Being a man is impossible, and I can only assume that being a woman is equally as impossible. Dove the soap people recently released this video, which maybe everyone in the world has seen, where a forensic artist sketches women based upon their description of themselves and then a second time based upon others’ descriptions. It’s no surprise perhaps that other people describe us as more beautiful—brighter, more open, more fair featured— than we describe ourselves.
David Brooks, ever interested in how the way we see the world affects our ethical decisions, picked up on this for obvious reasons, and asks a series of questions about men and women in this regard, wondering primarily whether men are over-confident where women are under-confident, and whether this is changing at all. Men, he claims, tend to base their self-image on performance where as women on their appraisal of internal qualities. He sums up:
In society generally, are more problems caused by overconfidence or underconfidence? The financial crisis and the tenor of our political debates suggest that overconfidence and self-idolatry are by far the larger problems. If that’s true, how do you combine the self-critical ability to recognize your limitations with the majestic confidence required to struggle against them?
I guess I’m asking how to marry self-criticism and self-assertion, a blend our society is inarticulate about. I guess I’m wondering, as we make this blend, whether most of us need more of the stereotypically female trait of self-doubt or the stereotypically male trait of self-promotion.
He may be describing as an ideal there a kind of narcissist, but he’s also describing most artists, who are skilled interiorists as well as who possess (who must possess) a belief in their ability to manifest their ideas, intuitions, and energy into works of art. Without that belief, as misplaced as it often is (or seems at first), nothing gets done.
I was reminded of Virginia’s Woolfe discussion of androgyny reading this, as I ponder upon occasion the ways in which our gender archetypes intermingle, or don’t, and how that shows itself. I wonder how malleable we are. As an arts educator, I’m counseling students to be more assertive, more ambitious about their self-culture, even as I say they need to become more responsive, more observant of the world around them. Woolf says: “It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly.” She quotes coleridge, who says (she thinks rightly) that great minds are androgynous.
He meant, perhaps, that the androgynous mind is resonant and porous; that it transmits emotion without impediment; that it is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided. In fact one goes back to Shakespeare’s mind as the type of the androgynous, of the man-womanly mind, though it would be impossible to say what Shakespeare thought of women.
I wonder whether a curriculum, or any method of education, can by design assist in the formation of this balance, although I’d think one with a generous bit of dialogue and making would assist. I doubt whether anyone is naturally in such a state, but I suspect an individual of energy and creative disposition—especially one with a good mentor or two along the way—is more likely to find his or her way there than others, to whom this ideal might never occur or be of use.