How Confidence Became a Cult

[Celerity]

Messages about women’s self-esteem are now so ubiquitous that their value has been placed beyond debate.

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2022/03/limits-women-confidence-workplace-inequality/626562/



To be self-confident is the imperative of our time. While women and girls are subjected to intense appearance pressures and unrealistic body ideals, the beauty industry is announcing that “confidence is the new sexy.” Similarly, as women suffer profound inequality at work, some employers are offering “confidence training” courses. Meanwhile, female celebrities are advocating self-love in chart-topping songs such as Lizzo’s hit “Truth Hurts,” and books such as Sheryl Sandberg’s 2013 Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead and Jen Sincero’s 2013 You Are a Badass: How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life have dominated best-seller lists. Gender, racial, and class inequalities are persisting, yet women are called on to just believe in themselves.

As feminist cultural analysts, we began to notice the rise of these messages in the early 2010s. They stretched across many apparently unrelated spheres: the welfare system, consumer culture, and even international-development initiatives. We expected that confidence might just be having a moment. But several years later, the obsession with women’s self-confidence seems to only be ramping up. Even the military has gotten in on the act: In a 2020 recruitment campaign, the British army addressed potential female soldiers with the promise that joining the forces would give them true and lasting self-esteem—unlike the superficial pseudo-confidence that “can be reapplied every morning,” like makeup or false eyelashes. (Other ads in this campaign targeted men, contrasting the confidence that would come from joining the army with the immediate satisfaction of pleasures such as a “quick drink.”) By now, these exhortations are so ubiquitous that they have come to constitute a kind of unquestioned common sense; the self-evident value of women’s confidence has been placed beyond debate.

Read: A lack of confidence isn’t what’s holding back working women

Of course, we are not against confidence. Would anyone genuinely want to position themselves against making women feel more comfortable in their own skin? But we are skeptical of the consequences of the cultural prominence of this imperative. And after a decade of research, we’ve come to a conclusion: Confidence is both a culture and cult. It is an arena in which meanings about women’s bodies, psyches, and behavior are produced, circulated, negotiated, and resisted. This cult isn’t all bad. But just as it opens up many possibilities for change, it also renders much unintelligible.

Whatever the problems faced by women or girls, the implied diagnosis offered is typically the same: She just needs to believe in herself. (We use women to include all who identify as such, including trans and gender-nonconforming individuals.) Inequality in the workplace? Female employees need to lean in. Eating disorders and poor body image? Girls’ empowerment programs are the solution. Parenting problems? Let’s make moms feel more self-assured so they can raise confident kids. Sex life in a rut? Well, loving yourself is “the new sexy!” Each of these messages reframes features of our unequal society as individual problems; according to confidence culture, we need to change women, not the world.

snip





This article was adapted from Shani Orgad and Rosalind Gill’s recent book, Confidence Culture. (Duke University Press)

[Phoenix61]

1. It's as bad as everything else women have been told

we should do; don’t be too (anything), get married, have a child, etc. Bottom line, you are free to do what you want as long as you don’t make anyone uncomfortable. So much this “Each of these messages reframes features of our unequal society as individual problems; according to confidence culture, we need to change women, not the world.”

[ret5hd]

3. Thank you for "verbalizing" it that way...

I read the OP…was thinking “wait…I agree but something’s wrong…I don’t quite know what it is yet…”

Then I read your post and yeah…that’s it!

[dlk]

2. Another way to blame women for the sexism and misogyny holding them back

The blame women, first, propaganda machine rolls on (and on).