Women and the Ego

I've been enjoying Eckhart Tolle's class on Oprah.com very much. I was not blown away by his book A New Earth, but I find Tolle to be absolutely heartwarming to watch.

One of the things Tolle shares in A New Earth is his belief that women are not as susceptible to the ego as men are. Well, Tolle, I appreciate that you revere women so much, but as a female I beg to differ. Never mind my own fantastic, stubborn ego. Ego is at work in many women in our culture today, as we focus on our looks instead of our brains, our bodies instead of our hearts, and our appeal to men instead of our appeal to ourselves.

Take fashion magazines. Who on earth invented these items of mental torture? I for the life of me cannot figure out why women purchase these sinister publications of Satan, but they do. I never saw the point of staring at women who were better looking than me. Maybe it's because I was the geeky kid wearing glasses growing up - I somehow missed the indoctrination that popular teen girls get into fashion and make-up.

Granted, I did purchase a few copies of Tiger Beat back in the day, but the whole purpose of that was to plaster my walls with pictures of Def Leppard and John Stamos. (Yeah, John Stamos. As in, when he was on General Hospital John Stamos. I think I had good taste at 13. John Stamos is still seriously hot more than 20 years later...not that I should focus on male appearance in an article suggesting we stop focusing so much on female appearance, ahem.)

Tiger Beat used to just be about cute boys - on viewing their website, they seem to be a training ground now for obsession with all things celebrity. Hillary Duff gets as much coverage as the latest boy group. Yes, that's progress.

Once an indoctrinated young woman grows up, she then can join the "sophisticated" adult world of high fashion. Female television shows such as Lipstick Jungle promote this obsession with the "right" clothes and "glamorous" make-up, with one of its leads a fashion designer and prominent Maybelline product placement throughout (apologies to Jungle co-star Paul Blackthorne, who recommends Tolle at his much more conscious website).

The fashion world has become this bizarre caricature of itself where pretty much anyone can create a line of clothing provided they are shallow and famous...as in, Nicky Hilton and the might-as-well-be-strippers Pussycat Dolls. The girls on the runways get younger and thinner, and no amount of media attention on their eating disorders seems to change the basic focus on the Lolita-like aesthetic.

We women feed the horrible media machine by purchasing tabloids, clicking obsessively on celebrity gossip websites, and charging up clothes we don't need on credit cards.

We actively purchase and consume things that make us feel inferior, less-than, and not good enough. We then go out and buy the products that are supposed to fix these feelings of inferiority. We singlehandedly keep the American economy going through our insecurities.

Why do women create this hell for ourselves? Our egos. The simple reason for this is that young, attractive women get a high off of male attention. Maybe when we were young, our egos got a boost when a man looked our way, even if all he was seeing was our body and not our souls. So we then want to recreate that high, as much and as often as possible. Or, if we didn't have that happen, we saw girls around us having it happen and we wanted it for ourselves.

We want that fake "power" that we believe we have when we "wrap a man around our finger."

But really, what's happening is that we've lost our power. Any time we need to look towards a man for our sole validation based on our sex appeal, we've now debased ourselves and men. (Because now we've fed into the male ego and his need for validation by having an attractive female as a possession or as arm candy. Some men do unplug from this, though, so let's not insult them by assuming they are all shallow.)

Why is it that lesbians seem to achieve more than straight women in the creative arts? I don't think it's because they somehow have a gene that makes them so. I think it's because they don't care about male attention.

I have struggled with this myself. I have gone through periods where I courted (and got) a lot of male attention because it made my ego feel really good. Then one day a male friend of mine, who I had known for years, told me in no uncertain terms he would not hang out with me unless I had sex with him. He wasn't even interested in dating me. He just had decided that he was tired of having female friends and no sex.

At that point, I reversed course and decided I had had enough of male attention, that it wasn't really all that meaningful. As I have pursued my spirituality more, I have found no need to go out and get men to look at me. Sure, it's nice when it happens, but I really feel it's not necessary to make me feel good about myself.

The only man I need to have paying attention to me is the man I marry. The rest can go about their business. Why do I want a man who is all about how I look anyway? All that means is that he is into me based on his ego, not his spirit, and our relationship is built on quicksand. It will end unless firmer foundations are built. The only true foundation to a lasting relationship is a deep spiritual connection and commitment based on unconditional love.

Thankfully, I grew up relying on my brains and so I do not have the misfortune of many women who were pretty all their lives. One woman called up Tolle on the second installment of his class on Oprah. She was very lost, because she was now aging and was losing her beauty. It is a gift, actually, to not be beautiful, because you learn how to cultivate other aspects of yourself.

And yet, we all want to be beautiful. Our ego tells us that is the answer, that it will fix our problems and make us more loveable. But the ego is a trickster. And it's wrong. Beauty is only skin deep, but the soul transcends all that.

It takes a lot to let our egos go. The first step for women is to wake up and notice how our entire culture is set up to make women consume themselves. And then once we realize we're being brainwashed, to unplug from it. Awareness is of course the key.