Peeing in the punch bowl

[jere7my]

Several of my friends have linked to, or contributed to, this post. It invites people to claim their awesomeness, and begins:

Too often we put ourselves down. Too often we think we are useless, not good enough, less than perfect and thus less than acceptable. Too often we demur praise, or will not praise ourselves. Often we outright hate ourselves, and much of the dominant media and various cultures around us are determined to make us feel as bad as possible, usually so that we will buy things.

In the comments to this post, I cordially invite you to tell me why you are awesome.

Damn straight, say I. Good points, say I. Well said, say I.

Except the post is only addressed to, and open to, women.

"Gosh," I said. "That's unnecessarily divisive!" And it didn't need to be — the post would have been just as strong, just as awesome, without the exclusivity. It's my assumption (and I admit that I am making an unfounded assumption here) that the author is operating under the widely held belief that women are disproportionately affected by irrational low self-esteem, à la impostor syndrome, and are therefore more in need of spaces to proclaim their accomplishments. That, of course, is common knowledge — I've seen several people repeat it in connection to this post — which happens to be false:

Early on, this phenomenon was associated with women, a belief that persists today. But subsequent studies, including another by Clance [who first described impostor syndrome], have shown that men are affected in equal numbers. [link to highly worthwhile Science article]

Men are just as likely to feel like frauds, to downplay or disbelieve their own achievements, to suffer from irrational low self-esteem. Everything in the post I quoted above applies equally well to men and women. Posts like Claim Your Awesome contribute to the idea that it's a women's problem — okay, maybe some men feel that way sometimes, but it's not systemic, it's not legitimate — when in fact it's a people problem. We put on blinders when we draw a box around it and call it a "feminist" issue or a "women's" issue — which means we look in the wrong places for solutions, place the blame in the wrong places, and that hurts men and women alike. Men, by typically being taciturn about their emotional needs, contribute to the idea as well, and that leads to a vicious cycle.

I would be hard pressed to finish the sentence "I am awesome because...." I don't suffer from impostor syndrome, but that's only because I have no role I could imagine myself to be fraudulent in. I don't have a career; I'm an unsuccessful writer; my physical flaws are numerous; I just turned thirty-eight; and I am more than half convinced that I have wasted my life.

None of that counts, because I have a dick.

#

(That said, the comments section of the Wikipedia article on impostor syndrome includes this line: "I feel like I'm only pretending to edit Wikipedia right now, like inwardly I'm not a Wikipedian." I am awesome because I am the sort of person who would close a self-pitying post like this with an observation of an awesome line like that.)

Comments

[glassonion]

You could, in fact, start your own post if you wanted. Maybe other dudes would want to contribute. Maybe women would, whether or not they'd contributed to the original. Maybe it would start a giant internet flamewar, but i doubt it. It'd probably get higher participation from people i know personally, which is fun for me. I like it when things are fun for me.

[ursula]

Or you could borrow this thread, which invites comments from everyone:

http://attack-laurel.livejournal.com/156092.html#cutid1

[jere7my.livejournal.com]

Kudos to her for "Guys are totes allowed to comment too - the internal negative voice affects us all."

[fiddledragon.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure whether the original post was inspired by this one, but one thing that the linked post brings up is that women are disproportionately more likely to be disbelieved or shot down when they assert their expertise and/or awesomeness. That said, I'd certainly love to see a gender-neutral iteration of this meme :-)

[jere7my.livejournal.com]

The post you link to also seems to be turning a people issue into a women's issue. I remember reading something by Stephen Fry (I think) in which he talked about his problems with accepting praise from fans — he was always aware of the flaws in whatever he'd done, so he couldn't accept a compliment without pointing them out. (I do exactly the same thing.) The advice he got from John Cleese was, "Just say thank you."

When I read posts like the two we've linked to, I always come away thinking I have unusually feminine emotional patterns. But I don't think that's true — I think feminist blogs are pointing out universal problems, and cloaking them in the label of women's issues. I'm just more aware of, and expressive of, my feelings than many men. The fact that men don't tend to talk about these things contributes to the perception that men don't feel them.

[jere7my.livejournal.com]

I guess what I should ask is this: have there been studies showing that "women are disproportionately more likely to be disbelieved or shot down when they assert their expertise," or is it "common knowledge," like the fact that women are disproportionately more likely to suffer from impostor syndrome?

[adfamiliares.livejournal.com]

I ask (you and crystalpyramid below): How much does it really matter? Do women need to suffer disproportionately for their experiences to be worth talking about? Do men need to struggle as much as women or in precisely the same ways for their experiences to be valid or interesting? Making this kind of misery poker the necessary precondition of conversation seems not terribly productive to me.

[crystalpyramid]

You're totally right. I think the main function of a women-only thread is to establish a community to have the discussion in, where some shared experiences can be assumed. It doesn't mean it's an experience unique to women, just that it's useful to have a smaller group than "all people" to discuss it in. "Academics" is apparently also a useful subset. "Swat alums who are not famous yet" might be another good one.

You're also right about how all this has distracted from the intended discussion of awesomeness. I'm sorry, I didn't mean it to, and I hate the way I made this conversation escalate away from where it was supposed to go. And adfamiliares is awesome for attempting to rerail the conversation.

Hey, jere7my, I think you're awesome. You have a keen eye for the world and a great sense of humor, highlighting the beautiful and the absurd. The little teaser bits I've gotten from your talking about your book make it sound awesome, too!

[jere7my.livejournal.com]

I think you're awesome too, even when we clash on the internet. We should chat more. My post wasn't actually a back-handed fishing expedition for compliments, at least not consciously, but I appreciate them.

I would think that the post existing on a feminist blog would pretty well self-select for women and supportive men (and deleteable trolls, who wouldn't respect the instructions anyway), so the limitation seems unnecessary to me. I still think she was being thoughtless, one way or the other, but there are a lot of thoughtless posts on the internet, so it's not such a big deal. It stuck in my mind last night, so I wanted to post a response, to show that nifty, well-meaning blog posts can have unintended consequences.

[fiddledragon.livejournal.com]

Definitely not, and I'm sorry if I phrased things poorly.

[fiddledragon.livejournal.com]

I don't know. I'd be very interested in seeing any studies that have been done. But it is the lived experience of many women that they are disbelieved explicitly on the basis of being female and thus having a single-sex "safe space" to discuss that in can be a very valuable thing. The blog that I linked to self-identifies as a feminist and predominantly-female space. There is certainly room for other spaces that aren't female-labeled.

[jere7my.livejournal.com]

Not sure I buy that. Do you have a link to a man saying the same thing?

[fiddledragon.livejournal.com]

A man saying which thing?

[jere7my.livejournal.com]

Never mind. It was a joke.

[fiddledragon.livejournal.com]

Ok :-)

[crystalpyramid]

Men are just as likely to feel like frauds, to downplay or disbelieve their own achievements, to suffer from irrational low self-esteem.

Sorry to be a bitch about this. But you keep saying this, and I'd really like a citation that actually says this. Even the Science article, while saying it's not just a women's thing, both fails to cite a source, and mostly in fact talks about women.

Even "equal numbers" is vague. Equal numbers of men, given that there are more men than women in academia/"successful" careers, implying a lower rate among men? Or at equal rates?

[crystalpyramid]

Please note that I'm not trying to say that some men don't also have this problem — I know plenty who seem to. All my original addendum was meant to be was a note that that thread was intended for women.

[jere7my.livejournal.com]

Again, the Science article says, "But subsequent studies, including another by Clance, have shown that men are affected in equal numbers." Presumably there is a citation somewhere that says (Clance, >1978), but I'm not going to go dig it up. I'm sure Lucas Laursen would reply to an email. I've linked to an article in Science, and haven't yet seen any links to anything that contradicts it (beyond appeals to common knowledge). I feel that's sufficient to make my point.

[jere7my.livejournal.com]

Sorry — the last sentence should read "I've linked to an article in motherfuckin' Science."

[crystalpyramid]

Conceded. Poking around the internet, it does look like most of the research is about how to cope with impostor syndrome, rather than about which particular demographics are more entitled to it. But maybe that's where it ought to be.

[adfamiliares.livejournal.com]

I have several reactions. First, theoretical: Why do you suppose it's so difficult to open the discourse to one set of voices and to affirm the distinctiveness of its experience (the messages women get about competence and beauty in our culture aren't exactly the same as the ones men get) without excluding another, or denying the common features their experience? (Maybe the convolution of that sentence is its own answer?) I cheated and read the article on impostor syndrome instead of the post you're talking about. One of its take-home points was the (obvious but important) observation that finding out that you're not alone in your feelings of inadequacy helps. That seemed relevant to your argument. Sure, it's helpful to learn that other people like you (for me: other women, other junior faculty) struggle with the same worries you do, but might it also help to learn that people you think have it all sewn up (men, senior faculty), and maybe resented for it, also have those feelings? A while ago elysdir inadvertently sparked a big argument about introverts v. extroverts; it wasn't fun, but it did at least teach me that extroverts have their own cross to bear, which I, an introvert, had never considered, and maybe I'm a little less resentful of extroverts now.

In other words, I agree with you (why limit the thread to only women?), partly for the same reasons (struggling with feelings of inadequacy isn't unique to women) and partly for a slightly different one (to the extent that women's and men's experience isn't precisely commensurate, it might be productive for each group to hear the other's perspective).

Second, when do we get to start talking about how awesome we are? I'll start with you: You're awesome because you're a wise, thoughtful, and generous friend. You're awesome because you know your way around a sentence; getting published or not won't change that basic truth. You're awesome because you have an acute, wide-ranging intelligence. You're awesome because you know how to talk to children on exactly the right level. I could go on, but I'll stop there, to leave room for others.

[myalexandria.livejournal.com]

hmm, I'd like to read that introvert/extrovert debate; do you happen to recall about when it was?

[myalexandria.livejournal.com]

ETA: found it by searching Jed's journal (the future is here!)

An interesting discussion. I'm a mixed introvert/extrovert and the comment that seemed the truest to me was the one that said, introverts go home and kick themselves over the things they *didn't* say, and extroverts go home and kick themselves over the things they *did* say. Uhuh. I have both those experiences pretty much all the time.

My main conclusion is that being a person is hard.

[stowaway-geek.livejournal.com]

Hrm. People sometimes tell me I'm too hard on myself. And I can see how that might be a problem.

That being said, though, the people I think of as awesome are often not the sort of people who would, say, add on to such a comment thread to proclaim their awesomeness. This can be a result of high standards, of realizing "Hey, that was pretty good, but in the larger scheme of things, it wasn't that awesome." This can be a problem, if people turn into workaholics, but I think it gave, say, Swat, some of its distinctive flavor. (Which admittedly isn't an environment I'd want to be in all the time.)

By this token, I consider myself an awesome computer scientist, and yet realize that I'm not totally awesome. Because neither I nor anyone else (as far as I know) has proved that P != NP, despite it seeming incredibly blinkin' obvious :)

[ursula]

I don't know, I'm professionally inclined to think that polynomials are weirder than you realize.

[miraling.livejournal.com]

So I saw the post originally in a non-gendered form and that seemed really good. I do remember reading something somewhere about women being worse at praising themselves (sort of separate from the actual self-esteem issue) but since I can't remember what or any other details than that it's really unscientific of me to bring it up.

Um, so I don't really have strong feelings about this issue? It seems kind of better to be inclusive, though, also unscientifically decided by means of what seems nicer or more right to me.