Is it really different for girls?

By Tamara Lee

Forgive me while I bounce around a bit in an attempt to connect some dots from the past week’s musings.

Early in the week, I met up with some writer friends, mostly women, but there were a couple fellas. We all range in age and experience. The discussion eventually turned to writers’ bravado and I noted how it seems to me fellas, regardless of their talent, are a lot more courageous about putting their work out there than women. Women seem to be the ones taking the writing classes, joining groups, buying yet another how-to book, and otherwise looking for validation or acceptance as writers in one form or another, while the fellas just head up onto the stage at open mic readings, send out their work on a regular basis and otherwise risk the sucker-punches more willingly.

Before you get miffed by this gross generalization, you should know that each woman at that table, regardless of her age and successes as a writer, understood what I meant. We’d all experienced the hesitancy, the extreme self-doubt, the yet-another-writer’s-class-just-to-be-sure approach to our craft. Of course, many men go through this and I do not believe this is specifically a gender issue.

But could Joe Jackson be a little bit right: is it somehow different for girls? Hasn’t this sort of doubt revealed its tiresome bulk in some way since the beginning of literate time? Women’s roles and societal expectations, and all that bushwhack; it’s the classic Whitman versus Dickinson argument. One swaggered and sang his body electric; the other experimented with eroticism and punctuation in solitude (as Kamilla Denman writes, "Dickinson's transition from a dominant use of the exclamation mark to a preference for the dash accompanied her shift from ejaculatory poems...").

But there’s another interesting thread I’ve noticed in the argument-that-never-ceases: this certain women writers’ fearfulness, or need to feel justified pursuing a certain creative path, seems especially true within the literary arts. I haven’t put my theory to the test but from what I’ve witnessed amongst my creative friends and acquaintances—painters, actors, filmmakers, photographers—creative-validation is most overbearing among the female writers. Perhaps the other creatives suffer in silence, while women at least have their monthly groups to turn to for support.

One of the gals at the table that night, a talented young slam poet, noted that she finds she has to be somehow tougher in order to be out there with her contemporaries, who are mostly guys. I've heard this sort of thing before, women who feel a kind of pressure to write more 'male'. I know female vocalists who have the same angst. Do women painters feel a similar pressure? Do female dancers feel pressure to dance more 'male' (or, vice-versa)?

I have a number of male writer friends who, before they were thirty, had at least one book out. Most of my female writer friends found their successes much later in life, after having children, going through several career shifts, taking another writing degree. The fellas were doing; the gals were planning.

Obviously, this week's musings resulted in very few satisfying answers. So I now turn it over to you. To what degree is all this purely anecdotal? What’s been your experience?