Tag: untamed

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What is a complicated woman?

Is The Untamed Woman Tolerable?

We recently recorded our episode on Glennon Doyle’s bestselling memoir, Untamed. She calls all women to shed the conditioning that teaches us to please others, to make ourselves smaller, to suppress our desires, and instead, she wants us to get untamed. 

The first time I read the book, my reaction was, “this is how I live my life and no one likes me.” Ok, that might be a) slight exaggeration and/or b) my own fault, unrelated to my untamed nature. 

On my second reading I found the undeniable value in Glennon’s work. Asking women to be untamed, showing them how to untame themselves with the four keys and highlighting reactions that come from our conditioning is important. The goal of becoming untamed is aspirational.

And then I thought about the work we do here at Pop Fiction Women. At the end of every episode we encourage women to Stay Complicated! Maybe being complicated is a way to bridge the gap from here to untamed?

Writer and director Leslye Headland has expressed her theory of why sometimes studio executives or audiences don’t “get” some of her characters, which I’m adapting to explain the reason this podcast is so important: we as a society lack the training to tolerate complicated women. 

We have trouble tolerating them because we don’t understand them. We don’t know them intimately. We hold them at arms’ length, out of fear that their complicated nature is contagious or maybe because we think holding them away will keep us safe, that it won’t ignite the feelings we know we have bubbling right beneath the surface. But that’s the work we do here. 

We discuss different types of women, with different damage, different struggles, different backgrounds, different attitudes, and different stages of their growth. We dig into them without fear. We bring our judgments because we are human, but we also bring our curiosity and intelligence and empathy and Kate and I each bring a different point of view. 

We do this in service of one singular goal: that all women feel free. Free from judgment, preconceived notions, shoulds and supposed tos. Free from the constraints of our culture, our families, men, other women, even — or maybe especially, free from our own beliefs that keep us caged and small.

This podcast’s primary focus on fiction allows people — men and women alike — to take a step back and say, look at these characters that we’re talking about, let’s analyze them, let’s look at what they’re doing and why? What is working for them? What isn’t? We unpack all of the preconceived notions that we bring to the table, and we dig into the women creators behind the scenes because that’s what they’re doing too. Embracing their complications. This analysis puts a step between you, the listener and the doer.

You don’t have to be Fleabag. In fact Phoebe Waller-Bridge said she wrote Fleabag because she didn’t want to become Fleabag. She created her and then we talk about her. Through this exercise, maybe other people can understand these complicated women a little bit better. And then by understanding them, we aren’t as afraid. We aren’t as judgmental. We’re willing to just let people live and do whatever they need to do, and we can also be free for ourselves. We are bridging the gap from caged to complicated to untamed. 

This is a big job, but we can handle it.

Stay complicated with us.

Categories
What is a complicated woman?

The Best Way To Have An Uncomplicated Life? Be A Complicated Person.

The Best Way To Have An Uncomplicated Life? Be A Complicated Person. No, that’s not backwards. You read it right.

When your podcast centers around “complicated women” you think a lot about complicated. I started noticing that complicated people often have uncomplicated lives, contrary to first impressions. And that uncomplicated people have complicated lives. Is there a correlation? 

Kate and I discussed productivity vs. busy-ness on our Untamed episode where I likened myself to a large breed dog. My brain needs a lot of stimulation, the equivalent of a forty-mile walk for Rover, every single day. If I don’t get that mental energy out before bed, I can’t fall asleep. I end up doing the human brain equivalent of gnawing on the floorboards and eating your shoes. In the dark, I unfairly pick apart things in my life that are imperfectly wonderful (nothing is perfect, after all) out of boredom. This is not a good situation. But it happened all the time when I was trying to force myself into the life I had planned. 

I blew up that life in phases, and slowly rebuilt the one I really wanted but was too afraid to go after, or not trusting enough to follow. In that process, I learned that it’s better for me to spend my days embracing my own complications.

That means I sit in my closet with my ragtag “altar” and say my own made-up “prayer” or “mantra” — and I also scream and curse when something doesn’t go as expected. I’m a zen hot-head. That means I get equally lost in the bliss of my financial budget and my novel. I’m left-brained and right-brained.

I’m loud and shy. I like to be the center of attention and I’m an introvert. And as my favorite mug proclaims, “I am small and sensitive, but also fight me” under a drawing of a cute cat holding a switchblade. That one’s pretty self-explanatory. The point is, I never force myself to be one thing. I am complicated. 

Some people are uncomplicated and live uncomplicated lives. We love those people! Don’t ever change! But more people ARE complicated, and have been taught to repress or reconcile the traits that make them complicated. In turn, that inner dimension comes out sideways: in their outer lives. They cannot sit comfortably with their own depths and dualities, their own complications, so they make their lives complicated. They meddle in other people’s drama. They engage in self-destructive behavior just to have a mess to clean up. Sometimes this dysfunction even parades as “responsibility.” The family daily planners of these people look like color-coded chaos to me now. They fill their every free moment with busy-ness or achievement. I once was that way too.

Magically, when I allowed myself to become complicated, when I embraced all my contradictions, when I stopped looking outside myself for someone to tell me which of my behaviors were harming me and which were good for me, my life became proportionately uncomplicated. I knew who I loved and what I loved to do, what I was passionate about and what challenges were worth the struggle.

Kate and I were preparing to record a new outro for our podcast episodes. At the end of our old one, Kate says, “keep it complicated.” Then we realized all our show notes say “stay complicated.” At first I wasn’t sure which one should stand as our tagline. I liked the alliteration of keep it complicated, but the truth is, I don’t want anyone to keep it complicated. Don’t complicate your life with so much doing that you forget how to be you. All of you, without hiding, ignoring, or fixing any of it. You aren’t broken, you are human. So stay complicated!!

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Little Fires Everywhere

Little Fires Love Triangle: Did Pearl choose wisely?

It’s been weeks since Kate and I recorded our Little Fires Everywhere episode, and it’s one I can’t stop turning over in my mind. Actually, “turning over” is the wrong phrase to describe it. Thoughts of that episode pierce my thoughts, swirl around my mind like a hurricane, cloud my brain like steam from a laundromat vent. 

Specifically, these disruptive thoughts revolve around our conversation about the Little Fires Love Triangle of Pearl, Moody and Trip.

Kate wondered if Pearl and Trip were keeping the intimate relationship a secret because Trip was ashamed of having sex with Pearl. Kate seemed to suggest that Pearl would have no reason to want to keep it a secret. Or she might even want people to know, because Trip is a catch. But she was mainly focused on the hardest gray area — that because the result of them wanting to keep the relationship a secret, that the lying that came from it was unequivocally wrong no matter the reasons behind it.

In our debate, Kate was firmly #teamMoody (over #teamTrip) but I saw it differently. I was all in for #teamPearl. I saw her agency and I understood the unstated rationale behind her actions. I vehemently defended Pearl’s right to keep the secret with Trip, even if it meant lying to Moody.

But my defense didn’t sit well with me, like a raspberry seed in between two molars. So I spent time unpacking why we — or really, I — had relationships or encounters that I wanted kept secret. Well, there’s probably too many reasons to mention, but the ones I want to explore deeply come around what it means to be a high school girl.

Is there anything wrong with a young girl (Pearl is 15, a sophomore in high school) wanting intimate experience? Kate and I would agree that there isn’t, but in reality society is uncomfortable with a young girl exploring her growing sexuality. And that begins at puberty, an age which terrifies people. 

Is there anything wrong with a young girl wanting intimate experience without telling everyone? 

Of course I would say no, right? That’s what I said about Pearl in our Little Fires episode. And I said that because I have kept secrets without there being any internal shame. I wasn’t embarrassed about what I was doing, and neither was my partner.

A girl with instincts, openness and interest in intimacy, should be allowed to safely and wisely explore those feelings. But doing it in the open? That’s so much more complicated. I don’t think I realized how much shame was coming from the outside — that I’d learned that it was easier, and had better results, if I kept it a secret. That’s how to avoid what I called high school, but is now referred to as “slut shaming.”

Here was a high school scenario for me: I hook up with a guy — at a party, after school, in private. It is assumed we have sex, because why else would you be discreet about it? What other reason do you go “find a room”? If you lock yourself in the bathroom, it’s because you’re having sex. If you meet up with no one around and don’t tell anyone, it’s because you’re having sex. 

It seems a high school girl can’t do anything besides make-out in front of a crowd and have sex. 

That’s because there’s very little articulated in between. Not in movies, TV shows, even on social media where there are tons of overt and cliched “sexy” pictures with no reference to what one might do with that sexiness, or how it might feel. No mention of touching breasts, of finding erogenous zones around ears or behind knees, of skin to skin, of writhing around with your clothes on (the health class 101 “dry humping” thanks for the reminder, Lady Bird). These were all such normal parts of my high school experiences, but they are rarely portrayed or discussed. I wonder if it’s because adults lose sight of these “in between” phases or whether it’s because in high school not everyone feels free to explore them. I understand why. 

I did explore these feelings and as a result was on more than one occasion excluded from parties, the focus of some nasty gossip, the target of hurled insults. One night, our school did a charity “fashion show” and I wore the borrowed dress of an upperclassman. First of all, I had been specifically forbidden to wear anything she donated for the show because she thought I was a slut. I did it anyway, and she confronted me, made a huge scene about it. Apparently, now the dress was ruined because it had touched my disgusting used body. I was a fifteen year old virgin. 

Thankfully, this is where I really developed my “give zero f*cks” muscle. I had no choice but to learn how to move forward with labels like slut and tease (yes, both). Part of the lesson I learned was not caring about what other people said about me. But also, part of the lesson was learning to keep things a secret. All secrets require lying.

I suppose there will still be people who say instead of lying I should have changed my behavior. What I wished I could have changed was other people’s interest in the things I did in private. But I couldn’t. And not exploring physical intimacy felt more wrong than lying to protect myself. 

It was in those encounters that I learned what felt good to me and what didn’t feel good. In fact, I learned how to FEEL good, and I learned it in a way that didn’t come from how I looked or how I acted. In intimate acts I was trying to please no one but myself. I learned to direct my partners. I learned to be fully in my body. I learned to let go. 

I also learned how to say no. I learned to say stop. To say stop for now, to say stop forever, to say stop for today, even if another day we went farther. To the same extent that I wasn’t trusted and believed outside of intimacy, my partners were the opposite. They respected my word and accepted it. Some people might be able to get all those experiences with one partner. I’m okay if you call me a slow learner. It’s better than the alternatives.

But this WAS about Pearl, Moody and Trip. And I still have questions. 

How much do you think Pearl was motivated to keep the secret knowing that other girls in school would call her a slut or a gold digger or a social climber? 

Does Moody deserve the truth in a way that would force Pearl to tell him about the relationship against her desire? If Pearl felt she could not break the secret of her intimate relationship with Trip, should she have ended her friendship with Moody rather than lie about her whereabouts when she was with Trip? Should she have told and suffered the consequences? What if the consequences were cruel or unfair retaliation?

As the premiere of the TV adaptation of Little Fires Everywhere approaches, I am nervous about how this love triangle will be portrayed. I desperately hope they will give Pearl even more agency and empowerment rather than stepping into cliches and out-dated tropes.