No Contest (31 page)

Even those women who are said to fear success do just fine at noncompetitive tasks. This much is fact. But what of our values? What do we make of this state of affairs? Let's begin by acknowledging that the phrase “fear of success” is not merely imprecise but loaded. It suggests a deficiency, a problem to be remedied. There would seem to be something wrong with people who have such a fear, just as with those who are afraid of the dark. If we substitute a more neutral term such as “aversion to competition,” we are then freer to ask whether this is really a bad thing. One of Horner's subjects spun a story which imagined the mythical medical student “no longer feels so certain that she really wants to be a doctor . . . [and] decides not to continue with her medical work but to continue with courses that she never allowed herself to take before but that have a deeper personal meaning for her.” Another subject has the student saying, “‘To hell with the whole business'” and going into social work—“not hardly as glamorous, prestigious, or lucrative; but she is happy.” These two excerpts are cited by Horner under the heading “Concern About One's Normality or Femininity” and are said to reveal fear of success.
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In light of the psychological and interpersonal destructiveness of competition (not to mention its unproductiveness), these comments ought to be seen instead as intimations of health, an altogether appropriate sense that one can and should step off the competitive treadmill. As Sassen puts it, Horner's subjects may be indicating

 

a heightened perception of the “other side” of competitive success, that is, the great emotional costs at which success achieved through competition is often gained—an understanding which, while confused, indicates some underlying sense that something is rotten in the state in which success is defined as having better grades than everyone else.
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***

It is competition and not success that separates men and women. There are signs, however, that the gap between the sexes is narrowing even here—and not because men are coming to share a distaste for beating others. Over the last decade or two, a chorus of voices has been urging women to compete and to accept competitiveness as appropriate and even healthy. Magazine articles and books too numerous to list here sing the praises of winning. One sample, fairly representative of the genre, should suffice to convey the flavor. Entitled “The Thrill of Competition,” it appeared in
Seventeen
magazine in 1982. “Don't get hung up—climb that ladder to success,” it counsels teenage girls. Betty Lehan Harragan, author of a book called
Games Mother Never Taught You,
is quoted as follows: “It's true that some people would rather that you weren't competitive. These people may prefer to succeed themselves rather than see you get ahead.” Thus warned that all critics of competition are cynical opportunists, readers presumably will be more receptive to the advice that they “start competing in high school and . . . get a strong foothold on the ladder to self-improvement.”
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Similar exhortations aimed at grown women typically observe that a sexist culture has limited its endorsement of competition to men—and then go on to urge women to correct this imbalance by becoming as competitive as possible. This is the gist, for example, of a book called
The Femininity Game,
written by Thomas Boslooper and Marcia Hayes. In another article, a psychiatrist says this:

 

We haven't integrated rivalry into the development of women. It's only been worked out for boys. I was at a swimming pool the other day, and two little boys were racing to the other end of the pool. When one of the boys lost, his father said, “Mikey, listen, this is why you lost: You didn't start off soon enough.” But the mother said, “Listen, Michael, it's just a game.” You see what I mean? I think a lot of women are still not comfortable with competition.
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Notice, first, that the mother's comment is assumed to reflect discomfort rather than principled opposition to competition or a simple sense of perspective about the importance of games. Second, the speaker not only assumes that this discomfort is problematic—something to be gotten over—but makes no effort to defend her assumption; it is so obvious as to require no support.

The pro-competition line has been winning adherents, changing the way both sexes think about women. Not only has it become the dominant viewpoint on the issue in the United States, but it has succeeded in reframing the controversy. There are now only two positions: either you agree that competition for women is desirable and long overdue or you are part of a patriarchal structure that believes only men have a right to be successful. This kind of rhetoric, combined with a legitimate impatience with sex-based discrimination, has led women to readjust not only their behavior but their cognitive and emotional response to the idea of competing.

Now it may be argued that women in competitive cultures have always competed—for men, for the status of being most attractive, and so on.
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What is new is the sheer intensity of the competitive drive, the absence of shame or hesitation, the fact that women are now competing with men, and the shift to the public arena (notably, the marketplace). Consider some examples of the last. A recent advertisement for
Fortune
magazine, which bore the legend, “Every success story starts with a kid who hated to lose,” featured a photograph of an unhappy little
girl
in a baseball uniform. Pro-competition magazines for businesswomen, like
Savvy
and
Working Woman,
are prospering. Women increasingly are “modeling themselves after the hard-driving men who have preceded them on the fast track . . . with single-mindedness that can disrupt families and friendships,” according to an article that profiles investment banker Karen Valenstein.
²³
(Valenstein is quoted as praising her mentor, who “‘taught me the words
gelt
and
shmuck
. I figured out for myself that if you don't have any you are one.'”)
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It may not be terribly important in itself, but fashion in the business world reflects this transformation. Women bought 24 million suits in 1984,
²⁵
suggesting a style of dress that is conservative, asexual, “powerful,” and that can even include shoulder pads. Clearly the idea is to look as much like a man as possible. Again, clothing is merely the outward manifestation of a rush to emulate male, competitive models of success. One writer remarks that “so many of the women I know are driven people, more afraid of failure than success, more afraid of complacency than of competition, more afraid of one another's successes than of the successes of the men in their lives.”
²⁶
The wistful preference for noncompetitive success—such as the sentiment in this chapter's epigraph—now tends to be mocked rather than taken seriously.

Precisely the same thing is happening in sports, and, again, it is difficult to find a single voice raised in dissent. “Whether they change reluctantly or enthusiastically,” one observer reports, “women's athletic programs look more like men's athletic programs every year. . . . Excelling at the highest levels of competition is emerging as the first commandment of women's sports.”
²⁷
In March 1985,
Ms
. magazine featured a musclebound female body builder on its cover; several months later, editor Gloria Steinem interviewed another body builder—this one boasting a physique that seemed literally indistinguishable from that of a male body builder.

The presentation of women in cinema is another good index of the cultural conversion. Indisputably, females still appear as little more than window dressing in many contemporary movies—a sidekick to comfort the hero or cheer him on or be rescued by him, someone to be ogled or seduced. But to the extent there has been a departure from this sexist tradition, it has chiefly been to feature women in the same dismal roles that men have hitherto occupied. In 1968,
Funny Girl
depicted a love story in which Barbra Streisand as Fanny Brice clowned and swooned, allowing Omar Sharif to chuckle at her antics and indulge her girlish whims. She was a girl who won her man. Fifteen years later, in
Yentl,
Streisand played a girl who
became
a man. This is a literalization of what was beginning to happen in American film by the early 1980s. In
Flashdance
and
Heart Like a Wheel,
for example, women overcome considerable obstacles to win, enthusiastically embracing a competitive dream, no matter what the cost. They derive their fulfillment from triumphing over others, becoming, in effect, men with higher voices. In
Heart Like a Wheel,
the heroine's private life is in a shambles by the time she brings home the trophy as a victorious race car driver. Hearts don't win, so they have to be transformed into wheels. The story has been told a thousand times before, of course, only with men at the controls. We are supposed to cheer the woman who insists that it's her turn to drive.

In real life, the conversion to competitiveness can, at the risk of some oversimplification, be broken down into three stages. At the beginning, a woman resists the whole enterprise of competition. In the second stage, she competes, but with serious misgivings: “I had no choice,” she might apologize to someone she has stepped on. Finally, her feelings and beliefs catch up to her behavior. She internalizes the competitive values, stops feeling conflicted about what she is doing, and rids herself of guilt. This last stage is precisely what women are urged to reach. Workshops and seminars, books and articles, therapy sessions and informal support groups, all encourage women to compete without reserve. Moreover, these exhortations often use language such as “Accept your own competitiveness!” in order to disguise the conversion as self-discovery.

There has always been opposition to this model, but it seems lately to have been drowned out by the pro-competition clamor until only a few lonely voices of protest are audible. I want to add my own in support of the dissident position. This perspective does not deny the reality of sexism; it asserts that becoming competitive is a spurious and unhelpful response to it. It resists the pseudofeminist posture—I think this blunt label is warranted—which seeks the liberation of women through the imitation of men. It does not object to androgyny in the name of
la différence
but instead to the particular male values, such as competition, that women are being encouraged to adopt. It rejects the implicit motto of pseudofeminism: If you can't join them, beat them.

A commitment to relationship, an other-regarding posture that places special emphasis on the connections between people, traditionally has been a signal feature of women's worldview. In the choice between competition and relationship—and it
is
a choice, as I tried to show in chapter 6—women have affirmed the latter.
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Carol Gilligan's 1982 book,
In a Different Voice,
represents one of the most lucid descriptions (and, if one reads between the lines, defenses) of this orientation. She calls it the “feminine voice,” noting that it is predominantly found among women but is not necessarily beyond the reach of men. Let me offer three examples of how this concern with relationship plays itself out and how it usually has been regarded.

The first case is the central focus of Gilligan's book: moral development. Some theorists have pronounced women less sophisticated in their ethical thinking, by which they mean that women are less likely to resolve dilemmas in accordance with abstract notions of rights and duties. Women have tended to think in terms of the obligations that flow from a sensitivity to our interdependence. While girls approach moral problems by wondering how to avoid hurting people, boys more often see the whole enterprise as “sort of like a math problem with humans,” in the words of one eleven-year-old subject.
²⁹
Gilligan's point is that the allegedly universal standards of moral development, according to which women have been found wanting, are actually based on an implicitly male-oriented model. Rather than trying to conform to it, perhaps women and men alike should consider the value of an ethical orientation enunciated in the feminine voice. In Gilligan's words:

 

When one begins with the study of women and derives developmental constructs from their lives, the outline of a moral conception different from that described by Freud, Piaget, or Kohlberg begins to emerge and informs a different description of development. In this conception, the moral problem arises from conflicting responsibilities rather than from competing rights and requires for its resolution a mode of thinking that is contextual and narrative rather than formal and abstract. This conception of morality as concerned with the activity of care centers moral development around the understanding of responsibility and relationships, just as the conception of morality as fairness ties moral development to the understanding of rights and rules.
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To take a second example of these divergent approaches, Piaget was among several investigators who observed that when girls who are playing a game come to a disagreement about the rules, they often will start over or switch to another game. This has usually been interpreted as a failing—an indication that girls are not learning negotiation skills or are threatened by conflict. But the same reality can be understood in another way. Perhaps girls cherish their friendships and do not wish to risk them for the sake of continuing a game or learning legalistic skills. Perhaps the female priority system ranks relationship ahead of rules and perhaps this appears skewed only when viewed from a male point of reference.