Hello, my beautiful humans, and welcome to this week's episode of "Midlife As." Yes. So last night, I went to see Barbie with my two kids. And, like, I'd seen a lot of the hype about it. And to be honest, I probably wouldn't have even gone to see it myself. Although I do like a bit of cinema, but the two kids said to me, "Hey, Mom, let's go see it." And I thought, well, let's do something nice together. So, hopefully, I was enjoying it as a lightweight movie. I didn't even realize America Ferrera was in it. And probably about an hour and a half in, America Ferrera has this monologue.
Where basically, and I won't give you the whole story of the show because I don't want to ruin it for you. But she, it's really a movie about the patriarchy. And it's really a movie about some things, and it really rang home to me. And I'm also reading this other book at the moment called, I think it's called "Radical Awakening," I'll double check that, and it's this stuff that is so intertwined in what the book I've been reading is about as well. And it links into all the work I've done with Gabor Maté, the work I've done with "This Naked Mind," it's all so serendipitous.
And the more and more I have been working in this space, the more I realize, and the more it really frustrates me that normal people, or AI, they call them "normies." I genuinely don't believe these people exist. I believe it's a great big lie.
But the way that people are, like even in one of my mastermind groups recently, I was putting up our like, I was planning to do this webinar, and I was talking about it. And a few of the people were like, "I'm not your target market." I was thinking, "What do you mean, I'm not my target market? Everyone who drinks is my target market." You know, like, we think that there's no... I'm getting to a point now almost where I'm going to stop. Because I know when I stopped drinking, I wouldn't have stopped drinking if the people who were talking to me about changing my relationship with alcohol had said, "It might mean stopping drinking." I wouldn't have come. And so it's almost like you have to get people in and then tell them, once they understand, they're less resistant to it.
And I know this is gonna sound funny, but it's almost like that. It's almost like, if you people come in, once you drink like normal people, and they realize during that, there is no normal. And then they leave usually, at some point, becoming alcohol-free. And now that might be something that takes them a long time. Because it might be, you know, we try moderating a few times and realize it's not working. And then people start to realize that life is actually just so much better without alcohol.
But in this movie, she literally goes through this monologue, and I wish I was trying so hard to find the script somewhere because it's sensational. And she basically, what's happened is the Barbies have come back from the real world and been introduced to patriarchy. And they've come back and they've kind of created, put all these Barbies into a trance, the trance of patriarchy, and they've all started, you know, feeling unsure of themselves. They've all started sort of serving men and doing all these things, and she goes into this, and it's a much more in-depth than that, but she goes into this monologue. And she talks about all of the reasons why women drink, that women don't drink for no reason. And women don't drink because they're weak. Women don't drink because there's something wrong with them. Women don't drink because, in reality, it's almost like women don't drink because they have a problem with alcohol, women drink because they have a problem with the world. Women drink because they have a problem with the patriarchy. Women drink because they are having to suppress themselves all the time.
And that's what there's a book that I'm reading as well, which is brilliant. I'm reading it with my book club. And I'm pretty sure it's called "Radical Awakening," I'll double-check and put it in the notes afterwards. But she also talks about this, and Gabor Maté talks about it. And it's, you know, all the great psychologists, psychiatrists of our time kind of talk a lot about this, is basically, we come into the world, and we create a personality that helps us survive, that helps us fit in. And most of that is to help us fit into the patriarchy. So it's all about productivity. It's all, like, that sort of whole conservative thing, productivity, there's only room for one at the top, everyone's out to get you, you know, that heart-like fear-based mentality scarcity.
And I remember seeing... Did I see Rupert Murdoch? My husband showed me this picture of Rupert Murdoch. And he's got, like, a poor white man on the table at a table, a poor black man at the table. And in front of him, he's got a load of cookies. And he's saying to the poor white man, "Watch out for him, he's trying to steal your cookies." But actually, we put my leg up side down with all the cookies.
And so this is, like, this fear, the scarcity, this hatred that the patriarchy creates. And all of the things that women, you know, we think we're so woke, but most of the females I know are having sex with their partners because they think they should, not because they want to. I think I probably know one person. And Joe, you know who you are. Possibly.
But, you know, I remember listening to Kimmy Kappenberg... I'm sorry, I'm having trouble with the name. Kimmy, uh, anyway, she talked... Kimmy Kappenberg, that's it, sorry. Kimmy Kappenberg talking at a conference. And she said, "You know, I walked into a room of 150 women, and I said, 'Who here has never had sex with someone when they didn't want to?' Who hasn't had sex? Who has not had sex?" Sorry, this is a terrible, basically who here has had sex when they didn't want to? And everybody put up their hands apart from her and another person.
And it's just these tiny things that we take for granted. You know, we've got to keep them happy. To me, that our well. And then, you know, I talked to the women that I worked with, and a lot of the reasons why women drink is because we have to suppress ourselves from birth. Because it's actually really fucking dangerous to be a woman in this world. You know, people like Clementine Ford, who I adore, talk about this stuff. And I was like, "Oh, she's a man-hater." No, she's not a man-hater. She's not. She's just calling out the bullshit.
And recently, I have had the worst time in two ways. One with the medical profession, and two with my neighbor. And it has just been soul-destroying to have this experience with this man who is just so threatening. He's so intimidating. He's like a Neanderthal. And I can feel the threat from him coming viscerally. I can feel when he's on the same street as me. And that's the fear that women have of men like, I was reading that, you know, listening to this book as well as you're saying, you know, when you come into the earth and straight away, you know that men are a danger.
Men and it was interesting watching Ken and Barbie in the movie. You know, they go into the real world, and Ken's like, "Mooching through the real world, going, 'This is awesome. Look at this.'" And Barbie's, like, "Oh, this is not very nice. I can feel, I feel scared, I feel threatened." And we don't realize how much this impacts our daily lives. You know, even walking down the street with keys in hand. So you know, all of this stuff is suppression of self. We do ourselves down, don't take up too much space. Don't wear sexy clothes. You know, don't... You know, my husband saw the other day, and I was walking along with my youngest child, and it said, "Women who are wearing something deserve to be raped." And I'm like, "Really?" And the world is getting worse for this stuff. Like, our kids, this whole Andrew Tate thing, now, our kids are dealing with some really horrible stuff, particularly our girl kids.
You know, and girl kids are going into to emergencies with injuries in their bodies because boys are having sex with them in the way that they see aggressive porn. I mean, I know we had our fair share of stuff in our generation, but somehow this stuff has to stop. And the threat... I mean, for me, the threat that I've been feeling from my neighbor for a long time, it just, it brings up something very primal. Like I was saying to my supervisor, I could feel it in my womb.
And I'm, anyway, I'm doing this webinar on the second of August, which is about breaking the cycle of judgment. And judgment can be anything from the, you know, the shits, all the shits in our head. Shits, which I know is so... you know, people reason why people drink to get away from the shits, all of the talk in the head. All of the judgment, and the more traumatic, you know, the more sensitive you are, and the more you internalize trauma from a young age, you know, the greater, the stronger, those shits are. Stronger, those shits. And the shits, they keep us safe. So, it's the kicking ourselves up the ass after we've drunk, and we didn't mean to. But why did we drink? We don't mean to. We drink, and we don't mean to because we're in pain. We drink because we don't mean to because we're in distress. Because we've been told we can't feel our feelings. We can't show our feelings. It's bad. It's wrong. We're bad, we're wrong. Unless we've got this tight grip on everything, unless we're just controlling everything to the nth degree because of this scarcity mentality. Because if we let go for a second, everything's gonna go to two facts. The whole world will descend into chaos because we have to keep everything under control because everything has to be perfect. Because otherwise, we're bad. Otherwise, we're wrong.
You know? We internalize all this. That's where perfectionism comes from. You know, as children, we learned that unless we did things well, unless we came up to scratch academically, socially. We were not... We were not given... We're not valued a lot, you know? It's like you're valued for what we produce. We were valued for what we did. We were valued for how we look. You know? Put on a bit of weight. People think it's okay to comment on that. You know, when we're children, yes, just extraordinary. I mean, the fatphobia in this world, even now, is just, you know, woke people. People who think they are really cool, really evolved. They still think it's okay to comment on the size of your body, on what you look like. There's still a really big proponent of people who've confused health... That was just my child running down the street. Health with weight. And it's not connected. Yes. We want to be eating well. We want to be moving our bodies. But this sort of thing around our value. You know, when people come to me for the Great Aussie Alcohol Experiment, I asked them why they're here. And they say, "Because I want to be thinner. Because I want to be more productive." There's all these negatives about themselves and all these things that they're changing for other people.
But really, the greatest gift that you can get from not drinking is you wake up from the traps. You wake up from the traps of patriarchy, the wake up from the trance of "not good enoughness," of "not worthy enoughness." And you start to get the possibility of unpicking and cracking away the armor that you've created to keep yourself safe. You know, this control, this drinking, this, you know, because all of this stuff, all of these controls, stop us from feeling what we're actually going through, what's actually happening to us. We're suppressing ourselves. And it's the suppression of self that causes eating disorders, unhealthy relationships with alcohol, unhealthy relationships with ourselves.
And so, no, I recommend go and watch the Barbie movie. I thought it was absolutely brilliant. I laughed my head off. They're all brilliant in it. The music's great. But the biggest thing for me is when she says, "Wake up, Barbie," and they wake up from the trance of patriarchy. And I think, for me, that's what stopping drinking was about. It was about waking up from the traps, you know? And then there are conversations that have to be had from that. And they are not easy conversations. And sometimes they're not safe conversations, you know? There's a lot to be lost sometimes. And that's often why people keep drinking. And that's fine. Because first and foremost, as women, we need to keep ourselves safe. And we need to keep our babies safe. We listen to the patriarchy and we listen to the way it treats our children. We listen to the way the medical professionals pathologize us and doesn't care about us, ignores us, doesn't believe us. I'm so fucking sick of not being believed, I tell you. So triggering. Anyway, I just wanted to share with you this. As I said, I've got this webinar coming up on the second of August. It's all about... So I have a... I'm doing a series of 12 webinars. The people who are in my membership group, they get to go for free, everyone else... So 20 bucks, you get access
