June 16, 2010 • 32 mins
The term "bachelor" is commonly applied to single men, but is there a satisfactory female equivalent? Molly and Cristen discuss various terms that have been used to describe single women over the years -- and if they measure up -- in this episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stump Mom Never told
You From housetop works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. This is Molly and I'm Kristin. Kristen. The
(00:21):
Bachelorette is about to start the television show. The most
recent bachelor found himself a lady. Thank goodness. Now they're
running off into the sunset love as I mean, there's
no other option on reality shows. You always find internal
love must And so I mentioned the Bachelorette casually to
you in an email, and you are an etymology guru. Like,
(00:43):
if I may give you a compliment right now, Kristen,
it's that you're really good at etymology. Well, I think
I'm more a googling things like you know, insert word etymology, Kristen,
don't sell yourself short. Well, I just gotta be I
gotta be honest with my you know, with our listeners. Molling, Well,
you you took my off hand in comment about Bachelor
Bachelorette and you went all etymological. Is that the wordmogical? Yeah,
(01:07):
you went all that on it. Tell us what you
found out well, here, here's the thing, Molly, because I
I've I've thought about the term bachelor before because I
don't feel like bachelorette it's necessarily equivalent to a bachelor
because I don't know about you, but when I think
of a bachelor, it implies something kind of sexy and mysterious,
(01:31):
like you don't know whether or not he you know,
a bachelor, confirmed bachelor is cool, just living on his
own and his sweet bachelor paths always got like a
cool wet bar. Yeah, bringing some ladies home he may
or may not call them, I don't know, or is
a bachelorette just sounds like well, first of all, it
sounds like someone who is part of an annoying bridal
(01:53):
party because he's already getting married. She's not single, she's
engaged exactly. And there's something kind of diminutive about out
the the bachelorette, you know, and we never think of
like you would never refer to Jennifer Aniston stay as
a bachelorette, whereas George Clooney, on the other hand, is
definitely a bachelor. Right, So so yeah, you you basically
(02:16):
just planted a seed in my head. Well you water
the seed. I should say that was already in my head.
You're the gardener of my mind, Molly. Um See, I
wanted to do a little bit of digging to find
out up the seed, well, the garden metaphors falling apart,
Christ let's back up. So I wanted to find out
(02:37):
the meaning behind bachelor and where we got this, and
whether or not there really is a female equivalent to bachelor. Okay,
So if i'm ay, Molly, share with you a little
a little history of the term bachelor. And this comes
from the online Etymological Dictionary, because unfortunately I don't have
an Oxford English dictionary. And uh, you know, Molly, if
(02:59):
you ever want to get me a doesn't I'm saying
it now. It's on the podcast. I really think she's
saying it now. So someone higher up in this company
will hear this. Thank her a dictionary, Yeah, I want
an o E ed Okay. So bachelor. The term comes
around in hundreds and it means a youthful night or
a novice in arms, and it's a French term and
(03:21):
it's usually referred to as a night bachelor. It's a
young squire in training for knighthood. Um. And then we
have it evolved in the fourteenth century from night in
training to junior member of a guild or university too,
then in the late fourteenth century to an unmarried man.
And this transition to the meaning of unmarried man parallels
(03:41):
sort of a shift in the institution of marriage when
the Catholic Church in Europe really started to formalize and
institutionalize the rules governing marriage and make it more of
a formal process, you know, dictating who can get married,
how it happens, whether or not you can divorced, have
a marriage in nold, etcetera. All right, so now bachelorette bachelor,
(04:05):
You would think that it would be very related to
the word, but it's not. It was from young girl
basically in French. Yes, um, they had bacallette and that
evolved into bachelor girl, in which I would assume had
(04:26):
a similar meaning it's bachelor. However, still we were on
uneven footing here with bachelor versus bachelor girl. Bachelor girl
sounds like, you know, like a seventeen year old and
it and it really meant student. It goes back to
that definition of bachelor that had to do with the
junior member of a university. It was you know, it
was a girl in high school essentially, right, yeah, co ed. Um.
And then it's not until nineteen thirty five that we
(04:48):
have the evolution of bachelorette in the sense that we
think of it today. And not surprisingly, that comes after
the arrival of the term bachelor party. In so the
history of bachelorette is pretty short, pretty short, and not equivalent. Yeah,
and so that's one of the reasons why I wanted
to do a little more digging to find out, well,
(05:09):
you know, we haven't been you know, women bachelorette does
not equal female bachelor by any stretch of the imagination.
I don't think. Um, however, my I think the term
that probably all of our listeners are thinking of right
now to term a single woman is spinster. Spinster, spinster. Yes,
(05:30):
it's a scary term because of all the loaded connotation
that it carries. So Kristen, being the etymological hard word
to say genius that she is, found us the origin
of the word spinster. And I actually ran across this
while reading Marriage a History by Stephanie Koontz, which is fascinating,
(05:51):
fascinating read um, and she points out that spinster used
to be a term of honor for a men who
spun yarn. And it's just back in the sixteen hundreds.
But then in the eighteenth century we have a big
shift in marriage from being a union of two people
(06:11):
that were more it's more of a brokered arrangement. It's
a financial deal. Yeah, um, father, pick someone up for
you exactly, married exactly. Because a lot of the wealth
is property based, you need to consolidate your resources. Hence
you marry two people off and joined them together and
then you can reap the benefits. But in the eighteenth
(06:32):
century there's a big shift toward industrialization away from landed property,
and with that comes a shift towards marriage for love.
And we've talked about this before in the podcast on
whether or not your parents should pick your marriage and
arrange marriages and things like that. So along with this,
Cause points out that there's a new sentimentalization of wives
(06:55):
and mothers because of this ideal eyes. Perception of marriage
is something very treasured, it's very sweet, you know, it's
it's destiny between two star cross lovers. You get to
add all this romance into it that you might not
have been able to add when it was just a
deal between you and the guy from the next county.
(07:17):
But it's it's very interesting to me that the change
that negative conotation of spencer happened so soon after the
marriage by fascination, right because from from spinster as an
honorable term for you know, hard working woman spinning yarn
becomes spinster. No one wants to pick so lonely, you
(07:40):
just have you in your ball of yarn to keep
you warm. Right, So it's kind of like the single
woman moves from being just this burdensome piece of property
that a family can't utilize to um to improve their
state or their wealth or whatever, to uh, just being
kind of pitiful because it's marriage because become something more
(08:02):
based on individual choice, and no one wants to choose
if you will this this woman, so she just becomes
the sad little spinster. Yeah. It just as easily, spinster
could have been a word that implied that you didn't
have any property or father you know, or family behind
you to make this match. It could have easily just
been a term of class. And now because marriage became
(08:24):
so idealized, it became this this unlovable, unwanted woman. Yeah.
And if you and if you don't believe us, they'll
take our word for Take Bridget Hills, who wrote a
book all about this called Women Alone Spinster's in England
from sixteen sixty to eighteen fifty, which I'm sure so
many of you out there have read. Um, it's on
everyone's nightstand. But she says in the past, women who
(08:47):
didn't marry were regarded at best as failed women to
be pitied or derided, and it worst ruined women whose
presence contaminated society. Because in the eighteen hundreds, they're really
especially in England and in the United States some degree
there were there was a growing group of unmarried women
because at this point, really for the first time, women
(09:08):
didn't have to get married to be secure. They had
more of a choice in things because they had opportunities
to earn their own income. And with this growing group
of unwed women in the nineteenth century, it became kind
of this social phenomenon, you know, like, what do we
do with all these unmarried women? And at the same time,
if you've got this growing idealization of marriage, it has
(09:31):
so much pressure. Now you don't want to you don't
want to ruin your chance at it. You've got to
find this perfect guy who's gonna fit all your needs.
So I think we have also these women who are
saying single by choice just because how can you live
up to these romantic ideals that have been infused into marriage.
So while socially there's a negative connotation in the past
with single women, at the same time, Molly, women today
(09:53):
have a lot to thank for these women who chose
to be single, because they did a lot to open
the doors for equalizing women's education, opening up universities to women,
um opening up career opportunities to women, the early suffrage movement, etcetera.
A lot of it has to do with the actions
of unmarried women because their responsibilities weren't tied up in
(10:15):
home and child rearing. Well, not that it was all
making accomplishments and drinking margarita's, because the women essentially might
have been considered the indentured servant of the family if
they didn't leave and go create their own you know,
they're these tales of the women who are living, you know,
as sort of the unpaid domestic servants. And when you
think about you know, aging parents, a parent who might
(10:38):
get sick, it was automatically assumed that the woman who
didn't have the family would move back home and take
care of them. So she assumes this caretaker role. And
in some you know, like films, it's portrayed as being
a choice that they're happy to make, they're happy to
be there for for their family, And in some films
it's more like, oh, this is such a burden. I
should have gotten married so I could have just flown
(10:58):
in on the weekends and not dealt with all this.
And I think that one, UM, one thing that's good
to point out that might be helpful for understanding sort
of the peculiar role of um of single women married
versus single women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are
these things called coverture laws, which for just laws by
(11:20):
which women's legal rights were subsumed by her husband once
she becomes married. Now, before that, unmarried women back in
the day had um had more rights to own property
and make contracts in her own name. However, if she
wasn't married a lot of times um she she would
still be under the thumb of say an older brother
(11:44):
or her parents if they were still alive. So there
were still all these legal restrictions UM around what single
women and married women couldn't couldn't do. But legally, single
women did have more independence, legal independence than married women
and under these coverture laws. But what did it matter, Christan,
because they were all alone, all alone. And you kind
(12:07):
of alluded to this earlier. But bachelor, I mean, he's
got the swinging bachelor pad. As he said, he brings
the ladies home and along the way. Spinster really acquired
this this tone of withered sexuality, or never used sexuality.
It was, you know, you can't be a spinster and
have a healthy sex life. Essentially, Yeah, a lot of
times there are older virgins. I mean to put it
(12:30):
quite bluntly, because if you think about the portrayal of
spinster's um in popular culture or an art or whatever,
it's oftentimes they're clothed and very modest, high necked, long skirt,
you know, glasses, perhaps hair, and a tight bun. That's
the classic spinster look. And you know, some scholars have
(12:54):
made the case that that has become the average spinster look,
almost a frightened single women into getting married because these
you know, there were came points in in our in
our history where we did need women to get married
and have children. You know, that is the propagation of
the species, and so it was seen as abnormal that
(13:14):
you wouldn't want to help that along, let's say, after
a period of war when the population have been decreased. Um,
So that was sort of, you know, as as everything
kind of painted by culture as here's the ideal, and
here's what you can be if it doesn't happen for you,
if you are so unlovable, you cannot enter a marriage
of love. Whoa unto you? Whoa unto you? Now see
(13:37):
to me? It makes sense that this idea of single
women just felt very problematic in uh eighteenth century nineteenth
century society because it kind of was a new thing
and there were so many huge shifts going on with
industrialization and um, a shift in how even the domestic
politics of the day. But then and we go when
(14:00):
we move forward a little bit into the twentieth century. Um,
there's a book called Bachelor Girls by Betsy Israel that
charts sort of the social history of single women, and
there seems to be a pretty well, i'd say, kind
of positive shift more during the Jazz Age, where there's
(14:23):
more of a modern idea of single women being okay,
they're striking out on their own, they're going to the
big cities, and it's a little more glamorous than it
used to be. So in the early twentieth century, we've
got what Israel calls the new woman, and it's sort
of an umbrella term that covers all these these new
kind of single women that are being appreciated in a
(14:44):
new way. You know, we've got beginning strains of feminism.
So this new woman is very left intellectual, you know,
not going to stay at home, and it kind of
evolves as that century goes on into something that can
be really glamorous, bohemian. Um that daydream that every girl
I think has at some point another of living alone
in Paris or New York City and just and living
(15:06):
a romantic lifestyle. Think when you say this is sort
of the only pause we see in terms of the
single female life being an achievable, attainable, desirable thing. Yeah,
it seems like the beginning of a of a pretty
big shift. And um Issuel also points out that the
media really honed in on this angle of this single
phenomenon of for the first time, like it's okay for
(15:29):
these these women to be independent and going to college.
And she also mentions that, um, this, this is the
first generation to really reap the benefits from the what
she calls the Civil War era blessed Spencers of the
day who were kind of hammering down, um, the barrier's
education into career and they were really taking advantage of
(15:50):
all this. And then from the twenties and into the
nineteen sixties, especially in New York and large metropolitan areas
like that, we have an influx of single career girls
coming into the big city to make their way. And um,
I think one of the most quintessential single girl haven's,
(16:13):
if you will, of the day would have been the
Barbazon Hotel. And this was one of New York's many
women's only dormitories where girls would come a lot of times,
say would be you know, from wealthier backgrounds, or they
would come from small towns having scrimpton safe to come
to the big city and and chase their dreams down.
(16:35):
And the Barbazon was really, I mean, it was just
the peak of glamour for young girls coming coming in.
And by young I mean you know, like yeah, a
lot of girls coming to find a career, sometimes in
modeling because one of the things you were grated on
to get into the Barbazon where your looks in your dress. Yeah,
and no wonder because, um, some of Barbazon's alumni include
(16:58):
Joan Crawford, Grace Kelly, Sylvia Plath, Alan McGraw. Actually the
bell Jar is based loosely on her life at the Barbazon.
So I think that takes us up through the sixties,
this glamor of the Barbazon, a young woman setting out
on our own. But I think that that's the last time,
as I said, that we see the female single life
really celebrated like that, because I mean what they say
(17:21):
in this article and Banty Fair that we're taking this
from is that what a lot of girls were on
the hunt for instead of a career was a husband.
So in the back of the mind, there's always going
to be that, uh, you're gonna settle down someday. Now,
I think we do have to point out, Molly, that
in the early nineties seventies there was a brief resurgence
and appreciation of this joy of being a single woman. Um,
(17:43):
there was a paper that we found by researcher Deborah J. Mustard,
and she really examined spinsters in film and in her
in her paper. She points out the Newsreek ran a
cover story in the early seventies, um, you know, really
celebrating the rediscovered independence of single women. And kind of
what that brings to mind, I guess is following close
(18:04):
in the heels of that is the rise of you know,
the career girl in the late seventies and eighties and
the you know, the women's power suits, the big shoulders.
You know, women are really starting to break through those
glass ceilings and make really large strides. But I would
argue that that kind of single celebration is a different
tone from you know, the single career girls in the twenties, thirties, forties,
(18:30):
because it's a lot more um, I guess, focused on
climbing the career ladder and striking it out on their own.
There's just a different tone to it. There's a different tone.
And I also think that in you know, in this
paper about the films, it indicates that there could be
a possible backlash. She talks about the movie Fatal Attraction,
(18:51):
where you've got an older woman who was single, I
had the affair and then went crazy because she didn't
get the settle down happy ending. Yeah, these on well,
they can have everything, but a bachelor has Okay, to
put this back in bachelor terms, they can have the
high power job and this like apartment and the nice
clothes and plenty of dates. But unlike the bachelor who's
(19:13):
fine going to bed alone and you know, just serially
dating the you know, single white female, at some point,
she's gonna boil your money, She's gonna boil your bunny.
You know, there's there's that element of danger still. I mean,
despite all those you know, career just to think about
it movie terms, like, yeah, you can have like the
working girl Melanie Griffith head off and saved the day.
(19:35):
But you know, in the same era, we've got Fatal
Attraction and and all these movies where the woman is
just like I am okay until I realized I'm alone.
And that's I mean, that continues on. You see that
in the romantic communies even today. Sure, I mean, like
going back to you know, the Jennifer Anderson versus George
Clooney reference. I mean, come on, like, think about how
the tabloids, I mean, the tabloids have given her a
(19:56):
narrative of single lady who is sad. Yeah, all she
wants is a baby and someone to raise it with.
And um so, I think at this point in our conversation,
we can we can now have a list of of
terms that are not just not equivalent, don't have the same,
all encompassing I guess power as bachelor because you know
(20:18):
we've got you know, Spencer obviously not bachelorette. No, career
woman no, because they're still like when you wake up
and you're sad, right, career woman doesn't have it all necessarily.
Um So let's keep moving forward, Molly, because I think
one offshoot of the Spencer that we haven't talked about
are these philon related terms. A trio of feline really
(20:41):
had terms which let's not even spend too much time
on them because I don't even know that they deserve
that much more, the first one being the cat Lady. Now,
so here's the thing that really bothers me. I really
love cats. I really don't like dogs. I'm not a
dog person, But by virtue of having a cat versus
owning a dog, I'm somehow painting myself as single and sad.
(21:02):
Don't don't you agree that's the case. Yeah, yeah, there
was a There was a blog post that we found
from Forbes magazine that um, you know, I was talking
about like the danger of you know, older women. Why
shouldn't say older women, I guess women our age UM
owning cats because it's like, if you bring a guy
home in your single and in your mid twenties, mid thirties,
(21:26):
it's gonna freak guy out because you're gonna look like
a cat lady, which is just it's just silly, you know,
it really is silly. And it was kind of funny though,
because they did, um, they did a survey to find
out like, look at the biggest, like the cat friendliest
cities in the US, and then breakdown number of single
males versus single females, and actually and then all of
the cat friendliest cities in the US there were more
(21:47):
single males than females, which I say statistically debunks the
cat lady erie. Also we shared this on our Twitter
last week, the blog keep Boys with Cats. I mean,
the thing is, if the guy owns a cat, it's adorable.
It shows like some nurturing side and cats are so
funny and playful. But if a girl owns a cat,
(22:07):
it's sad. It's typical because we've got this term cat
lady which again is not a good equivalent to bachelor.
And how do we become associated with cats? While it
goes back to the early days of domestication when cats
were kept around the house because they were skillful hunters,
eating the rats and then got onto the flower and
the dogs would go out to hunt with the men.
(22:27):
So cats therefore became more associated with the home and
with women. And now we have cat ladies, And of
course cat lady leads us to what you've all been
waiting for, folks, cougar, the cougar, Mollie, I'm city. You
and I are a little too young to be cougars.
Don't think we would be considered cougars unless we're cruise
(22:49):
in high schools. I believe the source you sent me
said thirty plus thirty plus yeah plus. The cougar for
any of you who um are completely out of the
pop culture loop is the slang term for an older
woman who likes to day to the younger man de
me Moore Ashton Kusher kind of relationships. She's usually pretty attractive,
(23:13):
well kept, and she wants some younger meat. To put
it in cougar animalistic terms, now, I would say that
if you listen to our podcasts. You know that we
love our Canadian fans. We know we have a lot
of them out there. We try and get props to
Canada whenever we can. But Canada, you are to blame
for this cougar phenomenon. Yes. According to the grammar Phobia
(23:36):
blog um, cougar is thought to have originated with the
Vancouver Canucks hockey team in the late nineteen eighties, when
the NHL players supposedly use the term to describe groupies
female groupies who are a tad older. Now, there isn't
(23:57):
solid evidence to support that, but some was sub tracked
the use of cougar to Western Canada in the early
nineteen nineties, when the term pretty much went the same thing,
and then in two thousand one when Canadians Elizabeth Vanderzog
and else Stage launched a tongue in cheek website named
(24:17):
cougar Date dot com. It was specifically meant for women
uh in their mid thirties looking to date, and they
say that they got the idea for cougar date when
a nephew of theirs, who was a hockey player, referred
to the two women as cougars. Hockey players hockey players
who knew Molly. If you had asked me to guess
(24:39):
the origin of cougar, I would not have said Canadian
hockey players. And then in two thousand one, we've got
dating columnists for the Toronto Sun who writes the book Cougar,
A Guide for Older Women Dating Younger Men. And you know,
christ I was trying to remember the first time I
heard the word cougar, and I think it was probably
probably television like shows like How I Met Your Mother
they did a big cougar episode. O um. So it's
(25:01):
hard to say, like exactly where on the timeline, like
all of these cougar things got really popular. But it's
cougars everywhere now. But it's cougars everywhere except did you
see that last week a Google band cougar date dot
Com from advertising on their site. I did see that.
But backlash, Yes, there's a cougar backlash, but it's not
because they don't like the word. It's just they think
(25:23):
that it's inappropriate. Because I think that it's another one
of those things where we want our spinsters to be
old women who don't have sex, and cougar date gives
that sexuality back to the women nom only sounds like
you are applauding the jerem cougar. I'm not applauding the
top the term cougar, but I think it's a double
(25:43):
standard because Google didn't ban any of the sites that
are geared towards older men, older bachelor's looking for younger women.
So I do think that's a double standard. And I
do think, yeah, I do think that if there's a
term that gives the women back the sexuality that spinster
totally takes away from them, then that can be a
good thing. Okay, but let me let me give you
(26:04):
a caveat. I do not like this new term cheetah.
Now'm like, I don't even know that we need to
spend much time on cheetah, because, first of all, it
is a concoction of a man named Spencer Morgan, who's
a writer for the New York Observer, who's obviously just
looking to start an internet meme. And um, I don't
really know how to say this except that Morgan's definition
(26:25):
of cheetah is nothing more than bull strong words. And
I can support that, Christian because when you sent me
this article, I thought it was a joke, Like that's
how ridiculous. I think this cheetah thing is. Yes, according
to Spencer Morgan, a cheetah is quote a cougar's younger
cousin who's generally a young woman fresh out of a
(26:45):
relationship on the prowl to take advantage of helpless, drunk
men who are out of her league. Basically, it's a
woman who has been dumped and she has somehow lost
her looks in the process of dating some guy, and
the only way that she can possibly have relations with
another man who might be a little more attractive than
she is is to wait until around two am when
(27:07):
they all have their drunk goggles on, and she's gonna
swoop and take advantage of him and then leave the
next day, essentially date raping him. I don't know. I
think that that's what he that's the assumption he makes. Yeah,
Morgan makes some some pretty off the wall claims about this, uh,
this cheetah thing, which makes me wonder where he got
(27:27):
the idea for it in the first place. I have
I have an idea on that, crystal, Okay, I mean,
think about what we've just talked about about these this
history of demonizing as spinster. I think it's the same thing.
I think that, um, there's some danger still in our
society where people don't know what to do with unmarried women,
and so the fact that they are out there living
(27:48):
what could be considered the bachelor lifestyle scares people. And
so I think it's the same negative connotations applied to
a woman who was unmarried as were applied back in
you know, a teenth century England when they were idealizing
mothers and wives. And maybe that's why even today, even
in two thousand and ten, we don't have a good
(28:10):
term I would argue for an unmarried woman. Now, some
feminists have tried to reclaim the term spencer. So you
know what back in the day was this was a
term of honor for women who worked hard spinning wool,
and it was just co opted by you know, the
marital industrial complex, cetera. Let's reclaim it positive but I
(28:31):
just don't I don't necessarily buy it. I don't think
that you can. You don't want that one back. Uh,
Let's see what else, Kristen Well, and then we have
things like Gibson Girl, Barbazon Girl, working Girl, all of
these you know, kind of bachelor equivalents, but they all
have girl attached to them, which implies the maturity. Molly,
(28:53):
what are we gonna do? I think we're gonna ask
our listeners. I think we're going to ask god listeners.
What term should we fabulous single ladies try to reclaim
as our own? I mean, it doesn't even matter, Like,
are we thinking too much about this? Like? Am I
just too hard pressed on having some kind of bachelor?
Because some people have also said, well, why don't we
(29:13):
just use bachelor? You don't like bachelor? You don't because
I think it sounds masculine, because I've been fed heteronormative
ideas all my life. Help us out, listeners, what should
get and and get creative? You know, we're Molly Molly
and I are open to all sorts of ideas. Is
there a good bachelor equivalent for single women? Mom? Stuff
(29:36):
has suffolks dot com sending your ideas? Please or post
it to our Twitter or Facebook any any way, shape
or form. Just get us your suggestions. And in the meantime,
here a couple of listener emails, Well, Molly about a
reading list here to kick things offices from Amy in Ireland.
And she is reading. She's reading a lot of George
(30:00):
Orwell's reading Coming Up for Air and a Clergyman's Daughter,
all by George Orwell. She is also reading Catch twenty
two by Joseph Heller and Catch Her in the Ride
by Salingers. She's got some classics up there from Classic
as a fan of crossing off the classics on you know,
during the during the summer, good time to do it.
Feel accomplished. Yes, I'm got an email from Sarah and
(30:22):
this is about the bikini podcast. She you know, we
we kind of gave Sports Illustrated a hard time. She
writes that she works as an artist for the design
from that handles the s I swimsuit calendars. She does
not specifically work with that calendar, by the way, but
she sees the raw photos that are sent to us
by s I. In our color proofing room. The artists
here removed moles, cellulite, stretch marks, tattoos, body hair, accentuate curves,
(30:44):
even the skin tone, et cetera, to make that picture
perfect each look. I think the rise of bikini has
led to the rise of many other services and professions
like personal trainers, stylists, tanning salons and the like, and
of course, professional photo retouch artist this might be a
mixed bag of blessing that keeps people like me employed.
In the end, I'd like to mind novel listeners out
there that if you ever feel insecure about not looking
(31:05):
like a model in the photo, that even the model
doesn't look like the photo, that look is made by
artists on computers. We all have flaws and imperfections, so
unless you have a professional retouching, you embrace your looks
from every somewhere makes you happy and enjoy your summer excellent.
So thanks so much for the emails, guys. Keep them
coming at mom stuff at how stuff works dot com.
Follow me and Molly on Twitter and Facebook as well,
(31:30):
and as always, you can check out our blog during
the weeks see what we're writing about. It's the stuff
Mom Never Told You blog. Is that how stuff works
dot com. Want more how stuff works, check out our
blogs on the house stuff works dot com home page.
(31:56):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's right me, are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stump Mom Never told
You From housetop works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. This is Molly and I'm Kristin. Kristen. The
(00:21):
Bachelorette is about to start the television show. The most
recent bachelor found himself a lady. Thank goodness. Now they're
running off into the sunset love as I mean, there's
no other option on reality shows. You always find internal
love must And so I mentioned the Bachelorette casually to
you in an email, and you are an etymology guru. Like,
(00:43):
if I may give you a compliment right now, Kristen,
it's that you're really good at etymology. Well, I think
I'm more a googling things like you know, insert word etymology, Kristen,
don't sell yourself short. Well, I just gotta be I
gotta be honest with my you know, with our listeners. Molling, Well,
you you took my off hand in comment about Bachelor
Bachelorette and you went all etymological. Is that the wordmogical? Yeah,
(01:07):
you went all that on it. Tell us what you
found out well, here, here's the thing, Molly, because I
I've I've thought about the term bachelor before because I
don't feel like bachelorette it's necessarily equivalent to a bachelor
because I don't know about you, but when I think
of a bachelor, it implies something kind of sexy and mysterious,
(01:31):
like you don't know whether or not he you know,
a bachelor, confirmed bachelor is cool, just living on his
own and his sweet bachelor paths always got like a
cool wet bar. Yeah, bringing some ladies home he may
or may not call them, I don't know, or is
a bachelorette just sounds like well, first of all, it
sounds like someone who is part of an annoying bridal
(01:53):
party because he's already getting married. She's not single, she's
engaged exactly. And there's something kind of diminutive about out
the the bachelorette, you know, and we never think of
like you would never refer to Jennifer Aniston stay as
a bachelorette, whereas George Clooney, on the other hand, is
definitely a bachelor. Right, So so yeah, you you basically
(02:16):
just planted a seed in my head. Well you water
the seed. I should say that was already in my head.
You're the gardener of my mind, Molly. Um See, I
wanted to do a little bit of digging to find
out up the seed, well, the garden metaphors falling apart,
Christ let's back up. So I wanted to find out
(02:37):
the meaning behind bachelor and where we got this, and
whether or not there really is a female equivalent to bachelor. Okay,
So if i'm ay, Molly, share with you a little
a little history of the term bachelor. And this comes
from the online Etymological Dictionary, because unfortunately I don't have
an Oxford English dictionary. And uh, you know, Molly, if
(02:59):
you ever want to get me a doesn't I'm saying
it now. It's on the podcast. I really think she's
saying it now. So someone higher up in this company
will hear this. Thank her a dictionary, Yeah, I want
an o E ed Okay. So bachelor. The term comes
around in hundreds and it means a youthful night or
a novice in arms, and it's a French term and
(03:21):
it's usually referred to as a night bachelor. It's a
young squire in training for knighthood. Um. And then we
have it evolved in the fourteenth century from night in
training to junior member of a guild or university too,
then in the late fourteenth century to an unmarried man.
And this transition to the meaning of unmarried man parallels
(03:41):
sort of a shift in the institution of marriage when
the Catholic Church in Europe really started to formalize and
institutionalize the rules governing marriage and make it more of
a formal process, you know, dictating who can get married,
how it happens, whether or not you can divorced, have
a marriage in nold, etcetera. All right, so now bachelorette bachelor,
(04:05):
You would think that it would be very related to
the word, but it's not. It was from young girl
basically in French. Yes, um, they had bacallette and that
evolved into bachelor girl, in which I would assume had
(04:26):
a similar meaning it's bachelor. However, still we were on
uneven footing here with bachelor versus bachelor girl. Bachelor girl
sounds like, you know, like a seventeen year old and
it and it really meant student. It goes back to
that definition of bachelor that had to do with the
junior member of a university. It was you know, it
was a girl in high school essentially, right, yeah, co ed. Um.
And then it's not until nineteen thirty five that we
(04:48):
have the evolution of bachelorette in the sense that we
think of it today. And not surprisingly, that comes after
the arrival of the term bachelor party. In so the
history of bachelorette is pretty short, pretty short, and not equivalent. Yeah,
and so that's one of the reasons why I wanted
to do a little more digging to find out, well,
(05:09):
you know, we haven't been you know, women bachelorette does
not equal female bachelor by any stretch of the imagination.
I don't think. Um, however, my I think the term
that probably all of our listeners are thinking of right
now to term a single woman is spinster. Spinster, spinster. Yes,
(05:30):
it's a scary term because of all the loaded connotation
that it carries. So Kristen, being the etymological hard word
to say genius that she is, found us the origin
of the word spinster. And I actually ran across this
while reading Marriage a History by Stephanie Koontz, which is fascinating,
(05:51):
fascinating read um, and she points out that spinster used
to be a term of honor for a men who
spun yarn. And it's just back in the sixteen hundreds.
But then in the eighteenth century we have a big
shift in marriage from being a union of two people
(06:11):
that were more it's more of a brokered arrangement. It's
a financial deal. Yeah, um, father, pick someone up for
you exactly, married exactly. Because a lot of the wealth
is property based, you need to consolidate your resources. Hence
you marry two people off and joined them together and
then you can reap the benefits. But in the eighteenth
(06:32):
century there's a big shift toward industrialization away from landed property,
and with that comes a shift towards marriage for love.
And we've talked about this before in the podcast on
whether or not your parents should pick your marriage and
arrange marriages and things like that. So along with this,
Cause points out that there's a new sentimentalization of wives
(06:55):
and mothers because of this ideal eyes. Perception of marriage
is something very treasured, it's very sweet, you know, it's
it's destiny between two star cross lovers. You get to
add all this romance into it that you might not
have been able to add when it was just a
deal between you and the guy from the next county.
(07:17):
But it's it's very interesting to me that the change
that negative conotation of spencer happened so soon after the
marriage by fascination, right because from from spinster as an
honorable term for you know, hard working woman spinning yarn
becomes spinster. No one wants to pick so lonely, you
(07:40):
just have you in your ball of yarn to keep
you warm. Right, So it's kind of like the single
woman moves from being just this burdensome piece of property
that a family can't utilize to um to improve their
state or their wealth or whatever, to uh, just being
kind of pitiful because it's marriage because become something more
(08:02):
based on individual choice, and no one wants to choose
if you will this this woman, so she just becomes
the sad little spinster. Yeah. It just as easily, spinster
could have been a word that implied that you didn't
have any property or father you know, or family behind
you to make this match. It could have easily just
been a term of class. And now because marriage became
(08:24):
so idealized, it became this this unlovable, unwanted woman. Yeah.
And if you and if you don't believe us, they'll
take our word for Take Bridget Hills, who wrote a
book all about this called Women Alone Spinster's in England
from sixteen sixty to eighteen fifty, which I'm sure so
many of you out there have read. Um, it's on
everyone's nightstand. But she says in the past, women who
(08:47):
didn't marry were regarded at best as failed women to
be pitied or derided, and it worst ruined women whose
presence contaminated society. Because in the eighteen hundreds, they're really
especially in England and in the United States some degree
there were there was a growing group of unmarried women
because at this point, really for the first time, women
(09:08):
didn't have to get married to be secure. They had
more of a choice in things because they had opportunities
to earn their own income. And with this growing group
of unwed women in the nineteenth century, it became kind
of this social phenomenon, you know, like, what do we
do with all these unmarried women? And at the same time,
if you've got this growing idealization of marriage, it has
(09:31):
so much pressure. Now you don't want to you don't
want to ruin your chance at it. You've got to
find this perfect guy who's gonna fit all your needs.
So I think we have also these women who are
saying single by choice just because how can you live
up to these romantic ideals that have been infused into marriage.
So while socially there's a negative connotation in the past
with single women, at the same time, Molly, women today
(09:53):
have a lot to thank for these women who chose
to be single, because they did a lot to open
the doors for equalizing women's education, opening up universities to women,
um opening up career opportunities to women, the early suffrage movement, etcetera.
A lot of it has to do with the actions
of unmarried women because their responsibilities weren't tied up in
(10:15):
home and child rearing. Well, not that it was all
making accomplishments and drinking margarita's, because the women essentially might
have been considered the indentured servant of the family if
they didn't leave and go create their own you know,
they're these tales of the women who are living, you know,
as sort of the unpaid domestic servants. And when you
think about you know, aging parents, a parent who might
(10:38):
get sick, it was automatically assumed that the woman who
didn't have the family would move back home and take
care of them. So she assumes this caretaker role. And
in some you know, like films, it's portrayed as being
a choice that they're happy to make, they're happy to
be there for for their family, And in some films
it's more like, oh, this is such a burden. I
should have gotten married so I could have just flown
(10:58):
in on the weekends and not dealt with all this.
And I think that one, UM, one thing that's good
to point out that might be helpful for understanding sort
of the peculiar role of um of single women married
versus single women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are
these things called coverture laws, which for just laws by
(11:20):
which women's legal rights were subsumed by her husband once
she becomes married. Now, before that, unmarried women back in
the day had um had more rights to own property
and make contracts in her own name. However, if she
wasn't married a lot of times um she she would
still be under the thumb of say an older brother
(11:44):
or her parents if they were still alive. So there
were still all these legal restrictions UM around what single
women and married women couldn't couldn't do. But legally, single
women did have more independence, legal independence than married women
and under these coverture laws. But what did it matter, Christan,
because they were all alone, all alone. And you kind
(12:07):
of alluded to this earlier. But bachelor, I mean, he's
got the swinging bachelor pad. As he said, he brings
the ladies home and along the way. Spinster really acquired
this this tone of withered sexuality, or never used sexuality.
It was, you know, you can't be a spinster and
have a healthy sex life. Essentially, Yeah, a lot of
times there are older virgins. I mean to put it
(12:30):
quite bluntly, because if you think about the portrayal of
spinster's um in popular culture or an art or whatever,
it's oftentimes they're clothed and very modest, high necked, long skirt,
you know, glasses, perhaps hair, and a tight bun. That's
the classic spinster look. And you know, some scholars have
(12:54):
made the case that that has become the average spinster look,
almost a frightened single women into getting married because these
you know, there were came points in in our in
our history where we did need women to get married
and have children. You know, that is the propagation of
the species, and so it was seen as abnormal that
(13:14):
you wouldn't want to help that along, let's say, after
a period of war when the population have been decreased. Um,
So that was sort of, you know, as as everything
kind of painted by culture as here's the ideal, and
here's what you can be if it doesn't happen for you,
if you are so unlovable, you cannot enter a marriage
of love. Whoa unto you? Whoa unto you? Now see
(13:37):
to me? It makes sense that this idea of single
women just felt very problematic in uh eighteenth century nineteenth
century society because it kind of was a new thing
and there were so many huge shifts going on with
industrialization and um, a shift in how even the domestic
politics of the day. But then and we go when
(14:00):
we move forward a little bit into the twentieth century. Um,
there's a book called Bachelor Girls by Betsy Israel that
charts sort of the social history of single women, and
there seems to be a pretty well, i'd say, kind
of positive shift more during the Jazz Age, where there's
(14:23):
more of a modern idea of single women being okay,
they're striking out on their own, they're going to the
big cities, and it's a little more glamorous than it
used to be. So in the early twentieth century, we've
got what Israel calls the new woman, and it's sort
of an umbrella term that covers all these these new
kind of single women that are being appreciated in a
(14:44):
new way. You know, we've got beginning strains of feminism.
So this new woman is very left intellectual, you know,
not going to stay at home, and it kind of
evolves as that century goes on into something that can
be really glamorous, bohemian. Um that daydream that every girl
I think has at some point another of living alone
in Paris or New York City and just and living
(15:06):
a romantic lifestyle. Think when you say this is sort
of the only pause we see in terms of the
single female life being an achievable, attainable, desirable thing. Yeah,
it seems like the beginning of a of a pretty
big shift. And um Issuel also points out that the
media really honed in on this angle of this single
phenomenon of for the first time, like it's okay for
(15:29):
these these women to be independent and going to college.
And she also mentions that, um, this, this is the
first generation to really reap the benefits from the what
she calls the Civil War era blessed Spencers of the
day who were kind of hammering down, um, the barrier's
education into career and they were really taking advantage of
(15:50):
all this. And then from the twenties and into the
nineteen sixties, especially in New York and large metropolitan areas
like that, we have an influx of single career girls
coming into the big city to make their way. And um,
I think one of the most quintessential single girl haven's,
(16:13):
if you will, of the day would have been the
Barbazon Hotel. And this was one of New York's many
women's only dormitories where girls would come a lot of times,
say would be you know, from wealthier backgrounds, or they
would come from small towns having scrimpton safe to come
to the big city and and chase their dreams down.
(16:35):
And the Barbazon was really, I mean, it was just
the peak of glamour for young girls coming coming in.
And by young I mean you know, like yeah, a
lot of girls coming to find a career, sometimes in
modeling because one of the things you were grated on
to get into the Barbazon where your looks in your dress. Yeah,
and no wonder because, um, some of Barbazon's alumni include
(16:58):
Joan Crawford, Grace Kelly, Sylvia Plath, Alan McGraw. Actually the
bell Jar is based loosely on her life at the Barbazon.
So I think that takes us up through the sixties,
this glamor of the Barbazon, a young woman setting out
on our own. But I think that that's the last time,
as I said, that we see the female single life
really celebrated like that, because I mean what they say
(17:21):
in this article and Banty Fair that we're taking this
from is that what a lot of girls were on
the hunt for instead of a career was a husband.
So in the back of the mind, there's always going
to be that, uh, you're gonna settle down someday. Now,
I think we do have to point out, Molly, that
in the early nineties seventies there was a brief resurgence
and appreciation of this joy of being a single woman. Um,
(17:43):
there was a paper that we found by researcher Deborah J. Mustard,
and she really examined spinsters in film and in her
in her paper. She points out the Newsreek ran a
cover story in the early seventies, um, you know, really
celebrating the rediscovered independence of single women. And kind of
what that brings to mind, I guess is following close
(18:04):
in the heels of that is the rise of you know,
the career girl in the late seventies and eighties and
the you know, the women's power suits, the big shoulders.
You know, women are really starting to break through those
glass ceilings and make really large strides. But I would
argue that that kind of single celebration is a different
tone from you know, the single career girls in the twenties, thirties, forties,
(18:30):
because it's a lot more um, I guess, focused on
climbing the career ladder and striking it out on their own.
There's just a different tone to it. There's a different tone.
And I also think that in you know, in this
paper about the films, it indicates that there could be
a possible backlash. She talks about the movie Fatal Attraction,
(18:51):
where you've got an older woman who was single, I
had the affair and then went crazy because she didn't
get the settle down happy ending. Yeah, these on well,
they can have everything, but a bachelor has Okay, to
put this back in bachelor terms, they can have the
high power job and this like apartment and the nice
clothes and plenty of dates. But unlike the bachelor who's
(19:13):
fine going to bed alone and you know, just serially
dating the you know, single white female, at some point,
she's gonna boil your money, She's gonna boil your bunny.
You know, there's there's that element of danger still. I mean,
despite all those you know, career just to think about
it movie terms, like, yeah, you can have like the
working girl Melanie Griffith head off and saved the day.
(19:35):
But you know, in the same era, we've got Fatal
Attraction and and all these movies where the woman is
just like I am okay until I realized I'm alone.
And that's I mean, that continues on. You see that
in the romantic communies even today. Sure, I mean, like
going back to you know, the Jennifer Anderson versus George
Clooney reference. I mean, come on, like, think about how
the tabloids, I mean, the tabloids have given her a
(19:56):
narrative of single lady who is sad. Yeah, all she
wants is a baby and someone to raise it with.
And um so, I think at this point in our conversation,
we can we can now have a list of of
terms that are not just not equivalent, don't have the same,
all encompassing I guess power as bachelor because you know
(20:18):
we've got you know, Spencer obviously not bachelorette. No, career
woman no, because they're still like when you wake up
and you're sad, right, career woman doesn't have it all necessarily.
Um So let's keep moving forward, Molly, because I think
one offshoot of the Spencer that we haven't talked about
are these philon related terms. A trio of feline really
(20:41):
had terms which let's not even spend too much time
on them because I don't even know that they deserve
that much more, the first one being the cat Lady. Now,
so here's the thing that really bothers me. I really
love cats. I really don't like dogs. I'm not a
dog person, But by virtue of having a cat versus
owning a dog, I'm somehow painting myself as single and sad.
(21:02):
Don't don't you agree that's the case. Yeah, yeah, there
was a There was a blog post that we found
from Forbes magazine that um, you know, I was talking
about like the danger of you know, older women. Why
shouldn't say older women, I guess women our age UM
owning cats because it's like, if you bring a guy
home in your single and in your mid twenties, mid thirties,
(21:26):
it's gonna freak guy out because you're gonna look like
a cat lady, which is just it's just silly, you know,
it really is silly. And it was kind of funny though,
because they did, um, they did a survey to find
out like, look at the biggest, like the cat friendliest
cities in the US, and then breakdown number of single
males versus single females, and actually and then all of
the cat friendliest cities in the US there were more
(21:47):
single males than females, which I say statistically debunks the
cat lady erie. Also we shared this on our Twitter
last week, the blog keep Boys with Cats. I mean,
the thing is, if the guy owns a cat, it's adorable.
It shows like some nurturing side and cats are so
funny and playful. But if a girl owns a cat,
(22:07):
it's sad. It's typical because we've got this term cat
lady which again is not a good equivalent to bachelor.
And how do we become associated with cats? While it
goes back to the early days of domestication when cats
were kept around the house because they were skillful hunters,
eating the rats and then got onto the flower and
the dogs would go out to hunt with the men.
(22:27):
So cats therefore became more associated with the home and
with women. And now we have cat ladies, And of
course cat lady leads us to what you've all been
waiting for, folks, cougar, the cougar, Mollie, I'm city. You
and I are a little too young to be cougars.
Don't think we would be considered cougars unless we're cruise
(22:49):
in high schools. I believe the source you sent me
said thirty plus thirty plus yeah plus. The cougar for
any of you who um are completely out of the
pop culture loop is the slang term for an older
woman who likes to day to the younger man de
me Moore Ashton Kusher kind of relationships. She's usually pretty attractive,
(23:13):
well kept, and she wants some younger meat. To put
it in cougar animalistic terms, now, I would say that
if you listen to our podcasts. You know that we
love our Canadian fans. We know we have a lot
of them out there. We try and get props to
Canada whenever we can. But Canada, you are to blame
for this cougar phenomenon. Yes. According to the grammar Phobia
(23:36):
blog um, cougar is thought to have originated with the
Vancouver Canucks hockey team in the late nineteen eighties, when
the NHL players supposedly use the term to describe groupies
female groupies who are a tad older. Now, there isn't
(23:57):
solid evidence to support that, but some was sub tracked
the use of cougar to Western Canada in the early
nineteen nineties, when the term pretty much went the same thing,
and then in two thousand one when Canadians Elizabeth Vanderzog
and else Stage launched a tongue in cheek website named
(24:17):
cougar Date dot com. It was specifically meant for women
uh in their mid thirties looking to date, and they
say that they got the idea for cougar date when
a nephew of theirs, who was a hockey player, referred
to the two women as cougars. Hockey players hockey players
who knew Molly. If you had asked me to guess
(24:39):
the origin of cougar, I would not have said Canadian
hockey players. And then in two thousand one, we've got
dating columnists for the Toronto Sun who writes the book Cougar,
A Guide for Older Women Dating Younger Men. And you know,
christ I was trying to remember the first time I
heard the word cougar, and I think it was probably
probably television like shows like How I Met Your Mother
they did a big cougar episode. O um. So it's
(25:01):
hard to say, like exactly where on the timeline, like
all of these cougar things got really popular. But it's
cougars everywhere now. But it's cougars everywhere except did you
see that last week a Google band cougar date dot
Com from advertising on their site. I did see that.
But backlash, Yes, there's a cougar backlash, but it's not
because they don't like the word. It's just they think
(25:23):
that it's inappropriate. Because I think that it's another one
of those things where we want our spinsters to be
old women who don't have sex, and cougar date gives
that sexuality back to the women nom only sounds like
you are applauding the jerem cougar. I'm not applauding the
top the term cougar, but I think it's a double
(25:43):
standard because Google didn't ban any of the sites that
are geared towards older men, older bachelor's looking for younger women.
So I do think that's a double standard. And I
do think, yeah, I do think that if there's a
term that gives the women back the sexuality that spinster
totally takes away from them, then that can be a
good thing. Okay, but let me let me give you
(26:04):
a caveat. I do not like this new term cheetah.
Now'm like, I don't even know that we need to
spend much time on cheetah, because, first of all, it
is a concoction of a man named Spencer Morgan, who's
a writer for the New York Observer, who's obviously just
looking to start an internet meme. And um, I don't
really know how to say this except that Morgan's definition
(26:25):
of cheetah is nothing more than bull strong words. And
I can support that, Christian because when you sent me
this article, I thought it was a joke, Like that's
how ridiculous. I think this cheetah thing is. Yes, according
to Spencer Morgan, a cheetah is quote a cougar's younger
cousin who's generally a young woman fresh out of a
(26:45):
relationship on the prowl to take advantage of helpless, drunk
men who are out of her league. Basically, it's a
woman who has been dumped and she has somehow lost
her looks in the process of dating some guy, and
the only way that she can possibly have relations with
another man who might be a little more attractive than
she is is to wait until around two am when
(27:07):
they all have their drunk goggles on, and she's gonna
swoop and take advantage of him and then leave the
next day, essentially date raping him. I don't know. I
think that that's what he that's the assumption he makes. Yeah,
Morgan makes some some pretty off the wall claims about this, uh,
this cheetah thing, which makes me wonder where he got
(27:27):
the idea for it in the first place. I have
I have an idea on that, crystal, Okay, I mean,
think about what we've just talked about about these this
history of demonizing as spinster. I think it's the same thing.
I think that, um, there's some danger still in our
society where people don't know what to do with unmarried women,
and so the fact that they are out there living
(27:48):
what could be considered the bachelor lifestyle scares people. And
so I think it's the same negative connotations applied to
a woman who was unmarried as were applied back in
you know, a teenth century England when they were idealizing
mothers and wives. And maybe that's why even today, even
in two thousand and ten, we don't have a good
(28:10):
term I would argue for an unmarried woman. Now, some
feminists have tried to reclaim the term spencer. So you
know what back in the day was this was a
term of honor for women who worked hard spinning wool,
and it was just co opted by you know, the
marital industrial complex, cetera. Let's reclaim it positive but I
(28:31):
just don't I don't necessarily buy it. I don't think
that you can. You don't want that one back. Uh,
Let's see what else, Kristen Well, and then we have
things like Gibson Girl, Barbazon Girl, working Girl, all of
these you know, kind of bachelor equivalents, but they all
have girl attached to them, which implies the maturity. Molly,
(28:53):
what are we gonna do? I think we're gonna ask
our listeners. I think we're going to ask god listeners.
What term should we fabulous single ladies try to reclaim
as our own? I mean, it doesn't even matter, Like,
are we thinking too much about this? Like? Am I
just too hard pressed on having some kind of bachelor?
Because some people have also said, well, why don't we
(29:13):
just use bachelor? You don't like bachelor? You don't because
I think it sounds masculine, because I've been fed heteronormative
ideas all my life. Help us out, listeners, what should
get and and get creative? You know, we're Molly Molly
and I are open to all sorts of ideas. Is
there a good bachelor equivalent for single women? Mom? Stuff
(29:36):
has suffolks dot com sending your ideas? Please or post
it to our Twitter or Facebook any any way, shape
or form. Just get us your suggestions. And in the meantime,
here a couple of listener emails, Well, Molly about a
reading list here to kick things offices from Amy in Ireland.
And she is reading. She's reading a lot of George
(30:00):
Orwell's reading Coming Up for Air and a Clergyman's Daughter,
all by George Orwell. She is also reading Catch twenty
two by Joseph Heller and Catch Her in the Ride
by Salingers. She's got some classics up there from Classic
as a fan of crossing off the classics on you know,
during the during the summer, good time to do it.
Feel accomplished. Yes, I'm got an email from Sarah and
(30:22):
this is about the bikini podcast. She you know, we
we kind of gave Sports Illustrated a hard time. She
writes that she works as an artist for the design
from that handles the s I swimsuit calendars. She does
not specifically work with that calendar, by the way, but
she sees the raw photos that are sent to us
by s I. In our color proofing room. The artists
here removed moles, cellulite, stretch marks, tattoos, body hair, accentuate curves,
(30:44):
even the skin tone, et cetera, to make that picture
perfect each look. I think the rise of bikini has
led to the rise of many other services and professions
like personal trainers, stylists, tanning salons and the like, and
of course, professional photo retouch artist this might be a
mixed bag of blessing that keeps people like me employed.
In the end, I'd like to mind novel listeners out
there that if you ever feel insecure about not looking
(31:05):
like a model in the photo, that even the model
doesn't look like the photo, that look is made by
artists on computers. We all have flaws and imperfections, so
unless you have a professional retouching, you embrace your looks
from every somewhere makes you happy and enjoy your summer excellent.
So thanks so much for the emails, guys. Keep them
coming at mom stuff at how stuff works dot com.
Follow me and Molly on Twitter and Facebook as well,
(31:30):
and as always, you can check out our blog during
the weeks see what we're writing about. It's the stuff
Mom Never Told You blog. Is that how stuff works
dot com. Want more how stuff works, check out our
blogs on the house stuff works dot com home page.
(31:56):
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