Confidence culture is a lie

And a new book aims to show you why. The Tuesday edition of the Goods newsletter is all about internet culture, brought to you by senior reporter Rebecca Jennings. The insidiousness of "just be more confident!" It’s hard to pin down exactly when it happened, but if you paid attention to women’s media in the 2000s and kept paying attention into the next decade, you definitely noticed it. Magazines that devoted their pages to diet tips and celebrity snark suddenly started preaching “empowerment.” Fashion brands that made clothing that only went up to a size 12 wanted you to “love your body” just the way it was. Parenting books wanted you to know that messing up was okay, that as long as you raised resilient, self-assured children, nobody cared about your stretch marks or your glass of wine in front of the TV. Regardless, somewhere along the way — perhaps having to do with a catastrophic financial crisis and the rise of social media — it became imperative for capitalist enterprises to recognize that people were rediscovering a certain kind of feminism, a kind that emphasized self-love and self-care, embraced imperfection, and called on women to advocate for equality. All of this coalesces in what the sociologists Shani Orgad and Rosalind Gill call “confidence culture” in [their book of the same name]( due out January 28. “To be self-confident is the imperative of our time. As gender, racial, and class inequalities deepen, women are increasingly called on to believe in themselves,” reads the first line of the text. It criticizes the individualistic, neoliberal missives from corporations to “just be more confident” — in our bodies, in our relationships, in motherhood, in the workplace, and within humanitarian efforts to support global development — and argues that most of the time, they end up reinforcing the very beliefs they aim to deconstruct. For example: Orgad and Gill describe one “love your body” campaign that features a dozen or so women all dressed similarly against a minimalist background as “an attempt to use and strategically deploy images of minoritized groups (people of color, disabled people, Muslims, queer people) in commercial culture to ‘take diversity into account’ only to empty any particular differences of their meaning and social significance.” I chatted with Orgad and Gill over Zoom, where we discussed the difficulties of critiquing confidence culture without critiquing confidence as a concept, the “girl-powering of international development,” and how the new wave of “anti self-help” is basically just … self-help. When did you begin to see directives for women to “just be more confident!” as a systemic cultural trend? Shani Orgad: We were working across different fields — Rosalind in intimate relationships and body image, I in motherhood and work, and we both had worked in issues of international development — and over the last decade or so, were witnessing very similar imperatives that were particularly addressed to women: to be confident, to believe in themselves, to love themselves. Rosalind Gill: The timing is not accidental, partly in the context of the financial crisis. That was a very significant moment that gave rise to this new common sense. Here in the UK, there was a really strong austerity culture distinctively targeted at women. It was all about women being thrifty and going back to traditional crafts and cultivating these qualities and dispositions that they needed to survive in this tougher, financially strained period. It really intersected with feminism and created a very neoliberal or individualized feminism: putting it on women to turn inward, focus on themselves, and stop thinking that structural barriers are out there and start thinking that they're just something we need to work on. You note throughout the book that what you’re critiquing isn’t confidence itself but the culture around it and “what its fetishization does.” How did you approach marking the difference between criticizing women with confidence and the more insidious confidence culture? Rosalind Gill: For me, the “love your body” advertising and body positivity really resonates. It has a power and I am not ashamed to admit that I cried when those first [Dove adverts]( came out. We were very, very critical of the work that they were doing, while also recognizing that we were doing similar things with our own students. We'd be trying to support our young graduate students and making them feel more confident. We're deeply implicated in it. But we make clear that we're attacking that fetishization and the way that it's become this article of faith, this kind of unquestioned common sense, rather than attacking the idea of confidence per se. In many instances you style “confidence culture” as “confidence cult(ure),” implying that this is more than a culture, it’s a cult. How do you define the confidence cult? Rosalind Gill: It’s like a cult in the way that it's been placed beyond debate: Who could be against confidence? Nobody could possibly argue against it because it's so taken for granted. I think it's good to be suspicious of the things that get placed in that space where they can't be interrogated at all. It was also just a culture in the way that it saturated right across society — it was disseminated so, so widely. We were encountering exactly the same messages, literally word for word, in our respective areas of research. Shani Orgad: The women I spoke to describe it as something that isn’t tangible: When you ask them, “Where did you get these expectations that you should be the confident mother and the full-time worker who's assertive?” They say, “It’s everywhere.” It becomes so unquestioned that it's being internalized into the most intimate sphere, whereby women, often very painfully, judge themselves according to this unattainable expectation. [Continue reading »](  [Learn more about RevenueStripe...]( Clickbait 👀 - [Inside Turning Point](, the extremely cursed incubator for conservative influencers. - The evolution of a [TikTok-generated song](, as told by Sadie Jean and Lil Yachty’s “WYD Now?” - The rise of Puerto Rico’s [“crypto colonizers.”]( - Why [TikTokers rallied]( around a 22-year-old’s application to Juilliard. 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