Women and self-promotion
Wednesday, January 27th, 2010 at 10:57 amStu sent me this post about women’s evident tendency to be not so great at self-promotion. The poster says: “They aren’t just bad at behaving like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks. They are bad at behaving like self-promoting narcissists, anti-social obsessives, or pompous blowhards, even a little bit, even temporarily, even when it would be in their best interests to do so.”
I was talking with Gillian about this a while back, and promised I was going to write something, and never did, because I didn’t have a lot of evidence to bring up, just general impressions and personal experience. But now someone else has written about it, so I can nod and say, “Yeah, I’ve noticed that about women, too.” Not all women, but plenty enough. And obviously not all guys are topped up with self-confidence, either. But when I think about myself and confidence, my first thought is that I had it when I was a kid, and somehow lost it. I don’t know whether that’s a common thing for women, but I wouldn’t mind comparing experiences, if anyone wants to.
I remember being a sassy little thing with a pretty good opinion of myself. And my mother (sorry, Mum, for dragging you into this, but you went through this bullshit too, and worse than me) often told me that I was arrogant, and that I shouldn’t blow my own trumpet. So I learned to be coy. And we got that message at school (an all-girl school), too. Or rather, mixed messages. We were told not to hide our lights under a bushel (bushels, trumpets, wild ran the commonplace metaphors), but we were also told not to boast about ourselves, which somehow warped into not saying anything positive about ourselves. Which perhaps warped further into not thinking positively about ourselves. Say “I’m dumb, I’m not that good, I’m ugly” enough times, even out of false modesty, and you might start believing it. You certainly don’t get in the habit of putting yourself forward with confidence that someone might actually be interested in you for reasons beyond sex.
I think we were taught to be modest, also, for reasons to do with sex. “Bold girls” who “put themselves forward” were somehow “not nice” and were not “ladies”. Yes, I was brought up to be a fucken lady, mate. Not that many of us at school were particularly ladylike, but unfortunately the one ladyish lesson that we did seem to take to heart — as I see it, anyway, looking back — was the one about not drawing attention to your own accomplishments. You were supposed to be pleasing — your thoughts focused on the pleasure of others, not on your own advancement. Which is all very well in purely social situations, but not so helpful in the world of work. But while our educators and parents (it was the 70s and 80s) were all for us having careers, and did what they could to ensure we were prepared academically, perhaps they didn’t give so much thought to preparation for the non-academic side of work — the side that’s less about ability than chutzpah, and which includes the art of mining social occasions for career opportunities (which may start with something a simple as telling someone you’re a writer, rather than just mentioning your day job). I don’t know if the early education of girls, at home and at school, has changed much. I don’t get the sense that it has, really, but I’d be very interested to hear other people’s views — and I assume there must be differences between countries and cultures.
But while I learned early on to project a coy manner, my actual inner confidence didn’t sink until puberty, which is so normal as to be hardly worth mentioning (though it shouldn’t be normal) — but I’ll stick this idea out: becoming a woman just isn’t as cool or empowering as becoming a man, because of the way we’ve constructed ‘man’ and ‘woman’. And in the first years of womanhood, just as you’re maturing, you’re also at your most desirable (at least in the current culture), and therefore your most vulnerable. When you should be becoming a person, you’re sweet sixteen and all too easily become principally a sex object, or a rejected sex object; either way, your subjectivity takes a hit. There’s so much media emphasis on women’s appearance, and so little on women’s accomplishments, that if that stuff gets in your head, your accomplishments can start to seem unimportant, even worthless. In my case, at least, that attitude took hold and stuck. I saw myself as an object for a very long time. (I know this happens to guys too, but my impression is that women are in more danger of losing their sense of personhood in the teen years.) Once you see yourself as an object, it’s as if you don’t exist. It’s pretty hard to find the will, courage, or even desire to promote yourself if you’re not real — if you’re abject, if you’re the very opposite of important — in your own mind.
I’ve been incredibly lucky in that I haven’t had to promote myself much. Because when I started writing I couldn’t have done it. I was taught to wait for others to notice you, and that was exactly what happened. Next time I have to do it, I’ll be able to — but that’s partly because I’ve now got some sort of profile and won’t be working from square zero. But my story is pretty unusual. I happened to have a weird book ready to publish when weird books were enjoying a surge of popularity. When I first tried to get a publisher for TEC, back in 2000 or 2001, my early efforts failed, and I didn’t know what to do next. I thought I had a pretty cool book, but when the couple of publishers who seemed the best bets (and who took unsolicited manuscripts) and one agent I’d met turned it down, I got stuck. I knew I ought to get an agent, but I didn’t know how to begin finding one. I knew there were lists, but how to choose names from the lists? And, good God, so many of them were in New York. Why would an agent in New York be interested in a random Australian with a strange book? (So a bit of cultural cringe there, as well.) The thought of contacting a writer and asking “Who’s your agent?” would never have occurred to me. The notion of bothering someone else like that, intruding on their time, would have been D: D: D:. In fact, even the thought of contacting an agent was pretty scary — not so much because of fear of rejection, but more a general sense of unworthiness, as if I didn’t even have the right to try to get someone’s attention and have my voice heard, especially by a citizen of New York. (And there’s another thing: seen and not heard. Is it still the case that women are to be seen, and men heard?) In short, I wasn’t confident enough to do the self-advertising and persevering that it often takes to get a first book published.
Anyway, I got noticed — eventually by Jeff VanderMeer, who is not only great at promoting his own work, but is a generous promoter of other writers. But there was a whole lotta luck involved. Without that luck, without the attention and effort of people — starting with Geoff Maloney, and most of my helping hands have been male — who steered me first to Prime Books and then to major publishers, I’d probably still be sitting here with an unpublished book — unless I’d grown some confidence somewhere along the line, and I doubt I would have. I started to grow confidence when I got published, not before. And it grew slowly, and I think it’s still a work in progress. And I remember that when I was first given real, practical help, I was astonished. I could hardly get my head around the fact that someone thought my work was worth their time. And that attitude didn’t come from put-downs in the past, since I’d had a lot of praise for my work at school (art and writing); but while praise is nice, it isn’t half as good as help. Tuition, mentoring, initiation into professional networks, all the stuff that can actually bring results: that kind of real, practical assistance is the petrol to which praise is the car wax (lovely and validating though praise is). And I wonder — do girls get as much practical help, from birth to adulthood, as boys do? Does our society truly have as much goodwill towards girls’ ambitions as boys’ ? Do we want girls to succeed in the public sphere as much as boys, and show it with our time and our wallets, not just our words?
So I guess I’m just wondering about women and the confidence to self-promote. If you’ve got it, how did you get it? Could you imagine a scenario where being a pain in the arse might have a positive outcome? Would you mind being a pain in the arse to get what you want, or would your self-image revolt? Could you lie to get a job or a place on a course if you were pretty sure you could live up to your own boasts, and could you live with being caught out in the lie? Have men supported your ambitions? Have women? Am I asking the wrong questions? And guys, what do you think?
January 29th, 2010 at 7:00 am
I grew up with similarly mixed messages about showing off where school was involved. Part of that was innate self-preservation where I was concerned, in that drawing attention to myself was also likely to draw abuse from bullies, but the other part was deffinitely about being a ‘good girl’, which was what my school groomed us to be in the lower grades. Once we were in high school that faded out alot. My mom, on the other hand, pushed me to make myself known, and that, coupled with my innate attention-whore personality helped overcome the school-related BS.
I thought it was interesting how you brought up sex, mostly because women aren’t supposed to show off there, either. Men can brag about how many women they’ve slept with, but if a woman were to do likewise we’re classed as easy. A girl’s ascent to puberty also isn’t celebrated, but hidden. A when a young man starts growing a beard it is celebrated, while menstruation, at least in my case, was never talked about. To an old fashioned mindset an aggressive personality in a woman could be classed as a sign of masculinity, thus meaning that the woman wants (god-forbid) to be treated as an equal.
As for support, my mom has always been there for me, but I’ve noticed that more men tend to be supportive than women. I’ve always been able to make friends with men more easily, so maybe that’s part of it, but I’ve gotten the feeling that when I put myself forward for something other women resent me for breaking the mold, while men tend to just be happy for me.
I’m rambling at this point, but maybe some of that was interesting?
January 29th, 2010 at 4:28 pm
You’ve answered one of my questions, namely whether women a fair bit younger than me still got the ‘good girl’ directive. Which in my case also faded in high school, but it got terribly mixed up with sex. It was good to be bad, but not toooo bad; and having been brought up to be obliging, suddenly being told to say “no” caused some interior conflict.
>>A girl’s ascent to puberty also isn’t celebrated, but hidden.
Absolutely. And when we’re told that menstruation means you can get pregnant (a responsibility), maybe we also need to be told that it means you’re becoming a grown-ass human being with rights as well as responsibilities. Maybe parents worry so much about teen pregnancy and AIDS that their daughters’ sexual maturity is a time of anxiety for them, so that they forget the positive side?
Men being more supportive than women is an interesting point. I have a friend with a master’s in feminist philosophy and according to her it’s often the way: men being supportive, acting as a team, and women undermining each other. I have no idea why men might be more helpful and generous, but I’ll try to dig up my friend’s sources.
Rambling is good! You find all sorts of stuff on a ramble
January 29th, 2010 at 11:40 pm
Sex ed for me always basically amounted to the same formula: If you have sex, you will die. Contraception is useless. Resistance is futile. All your base are belong to us. My school was especially big on drilling that into my head, though even my mother, who was never big on lecturing or scaring me into good behavior, gave me the piece of advice that ‘when a man and a woman make love, death sits on her side of the bed.’ It all hinges, I think, on the old idea that all sexuality and sexual ‘misconduct’ are the fault of the woman, while men are just led around by the penis and don’t have enough self-control to consider the potential results. So women must resist, and, to circuit back to the original point, perhaps we’re taught to hang back and be unnoticed so as to not risk our virtue. Possibly. Maybe. Or it’s equally likely that I’m pulling this out of the air.
January 30th, 2010 at 6:43 am
Was your school saying that condoms don’t protect against HIV? (O_o)
I hit puberty just as the Titanic of the 60s / 70s permissive society hit the iceberg of AIDS, and things seemed to change very quickly. In my school, the emphasis was on using a condom, not abstaining; but mothers know that teenage daughters might give in to a boy’s begging to go bareback. And if the boy is highly unlikely to have HIV, there’s always that one in a million chance — it must be a worry for parents. I’ve read the opinion that the puritanism which has come on in the last 20 or 30 years is a reaction to the fact that medically, we’re back in the 19th century again: sex can kill you, and somehow a safety issue has turned into a moral issue — as if the spectre of death provided an excuse for a lot of old ideas about sex to be dragged out in public again. I think there might be something in that. But perhaps it comes to the same end — hang back so as not to risk something, be it your virtue or your life? I wonder if girls and women aren’t encouraged in risk-taking behaviour as much as boys and men, just speaking generally. There’s a sense of risk in self-promotion, albeit a false sense, which might loom larger for women?
I think, perhaps, we allow men to be led around by the penis. We permit them that conduct in sexual life, and actively encourage it in business and professional life. We honour their desires. Women, not so much?
January 30th, 2010 at 8:31 pm
I could and would lie to get a job/ place on a course [ I'm not a very nice person?
] but since me getting a job or place on a course depends on the portfolio I have there is not much maneuvering space to begin with. Yes, I would tell them I love teamwork and that I’ll be delighted to join their company… Not lies, but severely bending the truth?
Men were always more helpful to me than women but there might be these two reasons. 1. I’ve met more men in the field/ art has for a long time been a man-dominated field
2. To get to a point in career where you can help a young grasshopper, in most cases, years pass. From studs, they become venerable old mentors. They like having young females that look up to them, even if they might never make advances of sexual nature.
As for the education/ growing up…
We don’t have sex ed here, its up to the parents/ media. Lucky for me, my dad is a gyno. I didn’t get the ‘ sex is death’ education. ^^
I didn’t get the ‘you should be ladylike’ either. Probably because I was ladylike to begin with. Not on purpose, but until I was around 20, I lived in a world that was populated with dragons and mermaids and the values of school or media had very little to do with me. Nowadays, I still live there, not here, but I sometimes have to make contact with the world.
Does that answer any of the questions? I think I lost the point of my message somewhere…
Oh. And I think growing up as a girl is a bit disappointing, when you became aware of it. I used to love pirates and samurai as a kid. Then I discovered women are considered bad luck on ships and there are no female samurai. Uncool.
January 31st, 2010 at 5:31 pm
I grew up in that supposedly liberal pre-AIDS period and was stymied by being seen as intellectual. You weren’t calssed as ladylike or easy if you were too bright. The bright boys in the class weren’t supportive – they wanted better marks than me because I was a girl. I had a choice between being female or neuter until I hit university (and even there, to a certain extent) simply because of the way I used language. Retrospectively, it was very odd. Other teens actually had conversations about it, in my preseence. I wasn’t a sexual lure or a sexual threat, but neither did I get much support when I did something special. Until I discovered a peer group at uni, I was in a strange little solitary bubble a lot of the time.
I learned to do the support thing, because I was brought up on committees and everyone pulling their weight. It was a matter of training combined with personality, in my world. Mind you, I didn’t merit support often when I was young – that’s a different issue. People seem to see me as ‘able to cope,’ when the reality is that we all need pushes at key moments in our career.
In my real world, men are just as likely as women (or women as men) to not be good at the support thing on the everyday front.
I’m begining to wonder if support for artistic talent isn’t a very complex mechanism, deepnding on a combination of the nature of social skills (not having them but having the right ones to attract the right person at the right moment) and how timely the particular talent is (writing weird when people are watching for it, writing vampires 3 years ago – that sort of thing), whether the talent exhibits the right traits to attract support (if a thousand people love your work in an intense personal way that means they don’t even think of sharing it, well, that’s gotta hamper career compared with even fifty people who tell everyone “read this book”) – those sorts of things. There’s more, but I’ve run out of steam. Meandering is dangerously exhausting.
January 31st, 2010 at 5:43 pm
D — >>They like having young females that look up to them, even if they might never make advances of sexual nature.
I think most of the men who’ve helped me would strenuously deny it, but…hmm… I wonder if men are more likely to help young women, then, than older women?
I remember leaving dragons behind, regretfully, for the world of school and media, because I felt I had to. It’s most awesome that you stayed with the true world…
If it helps, there were a few warrior women in old Japan. I used to learn the traditional Japanese women’s weapon, the naginata.
January 31st, 2010 at 9:14 pm
Age is relative. Like my grandma says, ‘that young man across the street’. When I ask her how old is that young man, she says ’sixty’.
Thanks, now I feel much better about the samurai.
But it is not that women couldn’t be something [ like female pirates ], it is that it was/ is against the social norm.
January 31st, 2010 at 9:46 pm
Gillian — I was never in a mixed classroom. The boys thinking they should do better than girls — I wonder where they got that from? At my school, you could be ladylike without being intellectual but it was harder to be intellectual and unladylike, as it was somehow assumed that intelligent people ought to know to be good.
The ‘able to cope’ thing sounds horrid (or rather, I know it’s horrid). And coping is one thing, and doing more than cope is something else. Why is it ok just to be coping, I wonder?
I would so love it to not be complex, but you’re probably right. And it also probably depends on the field and how patronage works in that field. But one of the social skills for attracting the right person at the right moment is still a willingness to be forward, I think? The more people who notice you, the better the chance of attracting the right one?
D — yup, the social norm is for women to be kind of uninteresting. Or to be interesting in ways only other women understand. (Or does it not go quite that far — I feel like I’m talking off the top of my head.)
January 31st, 2010 at 10:37 pm
Yes, it’s being forward, but in the right way with teh right people. I’ve seen bunches of people shoot themselves in the foot by being forard in unacceptable ways, and just as many (me included) shoot themselves in both by saying “I shouldn’t be pushy.”
We need a Miss Manners for being forward enough to be noticed as writers without actually doing the shooting in foot thing.
February 2nd, 2010 at 6:11 am
What’s unacceptable forwardness to one person may be acceptable to another, though; that’s the tricky thing. And cultural factors must come into play. Can I ask what sort of behaviour you’ve seen to be unacceptably pushy?
February 2nd, 2010 at 1:57 pm
My own standards on unacceptably pushy are inconsistent (I have real problems with upbringing vs industry needs). Me being unacceptably pushy is asking almost anything of almost anyone I don’t know. Someone being unacceptably pushy twards me happens about once a month “Do this big job of work for me. No, I won’t pay you. I am a genius.”
Sometimes I’ll do it anyway (which means it’s the far end of acceptably pushy, doens’t it?), because I like the project or I care about them as a friend, but mostly, these days I say “Come back to me when you’ve done such and such.” Mostly, that gives them time to get a bit industry aware – when they come back it’s normally with reasonable size questions (”Would you please read my short story and suggest markets?” instead of “Edit my novel, please. I have a deadline of a week.” or “Fix the history in this. I didn’t do any research.”)
In other words, I’m probably the last person to give a good answer to that question. This is why it’s a question that haunts me.
I was brought up in a culture of giving more than you receive, which is very laudable, but entirely ruins my capacity to objectively analyse acceptable levels of forwardness. I’m working on it, because we (me especially) really do need to udenrstand it.
There’s an added problem which I discovered when i studied in North America (and again when I worked on international trade agreements – another part of my exceedingly interesting past): Australian notions of forwardness and courtesy and language that reflects the same can be rather different to North American.
I think we need a physics of cross-cultural communiication: after all, we have relativity.
Thinking about it, my Thai friends had a different set of approaches and sensitivities again. Lots of hierarchies and gentleness. Was that Thais in Oz, or is it a deep part of Thai interpersonal negotiating culture?
Do these things disadvantage people who are brought up in one culture and trying to sell books into another?
February 3rd, 2010 at 8:28 am
I think those sort of “edit my novel for free” requests are not so much pushy as freakishly selfish and narcissistic; they’re less about putting yourself forward and getting noticed, which you really have to make contact with other people for, than about trying to get someone else to do something that you should be doing yourself. I see it as a difference in type, not degree, of request. Does that sound right?
I could say no to ridiculous demands long before I could screw up the courage to ask the normal-size questions. I don’t know if I can lay that on upbringing. I can remember pretty far back being a “you don’t bug me and I won’t bug you” kind of critter. But that might have been an early deal I made with the world in response to the world’s bugging me.
I don’t know much about Thai business culture, but I know Thai culture in general is gentler (in manners, anyhow) and more softly-softly than Australia. I don’t know how self-promotion works here. And arty/literary types might operate differently to business people.
I think these differences can cause problems, absolutely. Being too self-deprecating or too immodest. Annoying people by not being clear with them, or conversely be being too clear too soon. Expecting people to ask questions that they’re not culturally geared to ask. Not knowing what other people don’t know about your culture. There’s so much.
February 3rd, 2010 at 10:02 am
We all make mistakes nad we all have to negotiate the morass, but the people at the top of the heap (culturally, genderishly etc) are more likely to be able to make a mess of the tangles, without being punished. This makes the lack of clear boundaries and the sheer confusion about what’s bloody cheek and what’s gross presumption and what’s ordinary networking very difficult.
I still think your ‘luck’ with The Etched City was due to its brilliance and also the fact that it exactly fit people’s hunger for a work of its kind. It made you an honorary male. How do we make other women (again – me! me!) honorary men? I have no idea.
February 3rd, 2010 at 3:39 pm
Damn good points. I think it depends on whether both parties recognise the hierarchy, too. If I don’t recognise someone’s supposed privilege, I won’t be a doormat for them.
I tend to ask myself “Would I be happy to do this favour for this person if they asked me?”
I might at some point have said I got to be an honorary male, but now I’m not so sure. Otherwise I might have to start calling other female writers honorary men. I wrote something that some men liked, and that happened accidentally to be fashionable. But there are obviously a lot of women writers a lot more successful than me. And some of them write about women. So how they write about women might be the thing? I mean, obviously, all the self-promotion in the world won’t help if publishers can’t see a market for the work.
February 3rd, 2010 at 6:43 pm
That’s a different part of the cultural mix, though, whether something fits established paths for sale and how to evaluate stuff that doesn’t.
February 3rd, 2010 at 6:49 pm
Absolutely. And your own culture isn’t necessarily your own… We seem to be talking about two different things now: firstly, self-promotion (doing it at all), and secondly promoting something that doesn’t fit an established cultural niche. (Am I right? I might be getting confused.)
February 4th, 2010 at 10:07 pm
You’re quite right. It’s another set of problems, but they’re partly linked, since the writer mostly likely to create something that doesn’t fit the current cultural mix is someone who isn’t privileged by that mix.
February 5th, 2010 at 5:44 am
Right you are. In my case, though, I had a book that I could see was privileged by the current cultural mix, and I was still shy about it, and completely clueless about making contacts. That might have been at least somewhat to do with being Australian, though — the internet wasn’t so well developed, so making contacts outside Oz — and even in it — was harder. But I also had a deep, abiding sense of worthlessness. And rejection by publishers comfirmed that sense. It’s hard to persevere if you feel (even if you don’t think) that you deserve to fail.
And on the other track, we’re running into the damn tricky question of how someone whose work is outside the cultural mix can get their work into the mix. (In my case, I don’t know if I’ll ever write another book that’s in the mix — might have had my one and only commercial showing!).
February 5th, 2010 at 6:50 pm
We start with a tricky question and lure ourselves deeper and deeper into the marshes of uncertainty.
Right now I’m playing with more mainstream writing (as you know) but the real Gillian – cross-genre and quirky and misfit – keeps returning.
February 5th, 2010 at 6:53 pm
PS I know that feeling of worthlessness! And it brings us back full circle, in a way, because I think it’s something that’s inculcated in us. You explore it in your Baggage story, in fact.
It’s a complex set of cultural messages that reinforce some people within a culture and subvert others. I recently watched an episode of Bewitched and was horrified at how it reinforced a bunch of big negatives for women.
February 6th, 2010 at 6:13 am
Hmm, is the mainstream-ish writing not part of the real Gillian?
That worthlessness, I think it must be caused by a complex of cultural messages and personal circumstances; and perhaps it can be learned from early role models, too. I guess it’s another word for “low self esteem”? And then there’s the question of how to solve the problem…
February 11th, 2010 at 2:18 pm
Two levels need solving – the inside one (our own judgements based on all those factors) and the outside one (so that when we have ostred ourselves out, we don’t get put back into a place where we should not be. That’s the theory of solving. Theories are easy
.
February 17th, 2010 at 6:38 am
Yup. And I think the second level butts up against economics (perceived worth of a person related to economic value of their work and products), which I’m not qualified to even theorise about.