OK, so I have figured it out – I think. The book ends with the sentence “It’s a jungle out there…No…It’s a Lipstick Jungle” (435). We were all kind of wondering what this term actually means and to me, this sentence tells all. The book keeps talking about how NYC is the only place where women can make it in the business world and make something of themselves. And at the end of the book, the three friends come together and they realize what they can count on are other women, and that the men in their lives don’t really matter at all. The men can’t make them happy or sexually satisfy them, or else can only satisfy them sexually and thats all, and their children are important but occupy a very instinctual and self-perpetuating sphere of their lives. New York City is a lipstick jungle because women rule in it – literally at the end of the book the three women are at the top of a skyscraper.
I have my problems with this book for sure but I must admit that these women are liberated in the sense that they can have it all, they have reached the top and the glass ceiling no longer applies. They have come to the point where they have decided that they do not need to rely on men, that men are not the people who change their lives, who save them from sadness or who grant them their Cinderella wish. These women have been taught to expect different things in their lives, they have not succumbed to being the dumb beautiful blond wife that is so often portrayed by the 50’s housewife. They are not ignorant and therefore satisfied by kissing their husband when he comes home for dinner, only to be cheated on (aka Mad Men). They have learned and been taught to expect more of themselves and more of their lives.
On a tangent, we could say that this education and liberation of women has caused the downfall of the family structure as we knew it for several hundred years. It seems that men and women are even more divided now than they ever have been, because they barely need each other anymore, particularly if you take into account artificial insemination etc.
Ultimately, the quotation at the end of this book is silly, but it also has a kind of philosophically Nietzschien quality to it. These women view the world as a place where women (characterized by “lipstick”) dominate. They see it through their own lens and they define its terms. This is a powerful feeling, but one that bears lots of burdens – and as they say, it’s lonely at the top.
