It really is hard to wear clothes as a woman. If you wear anything cuter than a giant paper sack, you risk being judged for revealing too much. But if you go for the giant paper sack, you risk being judged for being too dowdy.

As a result, many of us opt to wear cute clothes, but then restrict our movements so as not to reveal too much. And sometimes we feel the need to restrict our movements even when wearing the giant paper sack. Honestly, it’s not so easy to find a shirt that reveals absolutely nothing when you bend over to weed the garden bed. And if you do find that shirt? Well, it’s probably so tight that you end up revealing everything anyway.

Tara Westover describes this womanly dilemma very clearly in her memoir Educated. She writes of the disparaging comments her dad and one of her brothers repeatedly made about women who dressed or acted immodestly, in their estimation. As a young woman who wished to do the right thing, she took these comments to heart:

“I worried that I might be growing into the wrong sort of woman. Sometimes I could scarcely move through a room, I was so preoccupied with not walking or bending or crouching like them. But no one had ever taught me the modest way to bend over, so I knew I was probably doing it the bad way.”

These words she uses, “the bad way,” are so very revealing (ha—no pun intended!). These words seethe with the judgment of others and the shame of oneself. Westover has drawn a perfect picture of what it’s like to be a teenage girl in America. Her family veers toward the religious and conservative end of the national spectrum; but this attitude is not so different, I posit, from that of American families that veer in other directions.

Our culture, unfortunately, teaches us that women should be careful to be simultaneously cute and modest. It’s a pretty impossible task.

What is so bad about having a body? What is so bad about wanting to look good? I have been obsessed for the past two decades with a culture that placed no restrictions on women as regards covering their breasts. What must it have been like to live in this society? I’m not advocating that we suddenly cast off most of our clothing; the situation is not quite so simple. But I do agree with Westover that we must do a better job of casting off the judgment and the shame. (Here’s why you should never be ashamed.)

Women have bodies. It’s not something we can exactly help. If a woman bends down to weed a garden bed and flashes you, don’t jump to the conclusion that she is a slut. She probably just wants some tasty veggies. And if she is, in fact, bending over purposely because she wants to turn you on? Well, that’s a nice compliment. Veggies or a compliment: this is a win-win!

What are you cultivating in your garden of perspectives on yourself and others?

Unlike most people I know, I’m not a fan of quotable quotes. More than one sentence is usually needed to fully express an idea. Plus, quotable quotes are often taken out of context and assumed to have a meaning that was never originally intended. And then there is the rampant problem of the misattribution of quotes on the Internet.

However, now that I have that disclaimer out of the way, I’d love to share some quotable quotes from a tiny book I just read. As I explained in a recent post about my travels in London, I made the impulsive decision while abroad to buy a stack of tiny books to take home on the plane with me. Some of these purchases were so small that I hesitate to call them books; but pamphlet seems too stuffy to describe them, while booklet, which is at least etymologically promising, seems too unprofessionally bound.

So let me use the word book. This one is a Penguin Classics collection of quotations by Oscar Wilde, an Irish writer who was born in 1854 and died in 1900. The book spared no pages on an introduction, so I cannot say what types of works the quotes originally came from. I know only that the venerable publishing house Penguin Random House—surely more reputable than the Internet at large—deems them to be penned by Wilde. So I trust that they were.

Following are a handful of my favorites from this little collection. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.

“Language is the noblest instrument we have, either for the revealing or the concealing of thought.”

A good reminder that just because it’s convincingly spoken or printed doesn’t mean it’s true. And I am definitely on board with the idea that language is a noble instrument of expression. Perhaps like the piano.

“An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.”

Yep, thinking outside the box can be hazardous to one’s health. And also to the health of others. Beware!

“If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out.”

Ha! I love this one. I have experienced this, unfortunately. Also: knowing that Wilde was imprisoned for homosexuality adds tragic depth here.

“Only the shallow know themselves.”

Another gem. This one gives me comfort because I recently experienced a time of confusion in my personal life, during which I couldn’t quite figure myself out. . . .

“Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.”

Brilliantly put. It’s okay to follow your dreams: don’t let anyone tell you otherwise! On the flip side, you can’t expect others to follow you over that rainbow.

“The secret of life is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming.”

Hmm. Meditation might help with this. I have lately been listening to a guided meditation about keeping an even keel. Being even keeled is rarely, if ever, unbecoming.

On the other hand, this bon mot, like many of Wilde’s statements, is also a tongue-in-cheek criticism of society and perhaps should not be taken literally.

Are you brilliant at breakfast?

A relative of mine recently emailed me and other relatives to ask a philosophical question: Does it matter whether people actually believe the tenets of their religious faith?

I wrote back with a response, which went something like this: Our beliefs and the stories we tell are extremely important. These cannot be discounted as superfluous aspects of a religion. They are important because they affect our real-world decisions. How we think about things matters.

Not long after that, I read the masterpiece Sapiens, by Yuval Noah Harari. Harari, in this book, delves into this topic in a much more comprehensive way than I did. The book helped to clarify my understanding of this philosophical point.

Stories and beliefs have a childlike reputation, as if they are merely tricks to get us to fall asleep; but therein lies their incredible power. Because, as Harari explains, the tricks work: and we are lulled into a world where everyone gets along under the magical umbrella of the story.

He writes: “Myths, it transpired, are stronger than anyone could have imagined.” Humankind is the only species that uses language to tell stories about things not present in the immediate surroundings. My chickens can make a distress call that means “There’s a hawk nearby!” But they cannot make a sound that means “That’s the same hawk we saw yesterday, but different from the one we saw the day before that,” or “That hawk is beautiful, look at those marvelous feathers,” or “That hawk was sent by a great and powerful god!”

Humans can say such things, and through language and myth they are able to build large societies of strangers working together under the same belief systems. Harari calls a belief system an imagined order. And he explains that religion is only one of many spheres in which people use stories and beliefs to foster cooperation. Here’s an interesting passage from the book:

“An imagined order can be maintained only if large segments of the population—and in particular large segments of the elite and the security forces—truly believe in it. Christianity would not have lasted 2,000 years if the majority of bishops and priests failed to believe in Christ. American democracy would not have lasted almost 250 years if the majority of presidents and congressmen failed to believe in human rights. The modern economic system would not have lasted a single day if the majority of investors and bankers failed to believe in capitalism.”

Harari points out that unless you are a true cynic, you believe in at least one, and probably many, imagined orders. The true cynic, he explains, is not apt to cooperate with anyone. In the cynic’s mind, all that talk about religion, patriotism, human rights, finance, politics, romance, and so on is just so much B.S. The true cynic will conclude that it’s better to sit alone with one’s home-brewed beer, cherry tree, and shotgun and try to enjoy life before it’s all over.

But then Harari points out the flip side of this. If you’re not a true cynic and thus do believe in something, it’s ultimately impossible (if you decide to go down that rabbit hole, which may or may not be advisable) to prove the truth of your cherished imagined orders. They are likely, upon logical scrutiny, to evaporate into nothing. This is where the word faith comes in.

And so, as Harari explains, because we have faith in the existence of the monetary system, we can have booming economies, home mortgages, business loans, and one-day Amazon deliveries. Because we have faith in the existence of our countries, we can have complex societies that provide schools, police, libraries, mail service, defense, unemployment benefits, and scientific research. Harari does not try to claim that these things are necessarily better than what humans had originally in their hunter-gatherer state; but he does explain that there’s no going back.

(In order to go back to a pre-imagined-order state, we would have to get everyone to agree to do this together. Otherwise, those with an imagined order would simply cooperate and trounce those without. But the only way to get a large group of people to agree to do something is through an imagined order.)

And so, Harari provides a somewhat tragic but interesting and ultimately, I think, correct answer to my relative’s philosophical question. It is important for people to actually believe something if they are to form a cohesive group of strangers—one that’s not just an accidental encounter of isolated cynics who are unlikely to cooperate. Of course, a few members of a religious group, nation, or financial market can be cynics without the whole operation falling apart. But the majority must believe—especially, as Harari explains, the leaders and the enforcers.

Are you a believer or a cynic?

Just as the illustrator of these Parisian women of the late 1800s wearing fashionable hats did a brilliant job of capturing the nuanced variety of the attire, Émile Zola did a brilliant job of capturing nuances of the nineteenth-century female experience in his novel The Ladies’ Paradise.

Moreover, as in his descriptions of large versus small businesses, the themes he describes are universal—and astoundingly applicable to the world today. Take, for example, this description:

“She could not go downstairs to buy a candle . . . without feeling a warm breath behind her, and hearing crude, insulting remarks; and the men pursued her to the very end of the dark passage . . .”

Replace “candle” with “pizza” or another modern consumable, and . . . #MeToo, anyone?

Oddly, the description on the back of my paperback copy pretends that the male big business owner is the protagonist. The description does not mention the actual protagonist—a woman—at all! This, along with the omission of the word “Ladies'” from the title, makes me suspect that the marketer of this edition was trying to scrub it of its female-oriented qualities. Do books about men sell better than books about women? At least the photo on the cover accurately depicts the content: a young woman in a fancy dress stands behind a counter, assisting two female customers in even fancier attire.

In any case, without a doubt, this is a book about women. It’s a book about women and consumerism; women and beauty; and women and manipulation, sex, and power. It’s a book about relations between women and men and between women and women. It’s a book about intelligent women and frivolous women; about women who abide by the dictates of society and women who abide by their hearts and minds.

Somehow, through the amazing and very human powers of observation and imagination, Zola, though a man himself, has captured some important truths about womankind. I won’t give them away here. I will note, however, that the protagonist is wonderful. She has her faults, as do we all, but she also has many admirable qualities. On the whole, I think you will love her. I hope you get the opportunity to meet her one day!

What different metaphorical hats have you noticed twenty-first-century women wearing?

Here is a strange and, when you think about it, disturbing fact about our culture: Girls are more often, and more openly, encouraged to do “boy things” than boys are to do “girl things.”

Can it be a good thing—for our personal relationships and for society—for females to grow up with an awareness of and appreciation for males, without the reverse occurring?

A few weeks ago, I was gift shopping for a boy in kindergarten and his younger sister. I bought three books with male protagonists, thinking that both of them could read and enjoy the books. I shied away from the books with female protagonists, thinking that only one of them would appreciate those.

And then I read the Washington Post article What are we teaching boys when we discourage them from reading books about girls? This article says it perfectly. It is one of the most profoundly important articles I have read this year. It’s not a long article, but every sentence is a gem. I urge you to read it.

How wrong I was in that bookstore! And I consider myself an open-minded person! Ach! I am upset with myself, but the situation is easy to rectify: I’m going to go back and buy the kids three more books—with girl protagonists.