“The last thing we find in making a book is to know what we must put first.”
BLAISE PASCAL
The idea for this book began a decade ago when even I, who had spent the previous dozen years working on external barriers to women’s equality, had to admit there were internal ones, too. Wherever I traveled, I saw women who were smart, courageous, and valuable, who didn’t think they were smart, courageous, or valuable—and this was true not only for women who were poor or otherwise doubly discriminated against, but for supposedly privileged and powerful women, too. It was as if the female spirit were a garden that had grown beneath the shadows of barriers for so long that it kept growing in the same pattern, even after some of the barriers were gone.
Yet when I looked for books on self-esteem to recommend, I found that, though many offered helpful advice, they focused on either the “inner” or the “outer” part of change: The “inner” books were the more spiritual and New Age ones, with an important message about the worth of each human being, but with little mention of the external structures that undermine this worth in order to assure their own authority. The “outer” books told women how to look better, deal with stress better, and succeed in our many roles, but rarely mentioned that women’s self-esteem might be damaged by the very expectation of filling all those roles; or that, if success alone could create self-esteem, there wouldn’t be so many powerful men out there whose appetite for ever more success is insatiable, precisely because they feel an inner void that can’t be filled.
Finally, with important exceptions (see the appendix on Bibliotherapy), a lot of self-help books put even more of a burden on the individual. I couldn’t tell whether they were protecting the status quo or just had no faith in anyone’s ability to change it, but they promised readers an internal power that would, in the words of one of them, “bind up mental and physical wounds, proclaim liberty to the fear-ridden mind, and liberate you completely from the limitations of poverty, failure, misery, lack, and frustration.”1 Somehow, that hadn’t been my experience.
So I set out to research current thinking on the factors that affect self-esteem, and to combine this research with the experience of individual women. There were new studies on the long-lasting effects of alcoholism in our families, and a new willingness to believe in the frequency with which sexual abuse occurs in childhood. In many fields, the idea that hallmarks of low self-esteem weren’t “normal” female characteristics was just beginning to be absorbed, and was producing some basic rethinking about such things as education for women and girls. I combined this research with women’s personal stories, which are, like all personal accounts of any group that has been marginalized, our best textbooks: the only way to make our experience central.
But right away, this book had a mind of its own. It decided it had to be for men, too. After all, it’s men with low self-esteem who give women (and other men) the most problems, from subtle condescension to grandiosity and outright violence; yet they are neglected as readers when they do look for help. I found many books directed at women’s disease of empathy sickness (knowing what other people are feeling better than we know what we are feeling) but few for men with an empathy deficiency (an inability to know what other people are feeling, which causes men to get blindsided by emotions—sometimes even their own). There were books about low expectations for women in the public sphere, but almost none about low expectations for men in the private one; many books to comfort women trying to play a double role at home and on the job, but few for men whose work was killing them because they had no lives outside it. Even the welcome new books about men’s regret at not having had nurturing fathers, and their resulting need to bond with other men, included no corresponding sentiment of regret for the inequality of their mothers, and men’s resulting inability to bond with women as equals.
The more I talked to men as well as women, the more it seemed that inner feelings of incompleteness, emptiness, self-doubt, and self-hatred were the same, no matter who experienced them, and even if they were expressed in culturally opposite ways. I don’t mean to gloss over the difficulties of equalizing power, even when there is the will to do so: to the overvalued and defensive, the urge to control and dominate others may be as organic as a mollusk’s shell; and to the undervalued and resentful, the power to destroy the self (and others who resemble the self) may be the only power there is. But at both extremes—as well as in the more subtle areas between, where most of us struggle every day—people seemed to stop punishing others or themselves only when they gained some faith in their own unique, intrinsic worth. Making male readers feel welcome, this book decided, was the least it could do.
With this in mind—and with time newly freed by the fact that Australian feminists had taken on the responsibility for Ms., the magazine that had been my major commitment for seventeen years—I spent months researching and interviewing, and more months writing 250 pages of psychological research, anecdotal examples, and philosophical prose. It was a peaceful time of sitting at my computer with my cat on my lap, traveling and tummeling less than I had at any time since I was in college, and finally having time to write something longer than an article.
Too peaceful. When Carmen Robinson, a friend from Montreal who is a family therapist, read that labored-over manuscript, she said, “I don’t know how to tell you this—but I think you have a self-esteem problem. You forgot to put yourself in.”
And it was true. I had lost my “voice,” as writers say. It was as if I had been walking on a plate of glass just above the real world, able to see but not touch it. I began to understand with a terrible sureness that we teach what we need to learn and write what we need to know. I had felt drawn to the subject of self-esteem not only because other people needed it, but because I did. I had come to the burnt-out end of my ability to travel one kind of feverish, productive, but entirely externalized road—and I had no idea why.
But at the time Carmen identified this underlying problem for me, I also had a more immediate crisis. If you want to imagine what might be called a “situational” or perhaps a “traumatic” self-esteem problem, try thinking about a writer who has spent years with no time to write, feels she has an unwritten book in every toe and elbow and tooth, finally achieves the enormous luxury of enough solitude in which to begin, and then blows it on 250 of the wrong pages. Just at that moment, I also got a letter from something called The Keri Report: Confidence and the American Woman, a nationwide survey of 6,000 men and women sponsored by a hand-cream company, informing me that I had been named one of the ten most confident women in the United States.2 It made me realize all over again what deep shit women were really in. Worst of all, I happened to open a paperback from college and discovered a note I had scribbled there: “Most writers write to say something about other people—and it doesn’t last. Good writers write to find out about themselves—and it lasts forever.” It was humbling—even depressing—to discover that I knew more in college than I did so many years later.
In the empty months that followed, I gave up those elaborate and intellectualized pages, but it took much longer for me to give up my image of myself as someone who helped other people through crises and never had any of my own. I began to realize that this writing crisis had been one of an underground series of them, some past and unsuccessfully buried, some present and denied—all of which were trying to tell me something. I had felt burnt out many times in the past twenty years, like so many people in social-justice movements—especially in the feminist movement, to which women bring the very training in selflessness we are trying to change—yet unlike other women with more self-vision, I believed so little in my own inner world that I couldn’t stop to replenish it. Like a soldier who is wounded but won’t lie down for fear of dying, I just kept marching. Why? Well, if I stopped, I would have given up the way I made myself “real”—that is, by being useful to people in the outside world—just as I had made myself “real” as a child by keeping so busy that I numbed the sad unreality at home where I looked after my mother.
And with that realization, emotions from the past began to flood into the present, often with a familiar feeling of hopelessness in the pit of my stomach, a feeling I thought I had left behind in childhood; sometimes with even more despair because this was my life, I was no longer at its beginning when I could look to the escape of growing up. I finally began to admit that I, too, was more aware of other people’s feelings than my own; that I had been repeating the patterns of my childhood without recognizing them; that I had no idea why certain landscapes or sounds could make me ineffably sad; that my image of myself was very distant from other people’s image of me; and that, in short, my childhood years—a part of my life I thought I had walled off—were still shaping the present as surely as a concealed magnet shapes metal dust. And as I acknowledged those effects of the distant past, I also uncovered anger about more recent events. After all the energy and years that I and many other women had poured into Ms., the sheer injustice of being unable to scrape up the money needed to keep it going—despite the fact that we had lost less in nearly two decades than other serious magazines lose in a single year—had resulted in a profound feeling of depression that I was only now beginning to recognize.* It was partly the covering over of that emotion that had led to my calm, intellectualized, impersonal writing.
Most of all, I began to understand there was a reason why, as a friend of mine put it, I was “co-dependent with the world.” It was also why I was so moved by anyone whose plight seemed invisible. Carried over from my own childhood—and redoubled by growing up with the invisibility of a female in a male-run society—my sympathy reflected my own feelings of nonexistence. I had retreated to researching and reporting because I doubted the reality of my inner voice.
So I started over again in a very different way. For the next three years, I worked on this book—and it worked on me. I didn’t end by writing an autobiography—I’m a long way from that, with many stored-up books to do first—but I did write much more personally. My hope is that each time you come upon a story of mine, you will turn inward and listen to a story told by your own inner voice. These last three years have taught me that, like the spider spinning her web, we create much of the outer world from within ourselves. “The universe as we know it,” as Teilhard de Chardin said and as the new physics confirms, “is a joint product of the observer and the observed.” We make progress by a constant spiraling back and forth between the inner world and the outer one, the personal and the political, the self and the circumstance. Nature doesn’t move in a straight line, and as part of nature, neither do we.
I know, however, that each of us enters the spiral at a different place and should progress along its circles in the direction we have not been. For me, as Carmen said, this meant traveling inward, but for others, it may mean the reverse. Trying to approach self-esteem from many different vantage points on the spiral in the hope that this book will be useful to as many people as possible, I’ve included theory as well as practical exercises, scientific studies as well as a wide variety of stories and experiences that people have entrusted to me. To enable you to enter the spiral at whatever point is most useful to you, I’ve made each chapter, and each section within a chapter, a complete essay in itself. You may read everything in order, which will take you in concentric circles that move from the center (the self) to the cosmos (or at least as much of it as I’ve been able to comprehend), or you may pick out the headings that interest you—or proceed in any other way that suits you. To make this approach work, I’ve restated some themes and premises from chapter to chapter, but in forms different enough so I hope they will resonate, not repeat. I’ve also tried to explain concepts as I go and keep scholarly references to a minimum, so that no reader is made to feel she or he should have read eighty-nine other things first. My sixteen-year-old self in Toledo certainly needed this book: I didn’t want to write anything that would make her feel excluded.
Throughout the text, there are also what I think of as modern parables—stories of people’s growth that convey the process of change, mini-novels that are themselves self-contained. In reading the parables, I hope that, as with those of earlier times, you’ll look beyond the specifics of the situation to the heart of the experience, and thus take from stories told by people of a different gender, sexuality, or ethnicity what is universal and true for you. I especially hope that men who read these pages will identify with women’s parables, as we so often have empathized with theirs. As for their literal truth, when I use both first and last name, the story is real. When I use no name or only a first name, I’m either disguising someone who requested anonymity or creating one story from the similar experiences of more than one person, so that the result is, as a poet friend of mine used to say, “true, but only basically.”
During the course of writing this book, I’ve not only looked inward, but I’ve gained a new prism through which to look outward. The past couple of years have been momentous ones for everyone on this earth: the long-overdue release of Nelson Mandela in South Africa, followed by the first steps away from apartheid and toward self-determination; the joyful destruction of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Iron Curtain as a democratic spirit swept through Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union; a Gulf War in which the Iraqi people, with no opportunity to freely elect their leader, were bombed “into the Stone Age,” and then left to the mercies of the dictator who had inspired the attack; and the thwarting of a Communist coup in the Soviet Union by ordinary citizens who took to the streets of Moscow to change the course of tanks—and of history. I’ve learned from these events that self-esteem plays as much a part in the destiny of nations as it does in the lives of individuals; that self-hatred leads to the need either to dominate or to be dominated; that citizens who refuse to obey anything but their own conscience can transform their countries; in short, that self-esteem is the basis of any real democracy.
It’s clear, for instance, that the disproportionate number of writers and other artists among democratic movements is no accident. Because their work demands that they see with their own eyes and listen to an inner voice, they are more resistant to political indoctrination, and more trusted as spokespeople than those in other fields. It’s a trust for which many pay a high price during authoritarian regimes—just as the curious or truthful child in a family of secrets and denial pays a high price—but they help others to trust their own eyes and instincts, too. In a Soviet press digest in the fall of 1989, for example, I read a speech by M. Antonov, himself a sociologist and scholar, in which he told the Writers Union of the U.S.S.R., “It was not from scholars or social scientists, but from writers, that we learned the very essence of what happened in the era of stagnation.” He warned against losing self-authority once again if poverty were to make their country “a colony of the transnational corporations.” In response, a speaker who identified himself as “from a peasant family” said of Marxism, “There is no human being in that doctrine, and that is why it leads us up blind alleys. … The only thing present in it is wages.” In its presumption of speaking “for the human soul,” he compared it to the hierarchy of the church.3
On New Year’s Day 1990, when the playwright Vačlav Havel found himself addressing the people of Czechoslovakia as their president—a position he had not expected or sought, yet had earned by speaking his mind—he pled for an end to the national and personal insecurity that leads to repression. “Only a person or a nation self-confident in the best sense of the word,” he said, “is capable of listening to the voice of others and accepting them as equal to oneself. Let us try to introduce self-confidence into the life of our community and into the conduct of nations.”
When Estonia, a Soviet republic smaller than West Virginia, defied Moscow and demanded self-government, its strategy seemed fueled entirely by self-esteem. In what Estonians called “The Singing Revolution,” 300,000 people, a fifth of the nation’s population, turned out for a peaceful, joyous, but rebellious rally in the capital, singing, “Estonian, I am … free …” Dr. Maurji Lauristin, a tough-minded Estonian political leader, seemed amused at the surprise of a U.S. television commentator. “The strength of small people isn’t in guns,” she explained, “it is in intellect, it is in culture and traditions and in self-belief.”4
In Romania, where the Communist government had outlawed abortion and contraception in its effort to force women to bear children, “Liberty, Democracy, and Abortion” was the official motto of the revolution, and the banner behind which both men and women marched through the streets. President Ceausescu had inspired this rebellion by declaring, “The fetus is the socialist property of the whole society,” a conviction shared by anti-abortion movements in other countries, and he had required all employed women up to age forty-five to submit to regular fertility exams or be punished like military “deserters.” As we saw so poignantly on television after he was overthrown, the result was nurseries full of malnourished, un-held, unloved children, many of whose mothers had died or been imprisoned because of illegal abortions, thus leaving their other children uncared for. “The state tried to own women, invade their bodies, compel their motherhood, kill their souls,” said Gabriela Bocec, head of the Romanian Nurses’ Association, who had seen the dimensions of suffering among women and children with her own eyes. “We marched out of self-respect.”5 So it was that a nurse, as unlikely a candidate for political leadership as a playwright, became one of this country’s new democratic voices.
Here at home in the streets of New York City, I watched huge crowds cheering Nelson Mandela during his visit in the summer of 1990. There are almost no words to express the poignancy of seeing him honored as a world leader just a few blocks from the wharves where African women and men had once arrived and then been sold at auction; in the same city where Southern slaves had later fled via the Underground Railroad, only to be relegated first to Sugar Hill and then Harlem; and just a few miles from the place where only the summer before, a young African-American man, answering an ad to buy a car, had been killed for entering a white neighborhood. “When I was in school, we were taught to be ashamed of being African,” said a woman standing next to me in the crowd. “They called us ‘jungle bunnies’ and names a lot worse—and now here’s Mandela. I can’t tell you what a difference seeing him would have made to me when I was a kid.” Later as I stood backstage in a Brooklyn theater watching schoolchildren file in to hear Winnie Mandela, who had carried on the fight outside prison walls, a six-year-old boy pointed at her with pride: “She looks like my mom!”
In that summer, I was not the only one to begin seeing self-esteem as the prerequisite for democracy—and for equal power within a democracy. Some of the California activists about whom I write in the first chapter met in Oslo with educators, psychologists, and health-care providers from eleven countries, including the U.S.S.R., Poland, and other nations of Eastern Europe. Topics of concern included how to decrease child abuse, alcoholism, prejudice, and other destructive behavior. Since studies show that low self-esteem correlates with both prejudice and violence—that people who have a negative view of themselves also tend to view other people and the world negatively6—representatives were interested in introducing self-esteem programs in schools. For the six Soviet delegates, the commitment to finding methods of developing self-esteem was even more basic, for they recognized that in Russia, where individual will had for so long been subordinated to the group, self-esteem was the most effective guarantor of the democratic freedoms they had just won. Other Eastern European countries had had some experience with democracy before Communism, but Russia was having its first open election in a thousand years.
Privately, the Soviet representatives told Robert Reasoner, a California educator and co-chair of that International Council for Self-Esteem formed in Oslo, that they had about three years of grace in which to put forward the central concept of self-esteem—the belief that each person counts and can make a difference—before there would be a right-wing coup against glasnost.
As it turned out, they were overly optimistic. In only one year, not three, a military coup was attempted by an authoritarian group within the Supreme Soviet. But those antidemocratic officials had themselves underestimated how contagious the idea of dignity and democracy could be. In late August of 1991, just as I was completing this book—and just as a First National Council for Self-Esteem was scheduled to meet near Moscow—Soviet citizens took their national future into their own hands by flooding into the streets in defiance of martial law, forming barricades to protect Boris Yeltsin and other elected leaders in their headquarters. As one old woman yelled up to the very young driver of a Soviet tank, “You can’t do this, we were the ones who fed you when you were little—just leave.” And he did.
It was an object lesson in ordinary people making a difference that Soviet citizens, and the world, would not soon forget. Listening to the reports of Boris Yeltsin’s words as he called for people to resist the coup—on radio and television stations that Mikhail Gorbachev had set free, conscious that no democracy could survive unless people could hear each other’s voices—I thought of all the studies I had been reading on the power of expectation. When teachers of randomly selected students are told their students are slow, they become slower; when teachers believe their students are gifted, they become more gifted. Yeltsin and other popular leaders expected people to take control of their own fate, and people did just that—an example of a leader’s ability to free the powers of self-esteem.
Later, when I phoned Moscow on the assumption that tanks in the streets must have delayed that meeting of the First National Council for Self-Esteem, I was told no, it had gone right on. The Minister of Education had been there, and they were planning self-esteem programs for the schools.
I’ve noticed, too, that economists have begun to speak in terms of self-esteem. Development experts more comfortable with citing natural resources, capital, markets, and other “hard” quantifiable elements have begun to talk about such “soft” factors as “national inferiority complex,” “national will,” “basic worldview,” “equality,” and “belief in reward for work.” In a deep sense, economic development without self-esteem is only another form of colonialism: an economic development ruled from the top, in which, whatever is being developed, it is not what people have decided for themselves, and thus it may develop products, but not people.
Consider the examples of Barbados and Haiti. Both are small island countries with similar crops and climate, a population mainly from West Africa, and a history of slavery and colonialism. Yet Barbados has had a representative system of government longer than the United States (indeed, it was part of the inspiration for our Constitution); its crime rate is lower, its life expectancy and literacy rates are just as high (or higher, if one takes as a measure the “functional illiteracy” of a third of all United States residents, not the official figure of 99 percent). When people from Barbados migrate to the U.S., they do better than the average African American whose family has been here for generations, and they earn about the same as the average European American (though if this were not a racist society, they probably would earn more, since immigrants from Barbados are often better educated than their white counterparts). On the other hand, Haiti is one of the world’s poorest, most divided, least literate countries, with a history of cruel and corrupt dictatorships, a small middle class and a few wealthy in the midst of great poverty, and until very recently, a sadistic secret police who ruled by terror. Instead of an adult literacy rate of 99 percent, as in Barbados, it is 2.3 percent in Haiti; and though Haitian immigrants to the United States are often political refugees who are activists and educated, they don’t yet occupy the leadership positions in the African-American and larger community that those from Barbados do.
The differences between the cultures of these two small nations have complex and deep roots: the British versus the French as colonial powers; an individualized Protestantism versus a hierarchical Catholicism as very different overlays on African spiritual traditions; and perhaps most important, the self-fulfilling prophecy of any system once it is entrenched. Because we tend to treat others as we have been treated, a trustworthy system leads to more trust, corruption leads to more corruption, violence to more violence. But all these factors can be summed up in the frequent cynicism among the poor of Haiti and the obsessive need for display among its rich rulers, contrasted with the sense of personal efficacy, irreverence, and pride among the people of Barbados: in other words, the marks of low and high self-esteem. As Dantes Bellegards, a Haitian writer early in this century, wrote about his country: “Everyone has two faces—one for those above him and one for those below”—a classic description of the character type created when self-authority is taken away, whether in a family or in a nation.
If such a clear contrast seems to be an idiosyncracy of two small agricultural countries, consider two industrialized nations among the ten largest in the world: Argentina and Australia. Both have great natural wealth, a large population of European immigrants, sad histories of brutality toward indigenous people (as does, of course, the United States), and large, rich, underpopulated areas. But Argentina’s efforts at democracy have often fallen victim to cultlike military dictatorships; its society is divided into extremes of rich and poor, urban and rural; and its role as a refuge for Nazis and other escapees from democracy has become legendary. Australia, however, has a stable democracy, a per capita income almost three times higher than that in Argentina, far less violence and corruption, and a much smaller military. Even Australia’s cult of masculinity is not as aggressive as that of Argentina. Since more immigrants went out of free will to Argentina than to Australia, which was largely a dumping ground for Britain’s overcrowded prisons, one might think the difference in self-esteem would be reversed. But a fatalistic and sin-focused religion, economic extremes, generations of military regimes, and a tradition of political torture have plagued Argentineans, who are, of course, not intrinsically different from Australians.
Looking at Barbados and Australia as relatively positive examples, one societal hallmark of self-esteem seems to be an ability to both give and demand fairness, an expectation that extends from the personal to the political. There is at least a belief that the law, an institution before which all should be equal, has a duty to play no favorites; yet in Argentina and Haiti, there is rarely even this expectation. “People could make it against flood and pestilence,” Brazilian novelist Jorge Amado wrote about similar problems in his own country, “but not against the laws; they went under.”
When I was in college and my government professor said, “The family is the basic unit of the state,” he described a paternalistic, hierarchical kind of family; yet somehow, he expected a perfect democracy to emerge from this model of inequality in which one parent lived “through” others, the other parent had authority “over” others, and the children were possessions with few personal rights, even under the law. Feminism is just beginning to change this earliest hierarchical paradigm, and to create a microcosm of democracy inside this group from which we acquire our deepest sense of self and human possibilities; yet we haven’t begun to change even in our minds our image of nationalism. It remains insular and territorial, a dangerous anachronism on this fragile and shrinking planet where neither war nor environmental dangers can be contained by national boundaries anymore. Even those of us most skeptical about nationalism have drifted into considering it a necessary evil. How can we ask any group to go without it in the aftermath of classical colonialism, and the presence of racial, economic, and corporate colonialisms that often go just as deep?
But we can’t afford old either/or prisons. We need to take a leap of the imagination and envision nations as the best kinds of families: the democratic ones we are trying to create in our own lives. A hierarchical family must be changed anyway if we are to stop producing leaders whose unexamined early lives are then played out on a national and international stage. Think of such current examples as Saddam Hussein, a boy beaten and tortured daily by his stepfather, who grew up to enjoy the close-up torture of others; or President Ceausescu, whose police state normalized his own earliest years of living in one room with nine siblings and an alcoholic, sadistic father. Think also of Ronald Reagan, who seems to have learned endless cheerful denial as the child of an alcoholic father; or George Bush, whose biographers describe a well-to-do childhood with an aristocratic, religious father who used a belt for discipline, controlled every aspect of family life, and insisted his sons compete, win, and become leaders, whether they wanted to or not. This is not to take free will away from them (or from us), or to excuse destructive behavior in them (or in us); for if anyone is willing or able to go back and confront those earliest years, feelings can be directed at their real sources instead of being expressed in bigger and bigger ways. But changing the way we raise children is the only long-term path to peace or arms control, and neither has ever been more crucial. As the feminist adage says, The personal is political.
When we imagine nation states, however, we could envision families that nurture self-esteem and unique talents in each person; that create independence, not dependence; and that produce people secure enough to take pleasure in empowering others. Even now, if we listen to a dictator or a humane revolutionary, we sense the difference in their motives: one wants to impose a vision, the other to help discover a shared vision; one promises benefits to some and punishment to others, the other knows that nothing benefits those who haven’t participated in it, and that violence only produces violent people. In other words, one of the crucial differences between the despot and the creative leader is low self-esteem versus high self-esteem. And just as the point of a truly nurturing family is not to keep its members at home forever, the point of a nation is not to draw a line in the sand and keep its members behind it, but to create world citizens who are secure enough to treat others equally: not worse than in the “masculine” and colonial style, or better than in the colonized and “feminine” one, but as well as.
It’s time to turn the feminist adage around. The political is personal.
A friend asked my hopes for this book. I began by quoting Thomas Carlyle: “The best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self-activity.” But then I remembered the message of chapter 3, perhaps best summed up in Vita Sackville-West’s smart couplet:
I worshipped dead men for their strength,
Forgetting I was strong.
In the course of rewriting this book, I was able to uncover some of those forgotten strengths. If you learn a tenth as much from this book as I have, I’ll be a happy writer.
[[Footnote]]
* Since that time, Ms. has changed hands again: in spite of investment from their home company, Fairfax, Australian feminists Anne Summers and Sandra Yates couldn’t get enough advertising to keep Ms. going either. Now, though it is no longer woman-owned, its new owner, Lang Communications, agreed to let us try an experiment we had longed for: publishing an advertising-free Ms. that is entirely reader supported. I’m happy to say that with Robin Morgan as editor and with generous readers, Ms. is doing better than ever before. As consulting editor, I can now spend all my Ms. time on editorial content—and I never have to beg for another ad as long as I live. (For my exposé of advertising and women’s media, see “Sex, Lies, and Advertising,” Ms., July/August 1990. To contact us, write Ms., 230 Park Avenue, New York, New York 10169.)