One of the things I’ve been mulling over since publishing my first two articles is how many women seem to describe remarkably similar experiences whilst talking about completely different men.
One woman describes a partner who becomes defensive whenever she raises an issue whilst another talks about a boss who is perfectly pleasant until she challenges one of his ideas. Someone else talks about a colleague who constantly interrupts her, dismisses her ideas or talks over her despite appearing charming and reasonable to everybody else.
The details vary enormously but the resulting impact and feelings are remarkably consistent.
She invariably ends up asking some variation of “Is it me?” or “Did I say/do something wrong?”
What many women clearly describe is a sense that something changes the moment they stop accommodating, start succeeding, challenge an idea, offer a different perspective or simply take up a little more space. In other words, the moment they stop playing smaller than they know themselves to be.
Growing up, I used to think these men were confident. Looking back, I can completely understand why because they certainly looked confident to me, they sounded confident to me and, if I’m being honest, I spent years trying to look and sound exactly the same.
For much of my life I thought confidence meant certainty. I thought it meant having the answers, being right, appearing strong and never allowing anybody to see doubt, uncertainty or especially, vulnerability. That was my training as a boy and as a teenager. That was the Patriarchy at play. Emotions were for girls and boys didn’t behave like girls otherwise they risked being ostracised.
Most people assume these men are confident because that is precisely what they want you to believe.
I know because I spent decades trying to convince people of it myself. Not because I was confident. I clearly wasn’t. I was frightened.
The irony is that many of the men women experience as controlling, dismissive, defensive, passive aggressive or threatened are often trying to do exactly the same thing and they’re doing it through fear because they are afraid.
My greatest fear was that if people looked too closely they would discover what I secretly believed about myself, namely that I wasn’t good enough, wasn’t worthy enough, I was a fraud for even trying and that I simply wasn’t enough, full stop.
The strange thing about insecurity is that it rarely introduces itself as insecurity.
It arrives dressed as certainty, authority, superiority or the need to be right. It arrives in whatever form is required to stop people getting close enough to see the thing we are trying hardest to hide which is invariably our true selves because we have been taught that our true selves aren’t good enough.
The more I’ve thought about this over the years, the more I’ve come to realise that many of the behaviours women describe are not really responses to them at all. They are responses to something happening inside the man and, more often than not, something he is rarely aware of himself. Thus these behaviours are actually projections and defensiveness.
In my upcoming book, How to Stop Taking Sh*t from Insecure Men, I describe this as an insecure man’s early warning defence system because that’s exactly how it behaves. The moment something threatens how he sees himself, his competence, his status, his idea, his integrity as he sees it or his place in the world, the alarms go off and the missiles launch automatically.
The trigger point for his early warning defence system to launch is invariably any time the insecure man feels remotely threatened that people will view him less than he wishes the world to see him or experience him. In businesses, this tends to get more pronounced with seniority as the spotlight adds pressure externally and then internally.
How women often describe what they are subjected to in the work place is often those very same automatic defence systems in action and showing up as dismissiveness, defensiveness, control, ridicule, undermining, withdrawal, shouting, sulking, passive aggression or an inability to celebrate somebody else’s success.
The behaviour varies but the purpose rarely does: protect the insecurity and at all costs, avoid facing or feeling the discomfort.
It’s primary objective is to stop anybody getting close enough to see what is underneath or to stop them from ever looking less than they want to or need to be seen as.
None of this excuses the behaviour for one second.
Our upbringing can explain how we arrived at our destination as young adults but staying there is not excusable, it’s our adult choice and our responsibility whether we stay there or not.
It is explainable but it is not excusable. What it does do is explain something many women have spent years trying to make sense of.
The more I’ve learned about insecure male behaviour, my own being the foundation of this journey, the more I’ve concluded that women are not imagining what they are experiencing. They’re not overreacting, they’re not being too sensitive and nor are they reading too much into something that was just ‘banter’. More often than not they’re noticing something very real, they simply haven’t been given a framework for understanding or naming it.
Perhaps that’s why so many women describe the same feeling whilst struggling to find the same words. They know something is happening; they’ve often known it for years but they just haven’t always known what to call it.
Or perhaps they have.
Perhaps they simply needed somebody to confirm for them that it wasn’t them.