the confidence gap vs. the badass feminine

I tweeted a link to the Atlantic article proclaiming that men are more confident than women.

A woman tweeted wryly, In other news; water is wet.

@justinemusk in other news; water is wet.

— Melissa (@liminalworks) April 28, 2014

No kidding.

Think about the kind of body language that signals confidence.

Confident people take up space: with their body, their presence.

They assert their opinions. They’re not afraid to interrupt (although hopefully they are not obnoxious blowhards). They’ll cross their arms across their chest; if they’re sitting down, they’ll steeple their fingers or put their hands behind their head. They are not overly expressive; they are calm, even stoic. They do not engage in overly approval-seeking behavior (excessive smiling, constant nodding, head tilting, flirting).

In other words, confident body language is coded as masculine.

I honestly don’t believe that feminine badass has to be an oxymoron. The fact that our culture interprets ‘feminine’ as weak and submissive creates this belief that women have to become imitation men in order to be powerful.

I suspect it’s because of a confusion of sex and gender and body language, as if submissive body language is innately feminine and strong confident body language is innately masculine. Men and women both can find themselves in positions of power or powerlessness — and their body language changes accordingly. Women who act one way in front of other women might show up completely differently in a room filled with men (and vice versa).

As many women will be quick to tell you, a lot of so-called traditional ‘femininity’ is a performance, just like a lot of ‘natural beauty’ relies on fillers, makeup, style, personal trainers, strict dieting, expensive skincare, teeth bleaching, laser hair removal, good lighting – and I haven’t even touched on plastic surgery yet.

Behavior that is aimed to please, placate, manipulate and soothe can be just as learned as putting on a pair of fake eyelashes.

Maybe women are biologically wired to nurture relationships and keep the peace – or maybe women have been acting the way people act when their survival depends upon the whims, moods, decisions and general approval of those who have more physical, social and/or economic power than they do.

Could you imagine Oprah – one of the most confident and powerful women on the planet – tilting her head, batting her eyes, playing with her hair, shrinking into the cushions, lifting the end of every sentence into a question mark as she interviews some major movie star (or watches Tom Cruise jump up and down on her couch)?

Maybe ‘femininity’ gets so commingled with ‘behavior aimed at catching and keeping a man’, that people have difficulty perceiving ‘feminine’ in a way that exists independently of men:

“In the eighties, a male writer conducted a survey to see how a thousand different people defined femininity. Men of middle age and older, those most invested in the patriarchal tradition, defined femininity as related to men – women were most womanly while being admired by and attractive to men or during heterosexual sex. Male interviewees of any age didn’t think of women as feminine while giving birth or nurturing children, only in relation to themselves. Without men, women appear to fade from sight.” — Valerie Estelle Frankel

I don’t say this to be critical of men. Traditional definitions of what it means to ‘be a man’ are equally problematic.

But I’m thinking of something I said in my TEDx speech, which was about my own troubled history with confidence and self-esteem. We have a way of becoming what we think we’re only pretending to be.

In this extremely popular TED speech, body language expert Amy Cuddy points out that influence flows both ways: the way you perceive yourself not only impacts your body language, your body language impacts how you perceive yourself.

In other words, are we ‘feminine’ because we’re submissive, or are we taught to be submissive in order to be feminine?

And if we’re so often acting submissive in the presence of people we feel the need to please (be they of either gender), how does that impact the way we see ourselves, or what we believe about femininity itself?

I don’t think anybody would consciously define confidence as ‘masculine’; I know I certainly don’t.

Confidence is about being comfortable in your own skin.

It’s about expressing yourself in an authentic and masterful way.

It’s about feeling entitled to a place at the table, to a voice, to a vote.

It’s about how you relate to your body, your self, other people, the world at large.

Confidence is power, necessary for creative achievement and professional success. This might be why society encourages some people to naturally have more of it than others. This might also be why confidence in women tends to look a lot like courage.

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