On Becoming Fearless by Arianna Huffington, reviewed by Denise Noe

Denise Noe’s note: The book reviewed here is oriented primarily toward girls and women so some readers are likely to criticize me for putting this review on Men’s News Daily. However, I do not believe that it is irrelevant because men have wives, girlfriends, mothers, sisters, daughters, and other female relatives as well as female friends who are impacted by the specifically female fears dealt with in Huffington’s book. Thus, men are apt to care about the topics discussed in the book itself and my review of it.

On Becoming Fearless

Perhaps no one is better equipped to write a guide for women called “On Becoming Fearless” than Arianna Huffington (formerly Arianna Stassinopoulos). She is the daughter of a fearless mother, Elli Stassinopoulos. In the 1940s in Greece, her mother hid two Jewish girls. One night German soldiers arrived at their cabin and threatened to shoot if the Jews were not surrendered. Elli, who spoke German, calmly lied in a good cause, telling them there were no Jews there. The German soldiers believed her and went away.

In the 1970s, Huffington herself exercised a far less physical fearlessness when she took on the fallacies of what she called “Women’s Lib” (not “feminism”) in her first book, “The Female Woman.” Dedicated to her own courageous and inspiring mother, a fulltime homemaker, that book shredded Germaine Greer’s “The Female Eunuch” and Kate Millett’s “Sexual Politics.” Huffington did not dispute that women’s roles should be expanded but she objected strongly to an attempt to “introduce the language of politics into intimate relationships,” to downgrade housewives and stay-at-home-moms, to pretend that there are no natural biologically based mental differences between the sexes, and to portray men as enemies and oppressors to be fought rather than fellow human beings “to be persuaded.”

Later, Huffington showed fearlessness when she authored “Picasso: Creator and Destroyer.” Much of the art world was outraged at this thoroughgoing “warts and all” portrait of its idol. Her research led her even to question whether Picasso’s works, which she acknowledged as extraordinary breakthroughs in painting, had made it to the very pinnacle of art. Of course, she was not an art critic and never claimed to be. However, as she noted in a National Review article, if her judgment had no worth, it was odd that so many in the arts world were “screaming at the top of their lungs that the book is not important.”

“On Becoming Fearless” is Huffington’s most personal book. She wrote it in large part for her own daughters whom she saw growing up with female-specific fears that she believes should have long ago been laid to rest such as terrors around their appearance (one daughter became anorexic) and fears of speaking out and leading.

“On Becoming Fearless” is something of a departure, and a welcome one, from previous books in being solution oriented. “The Female Woman” pointed out errors in the excesses of the early Second Wave women’s movement. “How to Overthrow the Government” – which should have been titled “WHY to Overthrow the Government” – and “Pigs at the Trough,” both took a searching and scathing look at political and corporate corruption. None of them devoted much time to alternatives.

Huffington’s definitions in “On Becoming Fearless” are instructive. “Fearlessness is not the absence of fear,” she writes. “Rather, it’s the mastery of fear. Courage, my compatriot Socrates argues, is the knowledge of what is not to be feared. Which is to say, there are things we SHOULD be afraid of – we want to stay alive, after all. We will never completely eliminate fear from our lives, but we can definitely get to the point where our fears do not stop us from daring to think new thoughts, try new things, take risks, fail, start again, and be happy.”

Huffington points out that the price of body obsessions is much too high and that “self-confidence is the ultimate turn-on.” She also points out how our fears about our bodies can be ironically self-defeating. At a party in 2006, she writes, “I could not take my eyes off the spectacle of Hugh Hefner and the three pneumatically endowed platinum blondes on his arm. I know it’s all part of his shtick, but seriously, the guy is actually shuffling now. . . . even more horrifying were the women.” Huffington describes them as the products of “heavy construction and demolition” that had resulted not in beauty but in a look of grotesque falseness.

“The greatest beauty secret is to live out our passions and connect with our own spirit,” Huffington contends. Sound flaky and New Age-ish? She backs it up with the findings of the 2004 Dove Campaign for Real Beauty report, a study that found that 54% of a large and diverse sample said they feel more beautiful when they help others. [Parenthetically, one should note that Huffington has a big inconsistency in that she frequently attacks polling and urges people to “hang up on pollsters” while just as frequently making use of poll data in her work.]

Women can be fearless about their bodies when they stop warring with food and recognize that they will only stick to a diet composed of that which they actually like and stick to an exercise program of activities they truly enjoy, Huffington urges. She also points out the vital importance of getting enough sleep in a multi-tasking, super-busy culture that sometimes seems to have declared war on the refreshing pleasures of Morpheus.

Any woman who will be a biological mother must confront a specifically female fear that has been with us since time immemorial for, even with all the advances of medical science, as Huffington writes, “the prospect of childbirth can also leave us paralyzed with fear.”

The birth is only the beginning of motherly fear as fear is inevitably exacerbated by guilt. “I’m convinced that once you become a mother,” she writes, “whether you stay at home or work – when they take the baby out, they put the guilt in.” Both mothers who work outside the home and those who are fulltime homemakers experience their own sets of terrors, all of which can become destructive to themselves and their children. Huffington advises mothers to heed the observations of psychotherapist Heide Banks that the primary determinant of parental influence is “Not what you teach your children or how much time you spend with them, or if you read to them or not. What it comes down to is who you are, because we teach who we are. You read, your child will read. You watch too much TV, your child will. You do service in the world, you child will do service in the world. So the best way to get past all the worries is to be the best you that you can be.”

Perhaps the greatest specifically female fears are triggered by work and the prospect of leadership. Women still must strive to overcome “fears of ambition and assertiveness.” Most destructive is the sense that, for women, “ambition” is a dirty word. While many or most men deeply fear failure, women often fear both failure AND success in the workplace. Huffington advises that it is possible and rewarding for women to become bold and assertive and that they need not equate femininity with being “timid and unimportant.”

Huffington believes she got a good look at how our culture still mistrusts female leadership when she unsuccessfully ran for the Governorship of California in 2003. In a televised debate, bodybuilder-turned-action star-turned politician Arnold Schwarzenegger, who won the race for Governor, told Huffington she ought to drink more decaf and she thinks this suggestion is “a comment that is hard to imagine being addressed to a man.” Another candidate, then-Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamante, repeated, Yes, Arianna. Yes, Arianna” while rolling his eyes. She found it “a condescending refrain . . . as if he could barely summon the energy to tolerate a typical nagging woman.”

Even more jarring for Huffington was that after the debate, she was “immediately surrounded by dozens of young female students who thanked me for taking a stand and not backing down.” She had not thought “that young women in 2003 would still be hungering for role models to help them gain the courage to find their own voice.” She believes women must realize that “Fearlessly expressing ourselves is a birthright we should cherish and take every opportunity to use.”

This book has its faults. The chapter “Fearless About God and Death” seems completely out of place. It also repeats superficial clichés about the wrathful God of the Old Testament and the gentle God of the New. In the section on money, she cites the oft-quoted statistic about the wage gap between women and men as if it is the result of sex discrimination even though studies have shown that the majority of that gap is due to women’s greater freedom to move in and out of the labor market and their selection of occupations that permit more flexibility regarding time investment as well as men’s inevitably taking on the physical strength intensive jobs (garbage collectors, lumberjacks, firefighters) that pay highly because they are physically dangerous.

Lest anyone suspect Huffington has become the sort of doctrinaire extremist she criticized in her first book, in this one she compliments a man for “helping me with my carry-on luggage and my carry-on seven-year-old on a red-eye flight to Washington” and adds, “What more could a woman ask for?”

“On Becoming Fearless” is a must-read for girls and women who want to make the most of their lives. Boys and men could also benefit from perusing this slim but potent volume as some of the lessons are universal and those that are female-specific will help give them insight into girls and women.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 10th, 2008 at 6:29 pm and is filed under Analysis, Book Review, Culture, Education, Entertainment, Family, Feminism, Health, Media, Men and Mating, Politics, Psychology, Society, Vox Populi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. | 98 views | Trackback | Print this page |

| More from Denise Noe