14 DAY TRIAL // Women are constantly told, more or less directly, that they need to strive to attain all goals: be successful in their career, have a happy family life, be good wives and mothers, and be as educated on all topics as possible. It is a modern disease and millions of women fall prey to it, “Bridget Jones” author Helen Fielding says for a new Daily Mail piece.
The fault, Fielding argues, is not entirely women’s as it’s not entirely society’s. Still, girls need to learn from a very young age that they can’t possibly grow up to have everything in life and that, in order to be happy as such, they must know on which aspects to focus. Again, in order to be able to do so, they also need to stop paying attention to what others tell them they should do and realize that on their own, the author points out.
“There are so many advertisements now telling people they need to look a certain way and have this perfect life. They feel they should be getting up at six in the morning and going to the gym, then doing a full day’s work and coming back late and have to feed 12 people for dinner. It’s a modern disease.” Fielding says of the type of expectations that women have to meet – without fail.
This is how “Bridget Jones” was born, the author explains, and how she became so popular because she represented something every woman could relate to. Even Fielding herself admits to succumbing to the pressure of being a certain way. “It’s happened to me where I’ve gone for photoshoots and looked at myself on the cover of magazines where I have been completely changed and thought, ‘I wish I looked like that’.” the author admits. Her case is not an isolated one – and hasn’t been for decades.
The self-help and self-education religion that is slowly taking over everything, from literature to television, is also making its contribution in terms of telling women they need to be a certain way. Then, Fielding adds, there’s advertising and glossy magazines, which promote a false image of the modern woman, and the media that pushes forward a model of woman that can exist only in movies, if at all. Caught in the middle of all this, the regular woman is lost and confused, and, not knowing which of these paths to tread, she attempts to tread them all, Fielding explains.
However, at the end of the day, she knows for a fact that, no matter how much or how hard she tries, she will never be as she’s being told she should be. Because of this, Fielding concludes by saying, simply accepting that women can’t have it all would be the best and safest way to go through life.