Miranda Gray’s The Optimized Woman is a book designed for women who want to create “Life-success in a female way”. Apparently, every woman’s monthly cycle can be broadly viewed in four phases:
and depending on which phase we are in we have different strengths which can be drawn on to make us more successful.
The Optimized Woman looks at each of these phases in detail in the first few chapters and then moves on to outline a “Daily Plan” to help you get the best out of each phase.
Reading this with a healthy degree of cynicism, I’m afraid the introductory chapter did little to dispel my initial instincts. Take the following quote for example:
“Where other life transformation and goal achievement approaches go wrong is to force women into a linear structure with unrealistic expectations about the consistency of our mental and emotional approaches and perspectives”
Most of us know that at certain times of the month women can be a little... unpredictable, let’s say, but I’ve never felt forced into a linear structure. In fact, if society functioned in a way that accommodated, even encouraged inconsistency, all I can see is chaos. I work quite hard to maintain some level of rationality when I am in what Gray describes as my Creative Phase (the pre-menstrual phase), and I’m not sure that my husband or my work colleagues would find my input very constructive if I decided not to exercise this kind of control.
When I read the above extract to my husband he could only smile wryly seeing it as the confession he had been waiting for... a female admitting to the very trait that many men find to be one of the most irritating aspects of femininity! This next quote was simply the icing on the cake:
“In general, we don’t really appreciate that we are not the same person one week to the next”
You may say, why not try to capitalise on the one aspect of being a woman which most of us find a real pain (literally and metaphorically). However, in reality, I feel this book is trying to desperately to turn a tiresome biological necessity into some kind of mystical power.
The fact that my cycle has allowed me to give birth to a beautiful daughter is enough for me- let’s leave it at that!
Miranda Gray's The Optimized Woman is available from Amazon. To order a copy, click the link below:
