In Praise of Confident Women

An interesting post on the blog Role/Reboot caught my eye yesterday, relating as it did to an important article in last week's Economist about "the lamentable lack of female professors" in academia. Kristie Theodoris's Role/Reboot post, "Men with High Self-Esteem are Confident, But Women Are Cocky," calls attention to the "fine line of self-esteem" girls and women are asked to walk. While boys and men are allowed to brag about their personal qualities, physical and intellectual accomplishments, even their sexual prowess, girls and women who do the same are seen as too self-confident. Given the plethora of negative consequences for girls of having low self-esteem, educators often champion programs that aim to develop girls' pride in themselves. Yet the social consequences for girls who give active voice to the very self-esteem such programs aim to foster are often deeply negative. Other girls, in particular, often feel that a "cocky" member of their sex needs to be put in her rightful place, to be "knocked off her pedestal," Theodoris argues. Since parents and educators rarely openly discuss or even acknowledge the contradiction between these two very strong messages, girls are left on their own to figure out just where that narrow window of acceptable self-esteem lies.

The Economist article, reporting on a study recently published in the journal International Organization (abstract here), demonstrates that the self-esteem conundrum is not just a problem that plagues girls, but one that continues on, far into adulthood, with real consequences for women's career and financial advancement. University of San Diego researcher Barbara Walter compared the number of times male political science scholars cited their own work in subsequent research, compared to the number of times female scholars did the same. Her findings—on average, male-authored articles were cited five more times than those by female-only authors—reflect the fact that not only do men tend to cite their own previous work more than women do, but also that men cite other men "more often than chance would suggest they should." Since Promotion and Tenure committees increasingly regard the number of times a scholar's work is cited by other scholars as a sign of said scholar's standing in the field, such a clear gender gap in citation might account in part for why full professors of the male persuasion still outnumber tenured females, typically by at least 4 to 1 in most disciplines.

How do women in romance novels fare in the self-esteem wars? Romances in general do tend to push heroines to develop higher self-esteem. But I can't begin to count the number of times I've read a romance in which the heroine is compared favorably to a "cocky" female rival, said rival embodying the "bad" confidence upon which society frowns. Why does society demand that women have some self-esteem, but not too much? Do romance novels teach women frame themselves in the narrow window of "acceptable" self-esteem? Would you admire a romance heroine who crowed about her own accomplishments or skills? More or less than you would a romance hero who did the same? What are your favorite romances that feature "cocky" women? And can we come up with a term less gender-biased than "cocky"?

Photo credits:

"Tell me...": Girls Inc.

Pre-Romance for YA's: Erica Lorraine Scheidt's USES FOR BOYS

"In the happy times, in the tell-me-again times," Anna's mother tells Anna a story, a story told with the brevity and directness of a fairy tale: "She had no mother... she had no father. All she wanted was a little girl and that little girl is me."

In those happy times, when Anna was a child, and Anna and her mother were on their own, Anna took the end of her mother's story—"And now I have everything"—and held it close, a secret spell, a talisman against the distance and dangers of the world beyond her family. And even though the boyfriends and stepfathers and stepbrothers that begin to revolve through her life show Anna that she's no longer "everything" to her mother, Anna holds even tighter to the story's happy ending as she struggles from childhood to early adolescence: all you need is one special person, and you'll be safe, you'll be loved, you'll be happy ever after.

Such is the message of not only of fairy tales, but also of many a romance novel. And it's lovely to live within that space, to feel safe and loved for the time it takes to read a fairy tale, to read a romance. But if a young girl hears the same story over and over, without realizing that the story doesn't tell the whole story, she can be in danger of spending her whole life looking for that one person who can fulfill all her needs. If not a parent, then a boyfriend, or a boy—or, more likely, a series of boys, mistaking their interest in her body for an interest in her self.

Which is why I decided to feature Erica Lorraine Scheidt's young adult novel, Uses for Boys, on the blog today, despite the fact that it isn't strictly a romance novel. Because it's a book I'd want to give to every girl who, like me, becomes a compulsive romance reader as an adolescent, looking for answers to questions about love and romance between the pages of a novel. For though the story Anna's mother's tells her is personal, biographical, its underlying theme is the same one girls in our culture are spoon-fed from the earliest of ages: find the right "one," and you'll find perpetual happiness. And Anna's story points out the damage that holding tight to such a fairy tale can cause.

Anna turns from her mother toward boys as the object for her search when she is an unpopular thirteen, when Desmond Dreyfus sits down and gropes her on the bus. "I can picture what it's going to be like for me now, what it's going to be like, how he'll introduce me to his friends and how he'll invite me to parties at Lisa Jenner's house and how I'll invite Nancy along and when they ask who invited her, I'll say I did," Anna thinks when the boy sits down beside her again (32). Yet after he uses her to jerk off, in front of two other boys, Desmond stops sitting next to her, stops talking to her. She'd tell her friend Nancy about it, about "how it felt, his hand under my shirt. The exploding warmth," but Nancy has stopped talking to her, too, stopped sitting next to her, stopped looking at her.

And since Nancy won't speak to Anna anymore, Anna decides to turn her attentions to another boy, one as outcast as herself. Bringing him home to her empty house, taking off her shirt, offering herself as a gift in return for the physical pleasure he can give, as well as the emotional connection she imagines he offers: "Joey's here every day after school. He's my family now. Anything's worth this" (38). Yet Joey moves back to Seattle. And another boy sexually assaults her, abuse that shines from her eyes but that her mother cannot see. And so Anna moves on, to another boy, to another apartment, another story: "Josh is a story I tell myself.... A story that's true. I'm telling myself the story of Josh and I look at his profile against the clouded sky. 'I was alone,' I say aloud. 'And then I found you.'" (92).

The lives of adolescent girls, unlike those of fairy tale princesses, rarely end with a "happily ever after," with a prince riding to the rescue to save a girl from sadness and pain. But every girl could use a fairy godmother, one who, like the mother of one of Anna's boyfriends, tells her a different kind of story: "When she says I can do anything, she doesn't mean a boy, a boyfriend, a husband. She means me. Me. I could do anything" (190).

The spare, stark prose in which Scheidt shows us how Anna gradually learns to recognize what's missing from her mother's story, from the stories she's been telling herself, from the stories others have been telling about her, turns what could have been a heavy-handed hand-wringing into a deeply moving rebuttal of the myth that a boy can fill the emptiness girls feel. Only after Anna begins to recognize her own strength, her own power, is she ready to engage in a mutually satisfying, respectful, and loving relationship with another boy, rather than one based not only on how he can use her, but also on how she can use him. Here's hoping that the majority of young romance readers learn the same, lest they become fooled by the message of far too many romance novels: "some day my prince will come. And away to his castle we'll go, To be happy forever, I know."

Illustration credits:

Snow White on books: Lauren Scanlon, Fairy Tales and Romance Novels

Erica Lorraine Scheidt,

Uses for Boys.

St. Martin's, 2013.

Next time on RNFF:

Sympathy for the romance rapist?