The deeply feminine urge to reframe nuanced situations as one-sided insecurities
This is something I've observed a few times, but haven't really seen anyone discuss. I know it's a controversial topic, (and a controversial framing) but I don't mean it to be inflammatory. I also don't really have any readers, so hopefully that helps as well. It's also just something I'm a bit confused by.
One day when I was in my twenties I was walking down the street with a platonic female friend. She had spotted a couple walking on the other side of the street, and sort of muttered to herself something like "wow, she's so brave." I didn't know what she might be referring to. I didn't see anything remarkable about the couple, so I asked what she meant. My friend (perhaps with a bit of pity) went on to explain that "a lot of women wouldn't be confident enough to be seem dating a man who was shorter than her." I hadn't particularly noticed this myself, but it was true. She was noticeably taller than her date.
That brief interaction made a lasting impression on me. (As a brief aside, imagine how well the inverse would go over: "Wow, he's so brave." "What do you mean?" "Well, not every man is confident enough to be seen dating a fat girl.") Confidence self-evidently had nothing to do with it. Women just usually aren't attracted to short men. You can like or dislike this fact but it doesn't change a thing about it. In a world with no social judgement, it's not as if women would finally be freed from the evils of society to pursue the short men they've been dreaming of. Women are not attracted to short men, and this is a compatibility problem (ie, who women are attracted to) reframed as a confidence problem. (ie, is a woman brave enough to do something that most women would find unappealing?)
I don't want to make too much of this point, but this is ultimately what I find so confusing. Why would you need to disguise the more obvious explanation? What benefit does it bring? You could potentially argue that prevents a woman from needing to utter a more uncomfortable social truth. And this is true, but this sort of "bravery-smuggling" seems to happen in cases where this doesn't really fit this mold.
One such case would be would be the all-too-common girl who keeps dating assholes or losers. I feel like most people have known someone like this. A common explanation I've heard from women is that such a girl merely "lacks the confidence" to try to date a higher-quality man. I'm skeptical here as well. Usually such women have opportunities for higher quality (or at least less rude or less violent) men and simply don't find these men attractive. It's not as if they couldn't date someone who has their life together. It's just that these men just don't produce that spark of attraction. This feels correct: when my confidence is shot I don't suddenly become attracted to ugly women.
I suppose you could make the argument that the "bravery-smuggling" in this case also prevents the girl in question from needing to utter an uncomfortable truth. But everything else about the scenario is really different from prior. In the first scenario bravery-smuggling girl is potential prevented from needing to admit that she's not attracted to short men. In the second scenario, the bravery-smuggling girl doesn't need to protect herself at all. She's not even necessarily protecting the girl she's talking about. She's swapping one bad description (she's only attracted to assholes and losers) for another bad description. (she totally lacks confidence and thinks she's only as good as assholes and losers) If you were really just disguising your intent here, it's not obvious why you would always use "confidence" as the disguise.
The other big example that comes to mind is when a man is dating a woman who is probably about to slip out of his grasp; she makes more money than him, or perhaps she has a new male friend he "doesn't need to worry about." This too gets portrayed as a confidence problem. He's "not confident enough to date a woman who makes more than him." Or, "he's not confident enough to let her hang around with attractive men."
This one at least feels partially true. It would be correct to observe that a man in that situation may not feel very confident. But, I still think this misses the point. His lack of confidence is an accurate reflection of reality. Women who spend time with attractive men are often on their way out of a relationship. Women who make more money than men are much more likely to file for divorce or break up. In other words, his lack of confidence is not the problem at hand, it's an accurate reflection of the problem at hand. The problem at hand is probably closer to the first scenario: the woman is not attracted to the man any longer, and he is able to detect this. His lack of confidence reflects the facts, not the other way around.
The last example I can think of is kind of stupid, but it feels a bit relevant all the same. I had opened Youtube in a fresh browser and so I just saw the terrible "default Youtube" feed with all its evil and abomination. There was some Short, which I didn't watch, but it was something incoherent about a man's false confidence when approaching a woman. The framing of the video title gives the impression that the man completely failed the approach, and he did so because he lacked confidence. Youtube shorts are obviously stupid, but they also seem to aim at our most basic instincts; outrage, lust, humor, etc. It felt like I had seen the stupid id version (ie, the Freudian id) of the false confidence arguments I've noted here. Why would a girl turn down the attractive man in the video? Because she knows in her gut that his confidence is false. He acts confident, but is probably a weak loser. That's really what the video is trying to portray: that a woman could easily see through his false confidence. (whether or not there was any true lack of confidence seems to be beside the point)
I also don't know what to make of this, except that it seems to reflect some female-specific bias that I don't really understand. I don't why it would feel correct to mislabel a compatibility problem as a confidence problem. The only other piece of the puzzle I can think of seems to be related to general traits of female attraction. Men can probably be rightly said to be superficial. A few kinder women have said that "men are visual." We know what this means, and I can understand in principle why that would be frustrating for a woman. Women do care about physical attractiveness. They care about height. But they also care a lot about a man's personality.
This often gets portrayed as the more mature or even more beneficent option. Caring about who someone is "deep down" rather than their superficial appearance. But in practice that's not really how I see it play out. The reality is that for a man his attractiveness often feels like it's on a precipice. A woman sees you confident in one scenario and she's attracted to you. She meets you in another context, and now she's not attracted to you. Or, you just have a bad day, you show weakness, and she's not attracted to you any longer. This is probably putting it a bit too strongly, but only slightly. A mature woman understand how to gauge someone intelligently, and understands that a single interaction cannot paint the full picture. (and further, that even the best have their ups and downs.) But all that said, a man's attractiveness seems only to be as static as his day-to-day performance. If he has a moment of weakness, the attractiveness is all out the window. Some men have been broken up with merely for crying in front of their girlfriends. The man didn't change who he was; he just showed weakness. I don't want to bemoan that too much. I'm not sure that this is any worse than what men put women through. It just seems to be less often discussed. The crucial bit here is not that women are disgusted by male weakness. The crucial bit is that a man must always be on guard for his own weakness. A woman who is attracted to you on Monday might be disgusted with you by Friday.
I do think that is must be part of the puzzle, though. I think women are looking to uncover false confidence. I think there are some pretty obvious reasons from an evolutionary psychology standpoint why they would want to do so. (and they're obvious enough that I don't really need to go into them here) So at least it feels like there could be some sort of heuristic for spotting false confidence that women are on the lookup for. I don't know if this is really correct. At some level, the general fact of evolutionary psychology must be true. However, it's also far too easy to conjure up some plausible-sounding bullshit when casually theorizing about evolutionary psychology. So I want to offer that caveat. I might have the explanation all wrong, but I'm more confident in the initial observation.