What do women really want? Flowers? Chocolate? Doors opened for them? To be tied up on a train track and saved in the nick of time?

Honestly, I have no idea. I have a hard enough time figuring out what I want—let alone all women on earth!

So let’s talk about something I do know about: what you want. You, apparently, want to read a blog post called “What Women Really Want.” Furthermore, it’s likely that at least some of you want to read such a blog post not because, ten minutes ago, you were thinking to yourself, “The best use of my time right now would be to read a blog post about what women really want!”—but, rather, because you saw the title and felt mildly intrigued, while also feeling disinclined to do something more cognitively demanding than clicking a link.

In other words, it’s possible that some of this post’s readers—not you, of course!—fell for the clickbait I so slyly threw out there. But, trust me, they’re not alone! I succumb to clickbait all the time. I mean, it’s called “bait” because it lures us helplessly in! Moth to a flame! Nonetheless, however you ended up here, I’m genuinely glad you did, because I want to tell you about a great book called Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport.

Newport dedicates three separate chapters of the book to three different ways that we can spend the free time we will acquire if we stop mindlessly clicking around on the Internet. According to Newport, these three uses of time are essential to human health and happiness, and yet are often neglected in the digital age:

• Solitude
• Conversation
• Demanding activities

At this point, I’d like to share a passage from Newport’s book. It’s from his chapter on demanding activities, but, in my opinion, it applies to all three of his recommended uses of time:

“The value you receive from a pursuit is often proportional to the energy invested. We might tell ourselves there’s no greater reward after a hard day at the office than to have an evening entirely devoid of plans or commitments. But we then find ourselves, several hours of idle watching and screen tapping later, somehow more fatigued than when we began. . . . If you instead rouse the motivation to spend that same time actually doing something—even if it’s hard—you’ll likely end the night feeling better.”

Obviously, demanding activities are hard. (I’m trying to learn French at the moment, and facile isn’t exactly a word that applies.) But I would argue that solitude and conversation are also hard, at least for us moderns. With various technologies filling every waking moment, carving out time for solitude and conversation is hard to do. It’s also hard to learn how to enjoy being alone, or how to enjoy being social, if those aren’t activities that come naturally to you. But I agree with Newport that the hard work does pay off.

And if you have made it through this entire, 500-word blog post? Congratulations: that counts as a demanding activity! Will you also make time to be alone and to be social today?

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?

Thanks to Masterpiece on PBS, I recently discovered and read an incredibly good novel. Written and set approximately 150 years ago, in the late 1800s, the book is about—as far as I can tell—Amazon.com.

But let me explain. I was browsing through my local brick-and-mortar book store, which fortunately still existed at that moment in time, for that was where I happened across a book with a cover featuring TV actors in period costume. As I am not a big watcher of TV or movies, such covers usually turn me off. However, this particular cover featured a famous name: Émile Zola.

Having never read anything by the great French writer Émile Zola, I impulsively snatched up the book, deciding, on the spot, that my acquaintance with this author could be delayed no longer. Truly, I couldn’t help it! Call it feminine weakness, if you will. Or, call it a helpless surrender to consumerist culture. In any case, there I was, inserting my credit card into a chip reader, in exchange for an exquisitely pretty paperback labelled The Paradise—but which I soon discovered was originally titled The Ladies’ Paradise.

In the novel, The Ladies’ Paradise is the name of a large store in Paris that is crushing the small businesses nearby. Women are nearly powerless before it: they roam its galleries in awe of the delicate merchandise, and they flock from within and outside of the city to purchase the fabrics and ready-made clothes on offer. Meanwhile, the mom-and-pop competition try to hold their own by adhering to old-fashioned values such as artistry, intimate knowledge of a particular trade and its goods, family-oriented service, and high prices that indicate value. Zola describes one small-business-owning family in this way:

“The Baudus were not a bad sort of people. But they complained of never having had any luck.”

That is—unluckily for them, most customers preferred cheaper prices, more spectacle and grandeur, and a wide and ever-increasing selection of merchandise.

“Had anyone ever seen such a thing?” Monsieur Baudu rants at one point. “A draper’s shop selling everything! Why not call it a bazaar at once? And the employees! . . . treating goods and customers like so many parcels . . . No affection, no manners, no taste!”

Sound familiar? Twenty-five years ago, had anyone ever heard of a bookstore selling everything?! Treating customers like so many shipping boxes?! No taste!!

Thus the wisdom of Zola was revealed to me; a 150-year-old story that resonates so well today must be describing some sort of universal theme. And best of all: the author does not take sides. He does not present big business owners as any better or worse than small business owners. He presents them all as humans making choices—and the moral is that those who obstinately refuse to adapt to changing times, and those who fail to actively, persistently work toward positive innovation, will suffer for their inflexibility, no matter who they are.

How do you handle the choice between shopping big and global, versus small and local? How do your favorite small businesses stay in the black—have they made innovations, or developed specialties, that enable them to compete successfully in a difficult marketplace? Have your favorite big businesses made innovations, or developed specialties, as well?

Despite the immense and unprecedented power of Google, there are some things it just can’t do. It can overwhelm one with information on a vast variety of topics, and yet it remains eerily silent on others.

The Internet can only tell us what we, collectively, already know. And we know much more about the present than we do about the past. When it comes to the past, all we can do is peep back into whatever scant historical documents and bits of evidence exist, make educated guesses, and imagine. Perhaps computaz don’t really rule over so much, after all.

When reading historical and anthropological books like Barracoon by Zora Neale Hurston, I often feel a yearning to know more. What exactly did Cudjo/Kossula’s African village look like? Did it look anything like this photo of mud huts in Ghana? Barracoon doesn’t give as many details as I crave. And I know from experience that, no matter how many university libraries one visits, how many obscure texts one reads, and how many answers one delights in finding, there will always remain unanswered questions.

Do you, like me, feel the urge to know more when reading this passage?

“Dey got de women soldiers too and dey run wid de big knife and make noise. Dey ketch people and dey saw de neck lak dis wid de knife den dey twist de head so and it come off de neck. Oh Lor’, Lor’! . . . No man kin be so strong lak de woman soldiers from de Dahomey.”

Whoa, women warriors? Please tell me more. How did they train? What kinds of weapons did they use? What did they wear while fighting? Were most women from Dahomey trained as warriors, or just a select few of them? Were they anything like the Amazons, as described in Greek mythology? Were they anything like Katniss, from The Hunger Games? I’m sure I could learn a lot from Google about women warriors, were I to do a search. I’m sure I could learn even more, were I to scour through library stacks. And yet, I’m also sure that many mysteries would remain.

What secrets of the past would you uncover, if you could?

The protagonist of Play It As It Lays, by Joan Didion, is lying on the beach, surrounded by friends—though friends is perhaps too strong of a word—when her husband walks away. She sits up and looks around, and then this happens:

“It occurred to [her] that whatever arrangements were made, they worked less well for women.”

In contrast to the party atmosphere around her, she is merely, introvertedly, noticing the bodies nearby: the female versions of which seem to be aging, and the male versions of which seem to be locked in a timeless vitality. She thinks about her small daughter. She thinks about pregnancy. As an actor, her career is dependent on her looks. And, of course, the Hollywood circles of which she is a (reluctant) member are deeply attuned to physical appearance.

In another chapter, a male friend (or not-friend; is there a synonym for friend that doesn’t imply actual friendship?) invites her on a short trip, along with some other friends (not-friends?).

She says, “I don’t want to do that.”

He says, “Yes you do.”

The chapter ends there; the reader gets the impression that this type of interaction is not uncommon in her life.

I don’t want to oversimplify the complicated life that Didion depicts. Much of the protagonist’s woe seems due to personality flaws and past traumas that are non-gender-specific. And yet, something pertaining to gender is going on here, and this becomes clearer, the further into the book one progresses.

In your life’s experience, have arrangements worked less well for women?