rm | women, men and being a con artist

http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2010/01/a-rant-about-women/

I'm pretty good at the sort of stuff Shirky is talking about. Maybe that's because my dad was in advertising, but it's probably not. Maybe it's because I've never been or felt consistently female and therefore am not the sort of person (woman) Shirky is ranting about it, but that's sort of besides the point, as we'll get to below.

The fact is it's probably because my perception of my childhood was that it was frightening and unpredictable and I always had to be ready with a response that would keep me safe or loved. I wasn't hit. I wasn't abused. I wasn't not loved. But my father's temper was unpredictable and spooked me nearly all the time, and the things I could be guilted for by family, teachers and/or peers (getting a cold, not smelling right, playing the wrong type of pretend, not being "cool") had a lot of impact on me.

I'm an only child, so I can't really tell you what of that was a truly difficult environment and what of that is the fact that I've always been pretty sensitive (some of this, I now know, is probably celiac-related) to loud noises, to teasing, to social cues, etc., and like most kids, my main goal was to not cry. As I became a tween (a word we didn't even have then) that goal became, more accurately, to hate myself enough that I could force myself into the forms that would prevent other people from hating me even more.

And that's had a huge impact on me. It's made me ambitious, competitive and deeply insecure. It's made me a catastrophist and a self-aggrandizer.

And while people who tell stories well at parties, who are self-confident, who are even smug (and I am all those things), are sexy... this isn't sexy. It's unpleasant for you and for me. And it's stressful.

Now, is this because I'm female-socialized and do care (as opposed to men, according to what Shirky posits) about the consequences when I get caught? Or is it because I'm not as good at it as I think (again because I'm female-socialized)? Or is it because Skirky isn't acknowledging consciously in his piece how much all of us, regardless of gender, spend so much of our lives feeling like frauds (did this happen before mass media, I wonder -- before mass media the pool with which anyone competed with was smaller and so, arguably, were the stakes) and so live in fear, not just of failure, but of success? There's always a higher mountain to fall from.

I loathe how often I feel this way -- like I'm telling a story to make people like me when I should just shut up, or just that I'm some sort of fraud in general. I loathe many of the reasons I am successful. I loathe the impact what it takes to be even as slightly successful as I am has on others. I loathe the idea of any one else having to feel this way.

And I hear everything Shirky says, much of it while nodding my head (ETA: which doesn't mean I think it's good or that he gets the impact of what he's saying (some of which is victim blaming BS, you bet) but I think a lot of the observations are spot on, even if the conclusions are wonky).

But wow, as a veteran of friendships and relationships with alcoholics, and as a person whose life as been defined by the borders between truth and fiction (my father's career and several of my own have centered on this), it's hard for me to get on board with the idea that more lies are the answer.

That said, I've no idea what the answer is -- for women or anyone else -- and whether the path to it is up. Or down.