Pretty Young: Being Unapologetically Female in a Man's World

By Sarah W Humphrey

Boys can "shoot the sh*t," but girls must act like a lady.

It's just one of the paradoxes that Sarah Whitney Humphrey has noticed since chil

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Sep 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9781637305287

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Pretty Young

Pretty Young

Being Unapologetically Female in a Man’s World

Sarah Whitney Humphrey

New Degree Press

Copyright © 2021 Sarah Whitney Humphrey

All rights reserved.

Pretty Young

Being Unapologetically Female in a Man’s World

ISBN

978-1-63730-435-8 (Paperback)

ISBN

978-1-63730-527-0 (Kindle Ebook)

ISBN

978-1-63730-528-7 (Ebook)

To my future daughter(s)—this one is for you. <3

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1. Fact or Feeling?

Chapter 2. Cultural Pressures

Chapter 3. Your Limiting Beliefs Are Limiting You in More Ways Than One

Chapter 4. Redefining Beauty on Your Own Terms

Chapter 5. The Toxic Tango

Chapter 6. #MeToo

Chapter 7. Sexy & I Own It!

Chapter 8. Faith, Shame & The Patriarchy

Chapter 9. The Mental Health Pandemic

Chapter 10. Post-Grad & A Pandemic

Chapter 11. Alone or Lonely?

Chapter 12. Validation Is for Parking

Chapter 13. Women in the Workplace: Lack of Confidence & Gender Biases

Chapter 14. Women in the Workplace: A New Era of Entrepre-istas

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Appendix

Introduction

My best friend, Natalie, started a drinking game in my honor. It’s called take a shot every time someone tells Sarah he’s seen her at the gym. Needless to say, you might be blacked out by the end of the night.

During college, almost every guy I ever met started off with, I think I’ve seen you in the gym before. Now, I’m not sure why they couldn’t come up with a better pickup line, but regardless, I was apparently that girl. I was that short, blonde girl from the gym who could be categorized as hot or attractive by society’s standards.

During my first two and a half years of college, this attention I was getting honestly amazed me. In middle school and high school, I was very much the girl who flew underneath the radar. I was never popular. I wasn’t the skinniest. I was never at all the parties. I barely even drank. I felt invisible to the outside world. When I went to college, I was desperate for things to change. I wanted to be seen and to be known. I wanted to be wanted. So, on a mission to make it happen, I did all the things you are supposed to do. I joined a sorority, went to parties, got drunk, and hooked up with boys. For a while, I was having the time of my life. This newfound attention was like having alcohol for the first time: intoxicating and liberating.

Unfortunately, this attention also went to my head. My ego was at an all-time high, even though I would never admit that to anyone. I was doing the best I could to live up to the labels given to me, and honestly, I was succeeding. I played my part so well I could’ve beat out Emma Stone for an Oscar. I put a smile on my face when I needed to. I was friendly and bubbly. I was fashion-forward and always looked put together. I did well in my classes and received high marks from my teachers. I was perfect, or so it seemed.

That all came crashing down on me during the second semester of my sophomore year. Heartbreak and trauma soon became my reality, and I was holding my exterior self together by a thread. My crippling anxiety and depression I had dealt with for so long in high school began to overtake my everyday life. The eating disorder I thought I had recovered from began to creep back in.

Maybe if I lost some more weight, no one would know I’m actually hurting? I thought. Maybe that guy who broke my heart would actually love me if I was skinnier?

I began to party more because drowning out our worries is what we are supposed to do, right? I spent hours scrolling through social media, comparing my short, athletic build to those with taller, leaner figures. I continually let boys disrespect me because nice girls are supposed to shut their mouths and take it, right? My anxiety and depression got worse with each passing day. Even sitting in class would make my heart race at a thousand miles per hour. To top it all off, I got a concussion I deliberately ignored. My mental, emotional, and physical health were deteriorating. Somehow, despite all the hurt and pain, I tried my best to maintain that perfect facade even though I was falling apart at the seams.

Each day, as I passed by familiar and friendly faces, I’d greet everyone happily with a big smile because that is what I thought I was supposed to do, despite feeling more alone, more broken, and more shattered every day. I soon felt suffocated by both myself and others as these different labels were continuously imposed on me—the pretty girl, the smart girl, the bubbly girl. People had told me for so long that I must be all those things. When I felt like I no longer fit the mold, I felt like a failure.

I spent so much of my life trying to live up to a standard and fit into labels others placed on me. While certain standards and labels can be debilitating for people like myself, I can understand why people like labels.

It’s safe. It creates a sense of order. It makes life easier to understand, but for me, labels feel suffocating.

Who do they want me to be? Who should I be? These thoughts pounded in my head constantly.

But in actuality, the real question should have been: Who do I want to be?

For people of all generations, it can be difficult to know who we are and who we want to be. But for young millennials and Gen Z’ers alike, this difficulty is apparent now more than ever. Our generation not only has parents, friends, cultural pressures, societal norms, and religion cramming ideologies down our throats, but also has social media, which is its own beast. I, like so many others, have spent so much time deliberating exactly who I am, who I want to be, who I should be, and where I’m going. I’m a professional overthinker and, to my own dismay, have seemingly taken every opinion into consideration at least once.

While it is easy for me to dread the fact that I do this, I only exhibit behaviors I have been conditioned to believe are acceptable, from seeking validation to accepting these socially and culturally constructed labels. We have been fed false narratives. Whether the narrative is about looking a certain way or pressuring people to have jobs before graduating college, these narratives are fed to us by people who we think we can trust, such as our teachers, parents, government officials, priests, rabbis, you name it. For women especially, these narratives create most of the mental noise and distractions swirling around in our heads.

One major issue with young women is we go through life on autopilot, never questioning, pondering, or seeking more information. Rather, we accept what is. We accept these boundaries, wear the labels, and find contentment in the ordinary. We stay in our boxes and rarely cross the line into unknown territory. We overthink but rarely become introspective because knowing ourselves can be the most terrifying thing of all. We are taught to sit there and look pretty. We are taught to wait for that dream guy, dream job, or dream house.

Don’t be bossy, they say, or you might come across as bitchy.

Don’t be too smart, or you might intimidate the man.

Don’t excel in your career so much, or you won’t be able to take proper care of your children.

You can’t have it all.

Rather than fight these voices speaking lies in our heads, we stay silent and mind our own business. But what if we started asking the questions, like: Why do I keep going from one toxic relationship to the other? Why am I constantly falling into these negative ongoing cycles? Do I really believe everything my religious or spiritual practice has to say about God or a higher power? Why do I feel the need to prove myself and find validation from everyone around me? Who was I before the world told me to be something else? The list goes on and on.

We live in an era where we are bombarded with so many distractions and noise. From scrolling through social media, to seeing various national events unfold, to trying to meet our family’s expectations, to keeping up with our own personal life and obligations, our world seems to be wildly spinning at times, affecting our emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual health.

This is what your twenties are like, they say. It’s full of chaos and confusion, frustration and liberation. It’s known to be the era of both being a hot mess and settling down. Both descriptions are contradictions of each other, yet they are far too accurate. We party to forget and get married because we think we have to. We work a nine-to-five job to pay the bills, but we drown out the mundanity of the life we signed up for with booze and boys.

The mental noise and distractions women experience eat away at us, yet we are so unaware. We rarely take the time to stop, reflect, and question our thoughts and behaviors. We have become so accustomed to how things are that many of us have stopped questioning why it has to be this way, why we often belittle ourselves, and why we can’t find the confidence within ourselves to take the leap.

We feed into the preconceived notions of what it means to be a woman and no longer have our own opinions on the matter, yet we still wonder why we struggle deep down. We still wonder why we don’t feel completely fulfilled. We still wonder, what if? What if we did it a different way? What if we went against the norm? But what if is often too much of a scary idea to act on. So, we stay in these toxic cycles, we continue down the path set before us, and we sit there and look pretty.

Because we’ve become accustomed to the noise and distractions, women have to drown out their truest selves. I am a firm believer in this being why so many women struggle with body image and mental health and toxic relationships. We have found our worth in what others say rather than who we truly are.

For the longest time, I felt alone when it came to how I thought about life. I felt like I was the only one who struggled with self-worth and self-confidence. I thought I was the only one who wanted a life outside of the norm. But according to some troubling statistics, I discovered I was never alone. According to a study done by Dove, only 4 percent of women worldwide consider themselves ‘beautiful.’ By the age of 17, 78 percent of teens have a negative view of their bodies. In another related study, researchers found when women enter the workplace, their confidence actually decreases over time, from 27 percent as a new employee to a mere 13 percent as a more seasoned employee. When it comes to getting a promotion, men are more likely to apply when they feel 60 percent confident they will get the position, whereas women tend to apply only when they feel 100 percent confident they will get the position (Slaughter, 2016).

Why is it as women we have such negative views of ourselves? Why do we diminish our abilities, when in actuality we are more than capable? Why do we believe we cannot succeed when we can? Why do we believe in these false narratives and give into our own mental noise and distractions, rather than work hard to disrupt the noise and counter these socially-constructed diversions?

We live in a society that is so fast paced, but we ignore the red flags, put our blinders on, and carry on with our lives. Our pain manifests as eating disorders, mental illness, toxic relationships, or poor self-esteem. We are left crying out for help. With these neglected personal issues, a global pandemic, and a stark political and civil divide in our nation, we have what I believe is the biggest threat to our generation’s mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual health to date.

So many of us are carrying around baggage from our own brokenness and the brokenness of others, which only inhibits us from achieving all we can be. The saying goes, Hurt people hurt people. With the vast amount of hurt and pain women experience every day, it can be easy for us to project our hurt and our pain on others unintentionally. Our hurt ends up hurting the ones we love the most.

But that’s when you have to stop yourself and ask: What if? What if women took the time to pause for just a moment, long enough to take inventory of their life? What if women took the time to declutter their minds and decipher their own thoughts? What if women spent the time to do internal work and question life as