Hi, I’m the syndicated columnist (banned from LA Times’ features sections, I might add) who wrote the above piece.
Regarding this comment from tanstaafl above…
Despite all the progress in recent years, there’s still truth in this observation…A big problem for women is …the double bind that tells a girl she is equal, but inferior, that her parameter of self-esteem is the approval of others and not the cultivation of self.
…can you explain how I, who grew up in this culture, and presumably, drinks from the same water supply as millions of other women, managed to become a woman who can muster the sheer courage to say, “Hey, ya big lug, lemme talk!”? I had no friends as a child, and became kind of a doormat as a result (desperate to be liked). I fixed that in my 20′s, and now, what I care about is whether I’m being true to what I believe in…which sometimes requires telling some blowhard to put a sock in it so I can be heard.
P.S. As I’ve written in my column: “There’s a reason they call it ‘self-esteem,’ and not ‘What other people think of me-esteem.’”
If women are too concerned about what others think, I’d say it’s because they place too much emphasis on a relationship with a man as a shortcut to having a self. Never works. But, if I’m correct about that — are men to blame?
