What the heck is a “high value woman?” During the days I was crashing into glass ceilings in Miami, circa 2003-2009, a man, who was an investor, once said to me: “A woman’s stock plummets after 40.” I remember feeling really annoyed but mostly confused and upset by this comment. What exactly did he mean?
Why was I a stock?
Why was my value as a woman going to plummet after 40?
Was my value high at the time?
I felt like he was warning me to hurry up and do something – but what?
Get published? Get famous? Get rich? Get married? Get pregnant? Get real estate?
Was this investor calculating my value by the number of offspring I could produce before menopause? In a world full of 7 billion people, this logic did not make sense to me. In my mind, I felt that I was worthless as a child – you know – young and dumb. I didn’t understand the world. I didn’t know who I was. I had nothing to offer. Sure, I had potential. But how much?
I was as valuable as a startup company, which no investor can truly appraise.
And yet, according to this man’s logic — where an old 1950s truck was valuable; a classic work of art’s stock was sky-high; a fine, aged wine was the object of his desire — my value was weirdly being measured in youth, beauty and fertility.
I’m not sure what happened to that guy, but he was obviously quite young and dumb himself.
If he had taken a closer look, he would have realized I was a Femmebot: a piece of hardware built with a robust, age-proof Latina operating system (see JLo, my mom) and a search engine that has been increasing in knowledge and context and hyperlinks since Al Gore “invented the Internet” and the world became boundless. But I guess I really can’t blame him –
I suppose I distracted him from seeing my soul because my boobs were always in the way.
Is that my fault, though? Or his?
