The Myth of The Cowboy and The Maid (and other lies we were told.)

The dominant narrative of 20th Century America from the post-WWII era onward was that of The Cowboy.
Capital T capital C.
The Lone Ranger, the Man With No Name, the Duke. The slow-talking gun-toting fella with a sexual swagger that will build a house by hand, but only for a good-hearted woman. Until then, he saves the day and rides off into the sunset...not even needing to shield his eyes from what must be wildly uncomfortable experience. After all, he’s equipped wide-brim hat and pure manliness.

Only, The Cowboy never existed.

The Cowboy is a fantasy concocted by white male writers starting in the late '40s and early '50s, channeling their insecurities through warped nostalgia. As noted by historian Heather Cox Richardson, it was around this time minorities were gaining more civil rights, women had realized they were capable of much more than they'd been lead to believe, and the pre-war status quo was on the brink of a complete upset. And lo, the daydream of the individualist, all-powerful, "can't nobody take nothin' from me" Cowboy, safe in the untouchable confines of yesteryear, was born. 

White people LOVED it. They fell head over heels for the notion that they could escape the present and shape their own destiny with nothing but boots and grit. The seeds of hardcore individualism were sown.

Unfortunately, this concept was always fiction. As humans, we are not capable of going it alone. No cowboy ever did, and no one who actually works with cows would ever think they could. (Cows are big y'all. Try handling one hundred sentient, uncooperative mid-sized sedans alone and see how it goes for you.) 

Real cowboys existed, but cattle wrangling was the lowest job on the ranch hierarchy. It was dirty, unglamorous, dangerous work, and was always done in teams. Real cowboys were badly paid, and—unlike The Cowboy—were often Black, Indigenous, or Mexican immigrants. The job of a cowboy is roughly equivalent to today's hotel maids: it was physically exhausting, genuinely gross, overlooked and underpaid, and by large part done by melanated people. The myth of The Cowboy coming into being today would be like if hundreds of books, movies, and TV shows came out telling stories of a single white woman, beautiful and independent, who scraped by a living as a rotating hotel maid in the 1990s, not needing anyone or anything and making her own rules as she went.

Oh, wait.

That actually happened.

There was, in fact, an immensely popular TV show running from the end of the '90s into the early 2000s celebrating a beautiful, fiercely independent white woman who got her start "at the bottom" as a hotel maid and worked her way up to being the manager.

I am, of course, referring to the incomparable Lorelai Gilmore.

(Buckle in, friends, because I'm about to tread on hallowed ground.)

My generation has a deep obsession with Gilmore Girls.
It was a world of perpetually witty comebacks, adorable small-town hijinks, perfectly decorated fall festivals, and dreamy dreamy boyfriends. Their hair was perfect, their jokes were funny, their appetites voracious. Coming off the era of the ethereal blonde stick insect as the standard of beauty (Daryl Hannah, Michelle Pfeiffer, Kate Moss, Gwenyth Paltrow, etc.), to see a brunette who could crack a joke, eat a hamburger, and still get the guy was a godsend! Yet in its way, Gilmore Girls insidiously perpetuated the myth of The Cowboy, rooting it deep in the hearts and minds of teenage millennial girls. 

The series, if you are unfamiliar, is about the life of Lorelai Gilmore and her daughter, after Lorelai rejected her sickeningly wealthy privileged upbringing to raise her child "on her own" in the imaginary small Connecticut town of Stars Hollow. Legend has it she knocked on the door of a local inn at age 16 with baby Rory in her arms, and said, "I'm here for a job, any job." The fact that the owner of the inn gave her a job along with free housing and childcare seems to be considered obvious and fair compensation—a fitting reward for having the gumption to knock in the first place. 

…Because in Gilmore-World, if you have the nerve to walk away from a bad situation, along with enough twinkle in your eye and chutzpah in your heart, employment, housing, and childcare will appear as if by magic. If you continue to work hard at the job, you'll get promoted, eventually buy a sprawling two-story house with a front yard, back yard, and detached garage, afford cable and takeout for nearly every meal, new clothes every season, and plenty of money leftover for whacky grandiose gestures like making the county's largest pizza. But don’t worry, despite all your success you’ll stay humble enough to mock how old your couch is.

I rewatched the early seasons during some of the bleaker pandemic months this past winter, and what baffled me most was that everyone in the series keeps saying Lorelai does everything for herself, "with no help from anyone." All the while, her friends fix her meals, her house, her car, and her relationships. They help her with every single event she volunteers for, and her parents fix any financial struggles she encounters. She starts her dream business of buying an inn using investment money from a purchase her father made in her name. Yet this is supposedly the story of a woman who pulls herself up by the bootstraps and makes everything out of nothing. The theme is epitomized in this brief exchange from season three:

Harvard Alumnus Guy: "You weren't handed everything in life. You struggled for it."

Lorelai: *nods* "That's true."

IS IT THOUGH.

At that moment I imagined all real hospitality workers collectively rolling their eyes and making a jerk-off motion.

Let's be straight. When real 16-year-olds run away from home, with their babies or otherwise, the story doesn't generally end in a plush house on a treelined street where the issue of the day is which cute skirt to wear to the big business meeting.
Also, Lorelai does not raise Rory all by herself. Mia, Miss Patty, Babbette, Sookie, Luke, the school system, basically the entire town, helps. 

As a woman who recently had no choice but to raise her preschool-age sons with no help whatsoever from grandparents, teachers, babysitters, museums, libraries, clubs, friends, or neighbors due to a deadly pandemic, I can tell you it's really fucking hard. Impossibly hard. Lorelai Gilmore wouldn't have lasted two weeks. She would've turned her house into a cutesy theme park, run out of money from the devastated tourism trade, then cracked after drinking most of a bottle of tequila before moving in with Sookie, because then at least everyone would be fed and she would have an adult to talk to.
I feel comfortable making this assertion because that's 100% what I would've done if I had the option.

But I digress. 

I'm not here to ruin one of my top 10 favorite TV shows of all time. 

(Okay...maybe a little. But don't worry, no one can take the memory of Milo Ventimiglia in that gray sweater under the sprinklers. Some things are sacred.)

My point is this: independence is a myth. Pretending otherwise traps us in bullshit.

All living organisms on this earth are inherently interdependent. None of us have the means to provide all our own food, all our own clothing, all our own shelter, and raise children simultaneously. We form communities and families for this very reason—to share the load. We will never be fiercely independent Lone Rangers making our own rules. We have been and always will be beautifully unique threads within a vast woven tapestry through time. But decades upon decades of messaging in our public spaces have told us if we can’t manage it all alone, we're weak. We’re told being a "self-made man" is the best possible thing to be, and doing less means there's something wrong with you. Being a strong, independent woman who works and cooks and cleans and raises kids and makes time for self-care AND bakes extra cookies for the PTA is the ideal for femininity we’ve been sold for a ridiculously long time. We were lied to. The Cowboy isn't real. The Maid isn't real. No one has ever successfully navigated this world on their own power.

That Into the Wild guy? HE DIED. There's a lesson there, people. 

Accepting help should never have been made to be a source of shame.
In a world outside the hardcore individualist brainwashing, accepting help is like drinking water: vital, practiced daily, and not a big deal. 

I promise it won't make you any less of a wonderful and capable human being to let go of the myth of The Cowboy and The Maid. Such aspirations were always rooted in fear and the desire to subjugate others.

We can embrace a new narrative, one in which we recognize the load has always been shared, and be appreciative of all the unique threads holding it all together. (You beautiful thread, you.) It's safe to relax into the fabric, to support and be supported by our small communities and families. 
Imagine it like letting go of a heavy box, only to discover it was being held up by a net all along. 

Support isn't a prison sentence, or a personal failing. When done right, it's freedom.

My challenge is this:
Notice the messages of individualism around you, and call them out, if only to yourself. They can be sneaky or outright bonkers, but they're friggin' everywhere.
Notice the harm they do to your mind and others.
Then ask for help with something. Anything. And help someone else in return. 

You will change the world in ways The Cowboy and The Maid could never dream.