Barbie, upon her entry to the human world, breaks down in tears, overwhelmed by the intensity of a non-plastic experience. As she cries, she turns to her left to see an old woman sitting beside her. She tells the woman that she is so beautiful, and the woman responds: “I know it!”
This scene was my favorite in the “Barbie” movie, and it reminded me of all the wonderful old ladies I know. Conversely, it reminded me of the dozens of male teachers, coaches, mentors, and advisors I’ve had in my life. These men have been young and old, serious and silly, gentle, funny, brilliant, loving. They have given me awards and propelled me to success and showed me kindness and esteem. But at the same time, I get an icky feeling when I think about most of them.
It would be easy to attribute these heebie-jeebies to a fear of violence, and maybe that is a part of it. But I don’t think that’s all of it. My best understanding of the unease I felt with those teachers is that when I think back to my favorite conversations with them, or most meaningful praises, they were always related to success. My favorite memory with my high school English teacher was his praise of an essay I wrote. My happiest moment with my male debate coach was a particularly enthused praise he gave me after a great speech. These moments matter to me, obviously. But I wasn’t always winning things. There were essays I felt embarrassed of, and speeches that made me want to cry—in fact, most of them. In these moments, of vulnerability or imperfection, I felt invisible to the male leaders in my life. I was off their radar, out of their line of sight. It was only when I dazzled, won, impressed, that I received their attention.
As a young woman, it can feel like all of my relationships are transactional. I certainly can’t speak to anyone else’s gender-based experiences, but in my individual experience, women my age can feel like there is vicious competition for space in a world that wasn’t built to fit all of us. Men my age can feel like hungry sets of eyes. Older men can feel similarly predatory, and even at their best, I know I still feel constantly evaluated. But older women have been a refuge for me. They have lived through many of the discomforts young women feel, familiar with its unique ache. When they see the success of a young woman, they see every failure and struggle that led up to it.
My eighth-grade math teacher saw the worst of me—the least dazzling, the least perfect, least polished side of myself. I was dreadfully bad at math and was scraping by, pitifully erasing whole pages of work in the middle of every quiz. She was a broad, militaristic woman, uninterested in being liked in the way that only middle school teachers can be. There was no softness in her voice, and she tossed out D’s and reprimandings like candy. But she would stay after class to talk me through my mistakes and give me extensions when I needed them. At the end of the year, she handed me my final exam, with a crisp “92” written on the top. She gave me a hug and a rare smile, and she told me she was proud of me. She had been with me for the whole year, paying attention to me, noticing how the scratched-out answers had turned to confident numbers, noticing how I stopped hiding. She saw me completely, terrified and ambitious and tragically bad at fractions, and when she said she was proud, I knew it was of me entirely.
In a space outside transactions and conditional praises, there is so much love that goes into the mentorship of women like this math teacher. The scene in the Barbie movie reminded me of this, as I’ve entered college and begun to grapple with the reality that the aches and pains of gendered relationships have developed a whole new dimension. I’ve shared this sentiment with the young women around me. All around us, in our academic, extracurricular, religious, and personal lives, we are surrounded by a hidden treasure-trove of resources: the women who have done it all before us. While I don’t mean to superimpose a narrative onto the old woman in the Barbie movie, I can assume that she has struggled as Barbie has struggled with being unbeautiful, imperfect, and ostracized by the patriarchy. In their small exchange on the bench, she reminds us that she has come out the other end with joy to share. Outside the landmine of winning partners, friends, praise, scholarships, and jobs from the people around us, there is safety in the knowledge and mentorship of these older women. They are free of an agenda, there is no ulterior motive. In these spaces, we can write shitty essays and make bad drawings and be horrible at math and cry and lose—a freedom we are not always afforded—with the safety of still being a human being at the end of it.
I remember my mom coming out of a meeting a few months ago smiling. She had been at a conference with some very important people at the museum she was working at, and her project had been moving smoothly, which she accredited to her affectionately named, “little sister boss”—a woman twenty years her junior, who is her boss. My mom smiled and told her how she had told the important people in her meeting about the hard work of the little sister boss. “She did a great job, that’s all”, my mom said. “I wanted them to know it.”
To all of the little-sister bosses working hard, failing, studying, planning, succeeding, perhaps there is some solace in that there are older ladies looking out for your whole, entire, unpolished self.
Julia Schroers is a member of the class of 2027 and can be reached at jschroers@wesleyan.edu.