tears. Oh my goodness! I had inadvertently brought up the antiquated Rabbit. How could I be so insensitive? I clapped my hands trying to change the mood.
“Hey!” I said brightly. “I’ve great idea. Let’s do shots of Aqua Vit! The drink of Sweden! A tribute to LELO, who made our love possible!”
LELO.com...the source of some good loving
“Now you’re talking,” said Mona hopping up and down.
I reached out and held them tightly. “We all good then?” I asked tentatively. Ina, Lily, and Mona purred in happy agreement. “I love you guys,” I said, a tear sliding down my cheek. “My sex life was so empty before. So hit and mostly miss, if you know what I mean.”
“Yeah,” said Ina sympathetically. “We hear that all the time.”
I got up off the bed and put my clothes back on. As I headed for the kitchen, I suddenly stopped myself at the bedroom door. Another weird, unsettling thought had just hit my brain.
“Hey, guys,” I said turning around. “I gotta ask. I’ve just slept with three girls. Does this make me, well, er, a lesbian?”
Well if vibrators could scream with laughter, they would have. “Are you nuts?” said Mona almost shouting. “It just makes you bisexual!” More hilarious buzzing ensued.
“Oh, phew,” I said wiping my anxious brow. “I mean, what would I have told my boyfriend—Hi honey, I won’t be home for dinner. I’ve left you for three girls…who are also vibrators?”
“Yeah, exactly,” said Lily snickering like a smarty pants. “Ridiculous!”
I shooed them into the shower and went to get our drinks. As I poured shots of Aqua Vit, I couldn’t help but remember something I read recently: 31,406,497 Americans live alone according to the 2008 American Community Survey from the US Census. And then I thought, why, oh why, when there are friends like Ina, Lily, and Mona in the world?
I downed a shot. Here’s to making 2010 the best year ever! May you always get your buzz on and make new friends while you’re at it!
PS: LELO Discount to SeasonedSex readers: Get 20% off your LELO purchase until Jan 5, 2010! Just enter the code: u2M4eZ at LELO.com.
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