Verified by 
I give a lot of talks to groups where there are about 500 women in a room.
Of these 500 women, at any given time, 475 are going to be sweating like barge mules if they're forced, as they inevitably are, to sit in a stuffy hotel ballroom boasting little ventilation and no circulation whatsoever.
It's like putting 500 people in a shoebox, only you've given them large bags. (You've noticed that every conference for women gives the participants a bag or a briefcase, haven't you? They can't stop themselves--those in charge of conferences look at lists, see women's names, and immediately announce "Gotta get those gals a bag!" thus transforming the professional women attending their event into coiffured sherpas in Anne Klein suits.) The bags contain bottled water, cheap pens, lined pads, and plastic folders with a logo stamped onto the front.
Of the 500 women in the audience who aren't sweating are twenty women under 30 years and five women who weigh less than 115 pounds. They are freezing. Their adorable cable knit sweaters are pulled tightly across their lithesome narrow shoulders.
The rest of us look like we've just been running with the bulls at Pamplona.
And yet, as the women sit there, wiping perspiration from their brows, fearing that their mascara will melt and that their bras will dampen and become terrarium-like from the condensation formed beneath their moist cleavages, they're all asking each other in fluty voices the eternal question that the first female protozoan asked the second female protozoan, "Is it hot in here, or is it me?"
Me, I'm looking at the audience.
I can see that their faces are burning, their cheeks are pink, their mouths are dry; some of them are fanning themselves with a brochure, others are sucking at bottles of water like they just qualified at an Olympic trial. Others look like they're about to slip into heat-induced unconsciousness.
Yet nobody is willing to take responsibility for assessing her own microclimate.
This is because we've all learned to be good girls, which was our first mistake.
As good girls, we were taught never to trust ourselves or our own reactions.
We can't tell if we're hungry; we only know what we shouldn't eat.
We don't know if we're tired; we only know we're not getting enough sleep.
We aren't sure that we're fit, we only know we're not sleek.
We don't know what our hair color is because we've been dying it since we first bought a bottle of Sun-In or Henna at age fourteen.
Half of us don't know what our weight is because we don't get on a scale.
The other half know what our weight is every half-hour because we can't get off one.
Is this any way to go through life? I mean, as an independent adult, with voting privileges and ambitions to rule to world? We need to make some changes here, folks.
to be continued...
