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.. .. Self-deprecating humor is acceptable as feminine, of course, as we've already seen. That making fun of yourself -- or, by extension, other women -- is okay comes across clearly to young women.  Penny Marshall claims that she would "make fun of myself before anybody else could. I had braces and my hair in a ponytail -- real attractive... So I would always hit before anyone could hit me. "Self-defacing humor is my forte." The very word-choice of "self-defacing" is interesting here, since by using a comic mask, Marshall seems to have found a way early in life to put on a new face.  Many funny women found out in childhood or early adolescence that self-deprecating humor can draw fire. ... So we grow up learning that we can defuse a situation by turning ourselves into self-effacing diversions, taking a little bit out of ourselves in order to make others happy. Wendy Wasserstein makes a distinction between being funny and being pleasing. "There's a line about Janie in 'Isn't It Romantic?' that says, 'That's the thing about Janie, she's not threatening to anybody. That's her gift.'" ///

Our humor, finally, is really about it being okay to answer back.  When Lizz Winstead replies to the question "Why aren't you married?" with the retort "I think, therefore I'm single," we want to applaud.  In response to Pat Buchanan's speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention, in which women's reproductive rights were considered the handmaidens of witchcraft, Molly Ivins suggested that we could not condemn Buchanan's speech because, after all, "it probably sounded better in the original German." Women's humor is not for the faint-hearted or the easily shocked. But then again, neither is waking up in the morning. Nobody said life would be easy. By seeing the ironies and absurdities of the world around us, we can lighten up and be less weighed down -- humor permits perspective, and perspective is essential for change. There is something clarifying, redemptive and vital about using humor. So make some trouble and laugh out loud. Gina Barreca from her article What's So Funny? Real stories, real laughter,  real women - Ms. Magazine summer 2004 her site Untamed and Unabashed: Books by Regina Barreca  her books include : I'm with Stupid : One Man.  One Woman. 10,000 Years of Misunderstanding  Between the Sexes Cleared Right Up

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.. .. Catwoman is sort of neither hero nor villain, she's an anti-hero and she's a very complex character.  So, I thought, I loved Batman, I loved Spider-Man, I love all these characters, but Catwoman is really different from any other one. ...  I feel like she is the most humanistic, the most relatable of these characters.  I think also she represents something really fascinating about women, that's very unique to women, that kind of pull and tug, you know, between "Am I a good girl, am I a bad girl? Do I fulfill society's expectations, or do I follow my own desires?"  You know, I think women struggle with it in their own way. Denise Di Novi - producer of Catwoman  IGN FilmForce interview July 02, 2004

.. .. "Every time I put on that suit I felt a sense of surreal power," says Halle Berry of her sexy leather costume.  "People addressed me differently. They stayed a foot or two further away than normal. I was very unpredictable -- they didn't know whether I was going to kiss 'em or kill 'em, smack 'em or hug 'em." "She's not as big or as broad as the great comic book versions of Catwoman," says Halle of the more reality-based update, "but she's more representative of a modern woman today if we could evolve and be who we really would like to be." ETonline.com interview 2004/07/14

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.. .. The whip will be front and center in this summer's release of "Catwoman" starring Halle Berry. ... So what's the appeal? The whip is a phallic symbol and fetish, which is "a story masquerading as an object," says Valerie Steele. "This fantasy of the woman as being fierce dominant-aggressive is very, very common among men." So is Halle Berry as a bullwhip-cracking Catwoman the objectified pawn of perverted male fantasy?  It depends on context, according to scholar Steele and stage combatant [Judi] Lewis Ockler. Does the character use the whip to advance her career? Fight evil? Build self-esteem? Or gratuitously entertain audiences with surface sex appeal?  "If it makes the actress look strong and gives her a better role, then cool," says Lewis Ockler. It's not necessarily "bad for women" if men find that erotic, says Steele.

"Today many young women who are wearing fiercely sexy-looking clothes feel that, metaphorically speaking, they're 'wielding the whip' because they have what men want," she says. "Like Catwoman, they're sexually empowered and empowered in a lot of other ways." // That's the theoretical side. Literal whip-cracking gives another perspective. Thank goodness I didn't know it was a phallic symbol before the [Lady Cavaliers] workshop, though, or I might have felt embarrassed enjoying myself so much.  It wasn't size that mattered, but the noise -- a crisp smack when you snap the thong just right, like when the ball hits your tennis racket's "sweet spot" for the perfect shot.  The satisfaction I felt when the energy surged through the air and my body made me want to do it again and again.     ~ ~ [The workshop is run by the Lady Cavaliers, a not-for-profit action theater company created to promote a stronger female image through the art of stage combat] from article Taking Back the Whip - by Jessica Seigel Ms. Magazine summer 2004 ....Valerie Steele. Fetish: Fashion, Sex & Power

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For a long time I was almost ashamed of being an actress. I felt like it was a shallow occupation.  Winona Ryder  ... [imdb.com bio]

 

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I rushed out of the projection room, ran home and cried for hours. I was really ashamed of myself. It was so awful...  Myrna Loy  (1905-1993) - on her screen test for the film Cobra (1923)   [imdb.com bio] related book Mick Lasalle. Complicated Women : Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood

 
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.. .. A night class at UCLA, taught by science-fiction master Theodore Sturgeon, became a turning point in [Octavia E.] Butler's life as a writer and a person.  She was the only black student and sat there as the professor quizzed students about books they had read and they expounded at length about books that Butler had never heard of, let alone read. Her mind boiled over with questions as she made her way over the long walk back to her bus stop: How could they be so well-read? When would she ever read all those books? How could she ever catch up? But the answer to the questions of that troubling night has served her well throughout her career. "I had to talk to myself," she recalls, "and say, 'This is who you are. You are not going to change into anybody else and you're not going to spend your life trying to prove you're human. You've got to work with what you've got and do the best you can with it.'

.. .. "I care what goes out with my name on it and I don't feel I have anything to prove to anybody else." //// Butler was accorded a singular honor in 1995 when the MacArthur Foundation in Chicago tabbed her as one of its national fellows.. although the blunt-spoken author would just as soon not be referred to as a recipient of a MacArthur "genius grant," the fellowships' more common name. "People may call these 'genius grants,' but nobody made me take an IQ test before I got mine," Butler says. "I knew I'm no genius." from article Pioneering sci-fi writer Octavia Butler has  overcome many barriers and hardships,  by John Marshall, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Feb 16, 2004 ....above photo from cover of her book Kindred

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By self-esteem I mean the experience of being competent to cope with the basic challenges of life and of being worthy of happiness.  This means trust in your ability to think, learn, make appropriate decisions, and respond effectively to new conditions.  It also means confidence in your right to experience success and personal fulfillment -- the conviction that happiness is appropriate to you.  Self-esteem pertains to an experience of efficacy. This entails confidence in your mind at a very deep level.  Not the confidence of knowing you can perform this or that task appropriately.

.. .. Not confidence in how much you may know about any particular subject. Bur rather, trust in the processes by which you reason, understand, learn, choose, decide, and regulate action. --....Nathaniel Branden, PhD. Self Esteem at Work photo and excerpt from nathanielbranden.net

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Does Self-esteem mean feeling good about yourself? Self-esteem is an experience. It is a particular way of experiencing the self.  It is a good deal more than a mere feeling. It involves emotional, evaluative, and cognitive components.  It also entails certain action dispositions: to move toward life rather than away from it; to move toward consciousness rather than away from it; to treat facts with respect rather than denial; to operate self-responsibly rather than the opposite.  Self-esteem is the disposition to experience oneself as being competent to cope with the basic challnges of life and of being worthy of happiness.  It is confidence in the efficacy of our mind, in our ability to think.

By extension, it is confidence in our ability to learn, to make appropriate choices and decisions, and respond effectively to change.  It is also the experience that success, achievement, fulfillment, happiness, are right and natural for us.  Self-esteem is not the euphoria of buoyancy that may be temporarily induced by a drug, a compliment, or a love affair.  It is not an illusion or hallucination. Lots of things (some of them quite dubious) can make us "feel good" - for a while.  If self-esteem is not grounded in reality, if it is not built over time through the appropriate operation of mind, for example, through operating consciously, self-responsibly, and with integrity - it is not self-esteem. from article : Answering Misconceptions  About Self-Esteem - by Nathaniel Branden, PhD from National Association for Self-Esteem site

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Elton John: Do you have self-doubt, like everybody does? Halfway through work on an album I'll come home and play a song and I'll go, "Oh, my God, it's horrible. I've got to scrap it and start again." Do you ever go through that? Jenny Saville: Yeah, I get to the point when I can't look at any other contemporary art; that's the biggest thing. Because if I look at anything else, it gives me other options; I think I can't have any other options this is it, this is where I'm at. I do find at that moment I can look at old art because it gives me a sort of linkage to tradition. [Interview, Oct 2003] quotes, images of Jenny Saville' painting and photography on visual arts: page 2

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If we were to think of each of these various unusual mental capacities (e.g. photographic memory, lightning mathematical calculation, the ability to visualize clearly, speed reading, quick spatial pattern recognition, ease in learning languages, metaphorical thought and speech) as "dots" and the lack of them as "spaces," we would see very different patterns in different individuals, even if IQ scores seemed to indicate great similarity. Because of these varied patterns each highly gifted individual is likely to feel very different from other highly gifted individuals and this sense of difference is likely to create a sense of inequality. from article: Self-Knowledge, Self-Esteem and the Gifted Adult by Stephanie S. Tolan

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We can't all come up with the theory of relativity... the acceptance of that reality is incredibly important.. the end of hating myself for not being that. I can say, Hey man, I'm not going to understand parallel universes... It's incredibly disappointing... but once you get over that, it can be incredibly freeing... Letting go of this thing I've had for 28 years... "Golden Child, going to succeed, brilliant future."  Martha Plimpton   ... [Surface mag., no.20, 1999]

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.. .. What really confused matters was that I excelled, with great ease, at many different talents and sports. ... attended Julliard School of Music as a very gifted and promising student and received top scholastic and communication honors in college. And yet, I failed at what I consider to be an extremely important mission in many women's lives. My ablility to conceive children was unsucessful. My only marriage fell apart... I started getting bored with always being emotionally depressed about my current lifestyle.

My negative self-value began to change after I read a part of Patricia Cleghorn's book, "The Secrets of Self-Esteem" entitled, "You deserve to be happy."  It says, "You are not here to suffer. Yet sometimes you may notice that when you're happy and contented at least for some continous period of time you find yourself wondering if it's too good to be true."(p. 10) There's a part of Cam that wants people to sympathize with her. Another side of her says, "Hey, everybody, I'm really suffering from emotional wounds. Maybe a 12-step program is the only sure thing that will cure me!"  Then my inner voice said, "Cam, only you and no one else are responsible for your self-improvement and esteem." I felt rather frightened by hearing that outburst. However, it was my general belief that when possible, try it. It might actually make sense and be useful! from article Self Esteem: Why Am I? by Camille Pierce

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 "Many of us perpetuate negative self-talk about talents that we don't accept.
Self-criticism can seriously injure potential talent that wants to be expressed...
Fortunately, talent waits patiently behind our fear and self-doubt."

*book: **Lucia Capacchione. Putting Your Talent to Work

related book: Living With Feeling: The Art of Emotional Expression - by Lucia Capacchione
available from  Now Get Creative.Com
 
 

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"Only the shallow know themselves."****Oscar Wilde

 

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[Did you have problems with low self-esteem when you were younger?] Mya: "Yeah, definitely. In middle school, when adolescence hit, I was teased all the time. I became really quiet and shy because I didn't know how else to respond, and then I got teased for that. Those are the experiences that developed my creativity."  [from drDrew.com interview]

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Changing how we feel about ourselves is complicated, explains William Swann, Ph.D., of the University of Texas-Austin. "Self-esteem is based on two components: first, our sense of how likable and lovable we are, and second, our sense of how competent we are" at our jobs and at other activities that demand talent and skill. On those scores, we've been hearing from other people -- parents, teachers, bosses, siblings, friends, romantic partners -- all our lives, and their opinions of us continue to reinforce our notions of ourselves, good or bad. ... If you find yourself in bad relationships where your negative self-view is getting reinforced, then either change the way those people treat you by being more assertive, or change who you interact with. <<  from article: Self-Help: Shattering the Myths** ***book: **William Swann, PhD.  Self-Traps : The Elusive Quest for Higher Self-Esteem

from book: Frances Borzello. Seeing Ourselves :  Women's Self-Portraits

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Stephen King goes on to admit [in his book On Writing]: "I have spent a good many years since -- too many, I think -- being ashamed about what I write.  "I think I was forty before I realized that almost every writer of fiction and poetry who has ever published a line has been accused of wasting his or her God-given talent. If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that's all." from article:Shame  by Douglas Eby

 

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"The greatest evil that can befall someone is that they should come to think ill of themself," wrote Goethe. While he may have been defying certain religious beliefs, he was acknowledging a profound truth about human nature.  The greatest barrier to achievement and success is not lack of talent or ability but, rather, the fact that achievement and success, above a certain level, are outside our self-concept, our image of who we are and what is appropriate to us. *from book: *Nathaniel Branden, PhD. Honoring the Self : The Psychology of Confidence and Respect  [Goethe quote paraphrased from original in book]

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"The problem with me, I've decided, is that I have no charisma, [but] I don't like charismatic people. Only healthy people are charismatic. I like [messed up] people who can't even carry a conversation." Aimee Mann - at an Amnesty International benefit concert last week. [LA Times, Aug. 27, 2002] book: Music from the Motion Picture Magnolia - Songs by Aimee Mann

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Sports makes me feel confident in a way I never dreamed of before. The thrill of raising my bow to the wind. The intense focus of setting my sight on my target and knowing I'm going to hit it. This feeling of excitement and accomplishment is something everyone should experience. ... I spent half my life without that feeling. As a tall, gangly kid, no one ever told me how sports would change my life. It wasn't until "A League of Their Own" that I realized I had a natural, but un-tapped athletic talent inside me.  That realization is why I'm dedicated to making sure that every girl has the opportunity and encouragement to get in touch with her sports spirit. Geena Davis - image and quotes from Women's Sports Foundation site

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"You're just a quiet creep -- you're second class. You're just worthless. You're not fit to be around people. You should be quiet and just stay in the background. What makes you think you're different? You're just a crazy, scummy person." from a voice therapy session -- in which destructive thoughts or voices are brought to the surface "so that people can challenge them and change the behaviors that are regulated by them." ---from book:--- Robert W. Firestone, Ph.D. et al. Conquer Your Critical Inner Voice

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*related page:*

Shame** Shame is connected with one's identity and sense of acceptance by others, and can disrupt and destabilize esteem and confidence in abilities, leading to a self-diminishing judgment: "If I feel this bad about myself, I must really be inferior."

 
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"I think it's been helpful to me, being who I am, to have moved at things the way I have. I think that if things [like stardom] came upon me too fast -- I think I've needed to take my time. I think there're things about me that are still too delicate for an extreme kind of thing like that.  I'd like to just work my way to who I am, as opposed to just suddenly have a BIG IDEA OF WHO I AM", he says, getting louder for emphasis. "It's like NOW THERE"S THIS PERSON invented in this public way."  Will Patton******[Associated Press, 04-03-97 - posted on willpatton.net]

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I had always hoped to be a playwright or director, never an actress. Knowing absolutely nothing about it, I convinced myself that an actor was merely the medium through which others - more intelligent and creative - expressed their ideas.  I was contemptuous of acting, and when I found myself not only an actress but a successful one, I was contemptuous of myself. I don't feel that way anymore.  Judy Holliday    [1921-65]    undated quote from site: The Judy Holliday Resource Center related book: Hurrell's Hollywood Portraits

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Refuse to allow yourself to have low expectations about what you're capable of creating.
As Michelangelo suggested, the greater danger is not that your hopes are too high and you fail
to reach them; it's that they're too low and you do.

*from book: **10 Secrets for Success and Inner Peace by Wayne Dyer
 

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Men have no problem calling themselves and their men friends Geniuses, whether they are or not. Hence Henry Kissinger is a Genius and Madeleine Albright is just a "Really Good Secretary of State."  Wolfgang Puck is a Genius and Julia Child is just "A Really Good Cook." Garth Brooks is a Genius and Dolly Parton is just "A singer with enormous tits." And so, The Grrl Genius Club was formed, so that women everywhere would learn to over-hype themselves the way the guys do.**** Cathryn Michon -  from her site: Grrlgenius.com ---The Grrl Genius Guide to Life:  *****A 12 Step Program on How to Become a Grrl Genius, According to Me! -  by Cathryn Michon [HarperCollins 2001]

 

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There are basically two kinds of self-esteem problems: situational and characterological. Low self-esteem that is situational tends to show up only in specific areas. For example, a person might have confidence in himself as a parent, a conversationalist, and a sexual partner, but expect to fail in work situations.  Someone else might feel socially inept, but see herself as a strong and capable professional. Low self-esteem that is characterological usually had roots in early experiences of abuse or abandoment. The sense of "wrongness" in this case is more global and tends to affect many areas of life.  Situational low self-esteem is a problem ideally suited for cognitive restructuring techniques... confronting cognitive distortions, emphasizing strengths over weaknesses, and developing specific skills for handling mistakes and criticisms. *from book: **Self-Esteem: A Proven Program of Cognitive Techniques for Assessing, Improving, and Maintaining Your Self-Esteem by Matthew McKay, Patrick Fanning  // photo: Michelle Cassou from painting*page 2

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Gifted adults often feel fundamentally different about themselves than others feel about them.

Their potential may not be recognized by others; they may be judged only in terms of their behavior;
they may be elevated in people's eyes to the point where they're not allowed to be human; they
may be disparaged out of envy; or their intensity may be understood as irrational.

from article: Gifted Adults: Their Characteristics and Emotions by Annemarie Roeper,
Advanced Development Journal, Special Edition, 1995
 

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It's amazing how frightened you are when you are filming -- somebody shouts "Action" and you go paralyzed with terror... [interviewer: Funny, you speaking of on-set terror, because the Maggie Smith persona reeks of Olympian self-assurance. But was Michael Caine correct when he once said, "She's supremely unself-confident?] [big laugh] That's very true! But then again, who isn't? How the hell could you be any other way?! You say, "Oh my God, I envy that person because they're so confident," but they're probably not, they're just good at looking like that. ... If you have to act those kind of people, then that's what you do. But it doesn't necessarily mean that's what you're like.  Maggie Smith    [from Premiere mag. interview, April 2002] Maggie Smith plays Deputy Headmistress / Professor Minerva McGonagall  in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

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