Regular reader Lisette mentioned in the Comments the other day that she first found HUS through a personal development post. I have done some of those in the past, but they’ve never generated as much interest as other topics I’ve covered, judging by the number of hits and comments they generated. I aim to please, though, so if there’s any topic that you’d like to see addressed please let me know. I’ll be thinking more about this as well.
In the meantime, I’ll point you to the best advice for women I’ve ever seen, anywhere. Grerp is a fellow blogger and regular here, and she’s on the Blogroll, but I wanted to especially highlight her work because I think it is extremely relevant to contemporary women. She has quite a few male fans as well.
If you were born female in the mid-1960?s or later, you were probably fed all sorts of erroneous information about how life works, what women deserve, what men want, and what the future will be like. Here’s some actually useful advice to help you survive in this increasingly chaotic post-Sexual Revolution world.
Like me, Grerp sees herself as an older woman giving advice that she hopes will be useful to a younger generation. Here’s why she writes:
My primary audience is 8 years old and calls me Tante (aunt). She is being raised in a stable family with very responsible parents who are daily investing in her abilities and calling her on her crap. She is lucky – not because her family is rich or influential – because it isn’t – but because she has a stable environment, lots of people who care about her, and parents with good values. Still, when she comes of age in 2019, the world promises to be an even more chaotic place socially, politically, and economically. These blog pieces are the things, then, that I would tell her so that she can survive and, hopefully, thrive in that environment. I want her to be able to marry and have children. I want her to have a chance at a middle class life. I want her not to sabotage herself from the get go. This blog is my meager wisdom set aside for her because I love her.
In the meantime, she says, she hopes her advice will be useful:
I know nothing about trendy cocktails, fashion, the club scene, or power flirting. I have always been cautious, a risk-averse person with modest goals. Those modest goals, however, are enough to make most people – people without serious entitlement delusions – content in the long run. They boil down to a strongly connected family, responsible finances, meaningful work, and functional creativity.
If these are goals that sound desirable, I have something to offer in terms of advice, and the younger you are the easier these pieces of advice will be to implement.
Having read most of Grerp’s advice, I can only say that it is eminently sensible and appropriate for women who want to ensure that their 20s are spent in a way that moves them forward in life and love. Grerp’s posts make up a series of numbered Pieces of Advice.
Stay married
If you’re going to prostitute yourself, at least charge
Show Some Humility
Jettison Your Toxic Female Friends
Don’t Volunteer for Single Motherhood
Encourage Your Children’s Relationship With Their Father
Do Not Be This Girl (Kesha)
Lose the Weight
Take a Sabbatical to a Third World Country
Toss your women’s magazines
Cook
Drop the learned helplessness
Defer/engage
Realize the clock is already ticking on your fertility
Soften
Don’t be a tease
Don’t be these women (marching topless to protest gender bias)
Dream little
Feel free to judge
Addendum to 19
Spend some time in the natural world
Listen
Realize that debt = slavery
Avoid advertising
Say no to the double standard
Watch North and South
Cut the drama
Rethink church as THE place to meet Mr. Right
Know when to walk away
Romance novels can be addictive
Let the other person have the last word
Realize Prom is just a dance
Get a thicker skin
Reinforce the authority of your children’s father
Laugh at yourself first
When managing others, observe first, then proceed respectfully
Cheat-proof your relationship
Count your blessings
Hold off on the inking and piercing
Acknowledge that chivalry is dead
Don’t poach other women’s men
Repeat after me: No one cares about your issues
Recognize the limitations of male-female friendships
Take a good, hard look in the mirror
Don’t get a boob job
Expect and accept that bad things will happen
Do not attempt to get rich off your everyday unfortunate experience
Differentiate between sexual power and real power
Get some experience with children
Realize that your reproductive rights utterly trample men’s reproductive rights
Honor your parents
Drop the princess act
Cultivate dignity
Limit your liquor
Grerp is very direct and she has strong opinions. (The best givers of advice always do ;-) ) You may not agree with everything she says, or you may realize that you fall short. In my case, I knew that not only had I fallen short, but that I would always fall short of a couple of her goals, and that’s OK too. Developing oneself is hard work, and it starts with as objective a self-assessment as you can muster. Grerp provides an excellent roadmap to get you there.
Although I didn’t write any of these posts, I did go to the trouble to link to each and every one (every title is live, just click on it).
Grab a mug of tea or glass of wine, and pull up a chair. Then knock yourself out.
