Demure

Back in the day, a certain cult-of-personality English teacher (not, I believe, in the sinister sense) at my high school, in a class dedicated largely to the purported genius of one male classmate, told my mother that I was "demure." I've gotten feedback like this over the years, if rarely phrased so... memorably. While a reserved-in-a-gender-normative-sense personality (perhaps not evident on-blog, or perhaps, who knows) might increase my allure in the realm of coffee-shop pick-up artists, it's not such a boon professionally. I have a whopping to-do list of editors and such to follow up with, writers I'd like to get coffee with in person to find out more about the profession what with everyone around me being an academic, but there is The Demure. It creeps up, this Demure, and makes me think that rather than pestering very important people who are, we can safely say, not sitting by their phones waiting for my email, I will... go for a run. Go grocery-shopping. Spend a week longer than absolutely necessary on a dissertation chapter. I'll be somehow productive, I'll stay off the streets, as it were, but I won't be heedlessly ambitious.

I really do think this is less about fearing rejection (internal grad-school funding competitions taught the win-some lose-some life lesson, if I hadn't learned it already) than a really ingrained sense that if a magazine editor contacts me out of the blue wanting me to write for it, or a literary agent expresses interest, and I reply enthusiastically and never hear back, I should do nothing. Not nothing - there's a friggin' dissertation in the works, people! But nothing in that particular situation.

Things like this do happen to me every so often, always in clusters, and, in anticipation of being told that my writing and ideas are in fact the very weakest to have ever emerged from a human brain (and writing for any place with lots of readers, there will always be commenters prepared to assure me of that), I opt not to bother those other than my three readers here at WWPD with my blather. And these are situations where someone who's a big deal definitively does like my writing and, presumably, topic-selection. What of all the decision-makers who don't even know who I am? Well, I'm not flooding their inboxes, to put it mildly.

I'd thought this was just me, or just me being appropriate. (If whichever entity desperately wanted me published, it would have happened. Which does sound "The Rules"-ish as I type it...) Then, on a Slate DoubleX discussion of... Lean In (which, Flavia, I do plan to read, but so do all other members of the local public library, and I'm demurely waiting my turn)? That survey of women's representation in major magazines?, it emerged that there's a huge gender disparity in who pitches articles, and in how persistent writers are in getting published. Women will pitch, hear 'no thanks,' and never pitch again. Men will pitch, hear 'no way,' and ask to be made editor.

I exaggerate slightly. But on this podcast or somewhere similar, it also came out that men will expect job-jobs when equivalently-credentialed women will shoot for - you guessed it - an internship. So it's not exactly that women aren't pursuing that career, or putting themselves out there. They're just doing it in a way that isn't quite so entitled. And "entitled" is apparently what you need if you don't want a fate of jogging, grocery-shopping, and slow-motion Chapter-Seven writing.

All of this seems the bleeding obvious, Gender Studies 101, but it hasn't been, for me, as I've been living it.

So! I think I know what I must change, and it's not turning a half-hour jogging routine into an hour-long one. I have not addressed whether aggressive women are then penalized in the workforce. They say it's true, but in my experience, it sure beats passivity.