How Society Stigmatises Single
Phew, what a rollercoaster of adventure our fantastics will be! If you just chucked me on the floor to go book a holiday or use your “Couch to 5k”’ App, or sign up for some voluntary work, that is totally fine. I don’t assume for a moment that your IWAB is fixed yet, but I hope at least that you are planning some fun away from the search. And whilst you do that, let’s look at some of the ways in which today’s media, or society, or the Zeitgeist (call it what you will) makes our IWAB worse.
Of course, I can only comment on media messages I have received. Maybe there are films and TV shows and books out there littered with positive single female role models. Maybe I just haven’t seen them. I suspect this isn’t the case, though. This is only a little book and neither it, nor I, are up to the mammoth task of exploring the entire media message on single women. All I can do is talk about my own experience. And that is single women are always hoping a man might come along and until he does, they are not going to be happy.
Look at Katherine Heigl’s character in 27 Dresses. If you haven’t seen this film, don’t bother, but the plot is basically (concentrate now) that our heroine, twenty-seven times a bridesmaid, is just so sad that she is yet to be a bride.
Is it any wonder that women are so self-critical, when someone as beautiful as this woman, and clearly popular too given the number of friends who wanted her as a bridesmaid, is portrayed as a lonely loser? Life only mends when she marries. In the eighties, at least we had some strong, real women in films now it seems we just have an endless parade of sad singles yearning for love in one after the other “Where is my Mr Right” chick flicks.
On TV we have had and still have similar messages. Who remembers Thirty Something? I loved that show, with its confident and capable married women, and it’s needy and neurotic single ones. Hmm. And I wonder where I got my IWAB from.
Then TV took needy and neurotic to new heights (or depths) with Ally Mcbeal, the ultimate single woman loser. Ally Mcbeal had all the trappings of a good life, but felt no good in that life as there wasn’t a man around.
Did Sex in the City change things? Come on, you know it didn’t. Wonderful as it was to see strong female relationships explored with honesty and humour, ultimately the main thing was still the man hunt. And don’t even get me started on Bridget Jones.
I have searched both film and literature for a story which ends with a happy single heroine. It’s a real struggle. One of my mummy friends suggested Roald Dahl, but that wasn’t what I was really after. Do magazines, and TV chat shows, and radio programmes ever talk about the free and happy singles doing all the things we talked about in Chapter 2? Or do they talk about sad single women looking for love to make their lives mean something? Well, we know what the answer to that is.
Constantly, we are bombarded with the message that as single people, we are inevitably less happy than partnered people. Is it any wonder that this message gets under our skin, making us believe that finding a man is the key thing we need to fix our lives? This is a message we should fight against. In all its forms, both blatant and insidious, we must fight against it.