This blog post was going to take a different tack. I’ve been interested in perfectionism for a long time, and a number of months back I set up a Google alert to catch the most popular articles. Suddenly I’m struck by how ‘perfectionism’ is heavily gendered.
Instead, here’s what I got:
- Ask Carolyn Hax: New mother struggles with perfectionism
- This article from the Daily Mail: ‘How learning skills can be child’s play for adults: If only we made the time for learning, we could pick up a new language as easily as kids do‘ points out that perfectionism is a bad thing in language learning and is accompanied by a large picture of a woman with a blonde bob cut with a grim look on her face.
- And although The Daily Mail is a crock of shit in general, and is ideally best ignored, here’s another article from them about perfectionism, with a very large picture depicting a woman shining a wine glass. Again, it’s a male who is quoted, and he even admits to perfectionism himself, demonstrating clearly that perfectionism affects all genders, despite the female media skew: “Mr Thompson, a math and computer science professor and a self-described ‘recovering perfectionist,’ added that perfectionism is intimately tied to fear.”
- Pressure To Be Perfect from Essential Kids , likewise, shows the close up face of a worried-looking girl. The picture is of a girl even though the anecdote contained within the article is about a little boy.
- This one takes the cake: the book about dealing with bitchy women at work. Much has already been said about that book in feminist world, but it’s worth mentioning here that one of the categories of bitches is the perfectionist (The ‘Insecure Bitch’, in case you’re wondering).
So what is the reason for all these perfectionism articles and advice directed squarely at women, on health and family blogs?
Part of the answer may lie here, in a response to Warren Buffet’s recent words in Fortune Magazine:
Competition may drive capitalist innovation, but Whitney Johnson of Rose Park Advisors asserts women are expected to be “nicer” and “giving,” a behavior not typically rewarded in business practice. Among other traits more likely to be exhibited by women, perfectionism plays a role in different ways for gender. Dr. Jackie Deuling at Roosevelt University of Chicago finds in her research that there are two kinds of perfectionism: adaptive and maladaptive. Adaptive perfectionism often serves as a motivator, while maladaptive traits create self-doubt and can be demotivating. Dr. Deuling finds women are more likely to display maladaptive perfectionism. This can play a factor in workforce advancement through salary negotiations, asking for time off, and the “over confidence, under confidence” phenomenon. On the opposite side of the spectrum, men may be pressured more to perform and succeed at whatever the cost.
I don’t know. I smell a rat. This all reads to me like psycholgists blaming women’s own shortcomings on failure to achieve workplace parity, instead of an inherently sexist system.
A review of another book on perfection (which I haven’t read) is titled: Hey, high-achieving women! Here’s how perfectionism holds you back, and no, I don’t believe that’s a Jezebel-style ironic title either:
OK, ladies, you know who you are. You take such pride in your work that even mild criticism stings. You want so sincerely for your email messages to have just the right tone that it takes forever to hit send. You keep thinking about completed tasks so much that nothing ever feels finished.
If any of this sounds familiar — and if the words “good enough” make you cringe — you may be suffering from a form of the same modern-day malady that affects most high-achieving women (and plenty of men!) in the year 2013: Perfectionism.
Notice how ‘most high-achieving women’ are suddenly diagnosed with a mental illness, while men get the parenthetical add-on.
Here’s a rare nod to perfectionism in men from a PhD writer, which apparently has a different outworking, and may therefore put down to other things:
“If I don’t do this perfectly it means I’m a failure and I can’t stand failure.” This type of black-and-white thinking can be quite consuming. For example, the public speaker that’s concerned with executing a perfectly flawless presentation will usually be so self-conscious that he’s unable to be as animated and engaging as he could be. Another classic example is in sexual performance. The anxiety that comes from being overly concerned about performing perfectly well is a leading psychological cause of erectile dysfunction.
Though I should probably add that erectile dysfunction happens to women too. It just doesn’t tend to be called that.
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The other thing I’ve noticed about these articles is that women are likewise more likely to be blamed for making you a pain-in-the-neck perfectionist in the first place.
Here’s a classic example from a review of that same book on perfectionism:
Can one negative comment from your boss or mother-in-law throw you into a tailspin?
Note that while bosses can be both male AND female, mothers-in-law can only be female. Were we meant to conjure up images of men when we thought of ‘bosses’, thereby achieving gender-balance in our criticism? Either way, that sort of language stinks.
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For a more nuanced look into perfectionism, here’s an interesting talk to some graduate students called Taming The Shrews: Perfectionism and Procrastination In Graduate School.
And here’s one of the slides.
While gymnasts, dancers, individuals with disordered eating and professional models are traditionally female pursuits, the categories of professional athletes, graduate students, scholars/scientists and mathematicians are not.
So I’m not yet convinced it’s helpful to think of perfectionism in gendered terms, erectile dysfunction or no erectile dysfunction.
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