Over the summer, a recent TikTok trend brought an age-old question to the forefront of my mind: do men have more confidence than women? If so, how can we change this?
The trend that managed to both highlight some inflated egos whilst also restore one’s faith in the chances of a successful emergency landing, showed girls asking the men in their lives if they believed they would be able to land a plane in an emergency with the assistance of the air-traffic control. Almost all the men said they could, with one even saying he could do it without assistance. Very doubtful. In a stark contrast to the testosterone fuelled videos, the comments sections were filled with women in awe of this self-belief, chiming in with their own anecdotes of how they struggle to parallel park, never mind land an Airbus A380.
I don’t think the boundaries of a lack of confidence stop at hypothetical aircraft emergencies either. It is easy to be paranoid and self-conscious about many aspects of life in such a tense age of social media consumption. After most Saturday nights I wake up – usually next to a half-consumed Medium Big Mac, and a Tropicana for balance – to a host of unflattering pictures my friends have tagged me in on Instagram. My immediate response is to un-tag myself from them all, bar the possible one that caught me in a good light.
I would love to have the kind of natural conviction to not dread what others, or even I myself after a few too many vodka-cokes, posted online the night before. I wish I had this same conviction when going on a bi-monthly trip to the ever-conspicuous Mayfair club scene, where I am forced to wear a pair of heels, even though I feel like the Big Friendly Giant when I become 5’10 and suddenly cannot rely on being shorter than all the men in there. Again, it’d be even nicer to have more self-assurance whilst I’m waiting for my Hinge date to arrive. After showing up half-an-hour early, I worry whether my six pictures and three prompts accurately depict myself, or whether I’m going to be called a catfish and heckled back home.
On observation, I think that the root of my own lack of confidence, and generally the lack of confidence I see in the women I am closest to, comes from some far-reaching narrative we have come to believe is true. The narrative that everyone is watching us, judging us, and caring about what we do, wear and say. I unashamedly spent the best part of an hour in a Zara changing room recently trying on four sizes of the same coat. FOUR. I then took so many photos in each I had to free up some iCloud storage before forwarding them to anyone who would reply, to gauge a general consensus of what people thought. I didn’t end up buying any variation of the coat; the responses to sizing were too mixed.
I cannot think of many things worse in the world of retail than spending the rest of my winter in dimly lit changing rooms deciding whether I’m more of a small medium or a big small. I know for a fact my brothers wouldn’t give the size of their winter coats a second thought. I doubt they even try them on, much to my mum’s annoyance. This coming winter, above all efforts to budget for the mini-Uggs I’ve been wanting for a year, or beyond any other trend I decide will become a staple in wardrobe and definitely not something I will wear for a fortnight, I will prioritise turning more of a blind eye to the opinions that I perceive other people to have of me.
Like most things, I suspect this is easier said than done. I still wouldn’t want to be tasked with a plane landing anytime soon, but I reckon I can muster up the courage to keep a few of those tagged posts up from time to time. Perhaps confidence could be the most trendsetting, desirable purchase of the season. Thankfully it comes at a much lower cost than most of my Pinterest wish-list!