In this photograph I'm with my Dad and though 12 years old I'm getting to be almost as tall as him. This snap was taken no doubt as a result of my Mother instructing my Father to get his camera out so someone could capture how smart she's badgered me into dressing. This level of control over my outward appearance would diminish over the ensuing teenage years. Yet here I am, on the cusp of that crucial period in 1969, with this nervous self-conscious aura surrounding me. The side parting, the floppy fringe that would often grow long enough to partially obscure me from view, my hands anxiously gripping onto each other. A boy/man, insecure about who he is or what he will become. As puberty and sexual orientation finally hits, a secretive side develops, something to really focus the status anxiety upon.
Teenage years, whatever the gender orientation, are for exploration and self-discovery in a succession of short lived but all consuming enthusiasms. Men tend to define themselves through the things that they do in preference to the more opaque mystery of who they are, and believe personal success in real life comes through focused single minded activity. I wondered at the time where any of my experimental ventures might lead -
'is this who I'll become, or is it this. or this, or this? The possibilities and prospects were, imaginatively at least, wide open. Yet I remember affecting a vague indifference about what my ambitions were, to disguise the conflicted views I held over what my actual desires were. The future was left as just this dreamy bubble, with a fear filled crust of the unknown forming around it. This forged psychological barriers and all variety of confidence sapping monsters to rise up into my mind. These sort of things you can spend years trying to expunge.
I was never the all conquering self-confident Alpha Male. But at that age I admired such men, or was it lusted after? Well, it was just the Six Million Dollar Man actually. I desperately wanted to attain whatever it was he was portrayed as having - the strength, the stubble, the pumped up hairy chest, the whole assertive swagger and style of him. What I didn't know then was that Alpha Males have developed a way of sounding confident, to always know the best thing to do, to appear as the fount of all truth. Whilst in reality the substance to back it up could be somewhat lacking. It takes a while for you to realise that these men are just confidence tricksters, with an 'I take no bullshit' persona , a thuggish quality, that keeps everyone else in a position of awe. Assertive arrogance gets easily mistaken for self-confidence.The Six Million Dollar Man was not a full or real man. He was part cyborg, cold and emotionally removed which its worth noting is what enables him to always know whats best to do.
Confidence and self esteem are acquired traits, unlikely to be an expression of your gene legacy. No one pops out of their Mother confident, it's more usual for it to be nurtured in you by them. Who your parents are, your upbringing, wealth, class expectations, public or private education, has an awful lot to do with it. Given the right circumstances its easier to build self-confidence. You may not have the required talent and skills for a job, but you're able to talk as if you have. To charm a picture of your potential into the eyes of others. My parents were both kind, honest, straight forward people though they didn't have huge amounts of social self- confidence to pass on, keeping what ambitions they had to the smaller scale and manageable. All dreams were heavily tempered by the practicalities of what was thought to be 'realistic'. What my teenage self understood was that as a man I would be measured according to my level of self-confidence, irrespective of whether that was faked or not. This is the male confidence trick. Another bit of the presentational armour men seem required to wear.
Multi-millionaires have found a way to feel potent as a man through business success. Their wives, when they are on show, appear on the surface at least to tolerate being paraded as arm candy. However, these sort of men are not renowned for being gentlemen of great moral integrity or exemplary role models for future generations of men to emulate. They often get what they want by being willing to ride roughshod over anything and anyone that stands in their way, whether that's trading regulations, governments, employee well being, climate change, moral qualms or adherence to the truth. Your Elon Musk, Mike Ashley, Rupert Murdoch, Donald Trump, Phillip Greene, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, are all successful men behaving badly, whose indiscretions, missteps and violations are too readily treated as just 'so inimitably them.' These 'confidence trickster men' develop an erroneous sense of their own superiority that appears to put them beyond effective constraint or censure. The big dosh of big dickheads trashing all attempts to restrain them.
The egoic impulses to be competitive, exert power, be ambitious and accumulate huge wealth, are presented as the inevitable outcome for men who possess self-assertive confidence. Research has indicated that successful directors of multinational companies often share dominant psychological traits with those of a psychopath. Male behaviour in general and hence success in business could then be, at least in part, driven by the absence or weakness of perceived limits on behaviour. Men often contain within themselves the unfortunate conjunction of a narrow emotional range of expression with a moral compass that is fragile, faulty or broken. This enfeebled ability to recognise and respect moral boundaries finds expression all the way down the line of male hierarchy via masculine toxic behaviour, the many oppressions, violations and rapes of people and places, at all levels and classes of society The paramount need for self-assertion, often couched in terms of their free will or free speech, over respect for other people, civilised society, collective needs and responsibilities. This manifests even in 'the small rebellions of little men', those minor infringements of civil and social norms that are transformed into these totemic expressions of liberty, that are in reality a desperate need for power over an existentially powerless situation. Its like sticking two fingers up to the wind.
I didn't understand then how anyone became self-confident. You certainly couldn't buy it mail order. I learnt slowly through life, through experimentation, my own mistaken notions, the determination to not fail as a man and the suffering that followed when I felt I had. Pain acting as a harsh truth teacher. I think I've got a better grasp now on what causes a more authentic self-confidence to develop - mainly it comes down to a genuine self-knowledge - knowing what your values are and living by them, what provides purpose and meaning for you, doing the things you love doing, caring for the welfare others as well as your own, keeping an honest and balanced appreciation of what you are good and not good at. the relative strengths and weaknesses of the person you have become - and finally just being fine with all of that. These form a securer foundations for who you are. Most of these are learnt from reflecting and learning from your life experience. What makes a man a man is never about how confidently you wave your big dick around, that serves only to demonstrate how unformed and infantile your sense of yourself is. Self assertion is a lot lot subtler than that.
Things changed in me overtime, but some aspects stubbornly did not. You need to acknowledge that this shadow side exists too, without guilt and with a degree of humility. To resist punishing yourself for the intransigence of perceived character flaws. Living in the shadow of comparisons with other men can be a painful state. Trying to match up to the fake masculine ideal and its prevailing culture of manhood, that this was what you should to be like, but are not, can leave you feeling as though you are constantly failing. Once I could begin to drop these sort of pernicious ideas it was something of a relief, because a large amount of the angst left with them. I could discover a way to relax into my own skin. Become more confident in finding my own way of being a man. Based on an individually authentic and more truthful form of self-confidence.
