Stu 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?

So, the editors of Publishers Weekly have made a list of their top 10 books of 2009, and they’re all by men.

“We ignored gender and genre and who had the buzz,” they said. “It disturbed us when we were done that our list was all male,” they acknowledged fleetingly in the middle of a paragraph of self-congratulatory rah-rah.

Well, it disturbs us here at Chez Bishop, too. Frankly, we are disturbed like Darth Vader was disturbed by Admiral Motti’s lack of faith. If only we had Jedi powers.

Lizzie Skurnick’s essay contra PW’s list is worth reading, particularly for her description of one awards-deciding process, in which, she says, “we have…called books by women small and books by men large, by no quantifiable metric.”

The trouble is, we’re not yet in a position to say that we can ignore gender. (Or race, or culture, or sexual orientation.) Our biases are deep as shit. As The Mumpsimus puts it, ‘ There is no objective, essential “best”. There is stuff we like and stuff we don’t — texts we have developed techniques for appreciating and texts that we do not, for myriad reasons, appreciate. There are texts about which we have built large critical apparatuses for justifying as “great”.’

Which is why I think we probably ditched affirmative action too soon. Patriarchy still informs our tastes and appetites, and we can’t evade it any more than we can evade our own genes.  And it may not just be a matter of taste regarding the books themselves. Skurnick writes: “It’s not that women shouldn’t be up for the big awards. It’s just that when it comes down to the wire, we just kinda feel like men . . . I don’t know . . . deserve them.”

Which is even scarier, if it’s true, because it doesn’t speak just about a cultural tendency to prefer men’s writing but a tendency to cut men more slack, to wish them more success, to extend them more compassion and goodwill — in short, to love men more than we love women.

In the interests of honesty, I have to say that I’m a woman who has been helped, encouraged, and promoted by men. I’ve had so much male support, I should be able to insert something witty about jockstraps in here, but I’m getting over a bit of food poisoning and ask to be excused from wit. At any rate, it’s not on my own behalf that I complain. Or rather, it is — if I ever succeed in writing this book I keep failing to write, the one with all the women in it, doing womanish things, though not having affairs, because that would be too sensational.

On to the second part of this post, which is much more ruminatory…
Lizzie Skurnick writes about a group of awards judges finding texts by men “ambitious” and texts by women “domestic”, and rewarding the former even if they fell short of their goals, though the latter may have been better written.

Assuming that this was not the only time that such a finding as been made, it raises some troubling questions. Like, do women actually tend to be timid, preferring to do a good but limited job, where men might take a wild risk? Or do we fail to see where women have been ambitious because the ambition is disguised? Do we simply prefer sloppy-ambitions to skilful-safe because the former seems to inject more new material into the cultural meme pool? Or do wild ambitious works by women go unpublished because publishers know that women’s writing within certain safe bounds is saleable, but when it comes to work that shoots for the moon, the reading public is more likely to look favourably on the flawed efforts of a not-quite-genius man than a not-quite-genius woman?

Perhaps a real genius, a woman who can shoot for the moon and hit it, has equal chances with an equally brilliant man. Or maybe not — maybe there are women out there shooting for a different moon, and finding that no one cares.

As I say, ruminations. Questions, all of them hard to answer.

I mentioned recently that I made a long soapboxy post and then didn’t post it due to a flaw in the thinking I was doing while standing on the soapbox. Leaving argument aside, I’ve recently been reminded — three times — that there are still people out there who don’t acknowledge that women can be great. At just about anything, except perhaps pole dancing.

And I’m afraid that while we call this a post-feminist age, it is no more post-feminist than it is post-racist, even in the West. One facet of it not being quite post-feminist yet, daaaaarlings, is that we still don’t remember women of genius the way we remember men. Female composers get perhaps the shortest shrift of all. It occurred to me that I have never, as far as I know, heard the music of a single female composer working before circa 1960.

Now comes my confession: with the exception of a few (often histrionic) pieces that I love, by and large I don’t appreciate classical music all that much. I just don’t connect with a lot of it. So for that reason, too, I haven’t gone out of my way to listen to classical and post-classical works by women.

But now I find myself really wanting to know the music that women wrote way back when. So I’ve started off with Clara Schumann (nee Clara Wieck; married to Robert Schumann), who seems to be the best-known woman composer of the 19th century. In her own time she was famous both as a virtuoso pianist and a composer. I randomly began with her Pianoconcerto in A minor, Op. 7.
1st movement
2nd movement
3rd movement

Am I a music critic? I am not. All I can say is, I find this music complex, deeply nuanced, and inventive, with a magisterial power of communicating emotional tone. The first movement in particular changes feeling so often and so fluidly that listening to it is like being a secret ear in a ballroom full of people, picking up the vibes of different hearts and minds. Does it thrill me? In places, yes. But I’m trying not to judge this by the thrill factor, given that Motley Crue thrills me too — I’m trying to be objective. Maybe I’m not qualified to make such an assessment, but I can’t see how this music is inferior to that of the great male composers, or why it shouldn’t be as much studied and performed and lauded.

Various questions are swirling in my head and the soapbox beckons, but for now I think I’ll just keep poking around and discovering music by women.

Reading The Age this morning, I came across this: Australia has put together a national advisory group, comprising a psychologist, a child health expert, a Federal Government minister, a model, two fashion retailers, and one current and one former magazine editor, with the task of improving the body image of young women.

“Over the next five months, the group will draft a voluntary code of conduct to look at making magazines and media outlets use a wider range of body shapes and sizes, tell readers when they have retouched photos, and set industry age limits on models.”

Willfully leaving aside the question of how much a “voluntary code of conduct” can “make” anyone do anything, this sounds like a good idea. It would be great if a wide range of figure types were given a positive image. I can’t help thinking, though, that behind this worthy project there is a blind eye turned to the greater problem of our culture’s obsession with beauty, particularly the beauty of young women. The fact that this advisory group has been formed tells me that we think it is terribly important — a matter of national significance, in fact — that young women be able to feel beautiful. And it is that important, because we have made it so. Beauty and the body were mental health issues for some women before the 20th century, but in our image-saturated age so many of us are afflicted with disorders related to perception of the body that the need for public and government action is obvious.

Shining a positive light on different shapes and sizes sounds like one good tactic to employ in the necessary fight. But what if we could also somehow distract the focus of attention away from looks entirely and find ways to praise and glamourise accomplishments, intellect and good character? What if, in other words, we could convince ourselves to stop caring so much about whether we make the grade as sex objects and start caring more about the entirety of our being?

I’m closing my eyes and imagining a world where our natures and deeds, not our looks, would be the bedrock of our self esteem. Where, for those of us who are peacocky, style and flair in personal presentation would be more important than the figure and features that nature’s lottery gave us. Where we would understand that every moment we spend obsessing over the flesh is a moment we steal from the nourishment of the mind and soul.

Opening my eyes, I go back to wishing I had longer legs, a prettier hairline and better teeth…