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The Masculine Dilemma
What to do when you’ve built your identity on being needed?
The impetus for this article was yet another man leveling the charge of “arrogance” at me. This happens in my life with startling regularity.
As an entrepreneur, doctor, and confident woman, I get a lot of epithets tossed my way: “overeducated,” “unfeeling,” “self-aggrandizing,” “delusional,” etc, but within this swirl of pejoratives, “arrogant” is by far the most popular indictment.
I became curious about this phenomenon. As a researcher, I naturally like to look for trends, and when I catalogued the instances (and there were many), two trends stood out in particular:
- I have only ever been accused of arrogance by men. No woman, ever, has called me arrogant despite the fact that I am no less ambitious, outspoken, or self-assured with women than with men.
- It’s almost always happened when I’ve refused some sort of “help” that the man was offering.
Given the fact that I have raked myself over the coals for years about others’ opinions of me, mined every interaction for information on my own ego and state of being, relentlessly pursued self-growth, and on many occasions taken full responsibility for the feelings, actions, and fears of others, I am very comfortable at this point accepting that charges like “arrogance” say…
