Does distress make me look fat?

David Brooks writes:

I guess everybody has seen the Dove Real Beauty Sketches video five or six times by now, where the women undergo an experiment where they find out that in the eyes of other people they seem better looking than they actually are, if that's not oversimplifying.

I mean, not really an experiment in the sense of science, footnoted and peer-reviewed and so forth. In fact Gail and Frank and everybody up in New York is telling me that it's art, which is absurd. The guy doesn't even draw [jump]
very well, it's neither great like Michelangelo nor weird like Picasso but just plain like a police artist, which is what he is. No, says Gail, it's not the drawings, it's the whole thing. Like now we're supposed to go to Soho and buy a whole thing, including a pseudo-scientific experiment, a dozen pencil drawings, a gallery show, and a video anybody can get on YouTube? I don't think so. You'll laugh, but I swear sometimes I'm glad I live down where I do, where people mostly keep two feet on the ground, Beltway or no Beltway.

In any event it's more science than art in the sense that you can draw conclusions from it, like, women are harsher on themselves in the personal attractiveness line than they need to be and most men are nowhere near as humiliatingly good-looking as some of them seem to think they are.

This raised questions for me that go well beyond mere attractiveness to questions about self-confidence, but when I sat down to write my column on the subject I realized—a rare occurrence, as you may well imagine—that I didn't actually know anything about it. Or more to the point couldn't find out anything about it on the Google except for Erol and Orth's examination of self-esteem data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, which was plainly off the wall: they found that there was no difference between men and women in self-esteem trajectories at all, and any idiot knows that's not true. 

I mean really, it's like saying government indebtedness doesn't inhibit growth, or whatever other "sophisticated" paradoxes people come up with when they have an economics degree and think their stupid beard makes them really handsome. But I wasn't going to write about that.

Anyway, to get the real skinny on men's and women's self-confidence, what we obviously need is some Bigger Data, as I have called it, that would be free from the bias of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (produced, after all, by the pro-labor Bureau of Labor Statistics). So I figured I'd crowd-source it and you, dear readers, are my crowd.

What I'm planning to do is ask you a series of questions. You can email me your answers, and if I like them I'll use them in my column. This way we'll have an objective alternative to Erol and Orth's unsustainable hypotheses.

Frida Kahlo. The Two Fridas. Albert Bierstadt Museum.

The first question is: Given how much women used to lag in self-confidence before the feminist revolution, are they any more self-confident now? They certainly make a good deal of noise in the classes I've been teaching at Yale University this semester—have I mentioned my Yale gig to you at all?—but I don't know if that, um, exuberance translates over into the workplace or sexual meat market or the playground when they are comparing what fancy pre-Ks their toddlers have gotten into. When you read the diaries of women who have been dead for a while, you find that many of them harbored feelings of inadequacy, and I don't see why a bunch of books by Simone de Beauvoir and Germaine Greer should have brought that longstanding tradition to a halt.

For my second question, I'd like to know: Do women in your organization tend to flow in a particular direction? Like, after an intensive meeting, do they flow toward the women's bathroom, whereas the men congregate around the water cooler exchanging ideas stimulated by the conversation that just ended? Some psychologists have conjectured that separate women's facilities never have enough fixtures, forcing women to spend long portions of their workdays standing in line, but others argue that women are simply hiding from their responsibilities out of fear of looking like idiots or being seen as flirtatious.

Third: Do I undervalue self-criticism as a female strategy for fishing for praise? Maybe the self-abnegation shown by the women in the Dove campaign is something that in day-to-day life makes men feel sorry for them and offer them opportunities—promotions, engagement rings and the like—that they might not otherwise receive. Or perhaps self-criticism even works in a more direct way in showing women, even as it makes them feel bad by pointing out ways in which they fall short, what they could do to improve themselves. If George W. Bush could have seen ways in which his presidency was imperfect, he might have been even more successful as president than he actually was.

Finally: Of overconfidence and underconfidence, which is more harmful to society as a whole? If you think of recent failures in real estate investment, exotic finance trading, and political campaigning, you might think of overconfidence as the greater problem of the two. But how would a person maintain the delusions of grandeur required to become great and practice self-criticism at the same time? How female does a fellow need to be to beat the ladies at their own insidious game?

The Male Side of Beauty Blindness. From Co-Create.

Note: The joke in the headline has been used in a couple of other blogs, once pretty entertainingly (in Mark Edson's short-lived Broadly Eclectic). I did make it up myself, but I'm not the only one, alas.