No one writes with more truth or incisive clarity about social issues than Sady. I’ve never read anyone else as cohesive, funny, and painfully honest. Your writing always makes me think and you’ve helped me more than I can say.

Your friend is damn right when he says you can, and should, hold a higher opinion of your abilities and promote the hell out of them and yourself. I love me some Tiger Beatdown but I hope that eventually your talents will reach a wider audience – because you write better than anyone I know and you deserve it.

“Let’s talk about how many times a woman gets called “intimidating” just for being correct, and for not seeming unsure about how correct she is, in the course of an average lifetime.”

I get called intimidating *all the time*, mostly by women, and whenever I’d ask people why, I always got vague responses about aggression that never seemed to make any sense. I never attack people in arguments, just their ideas, so I couldn’t understand where the problem was. I’ve always understood it had something to do with being confident, and that being a woman didn’t help, but I don’t think my mind ever quite clicked on it the way you just described. You are so freaking correct it make my head spin. Now I’m even more pissed about every demeaning thing I’ve heard since kindergarten – and goodness knows that anger will only make me all the more intimidatng.

Re:fat issue? I once butted in on a ‘omg I’m so fat/calorie discussion’ by going ‘I eat full-fat, don’t calorie count and just exercise – why don’t you try that?’ and immediately got a sneering whiplash from all of them designed to take my head off of ‘Rub it in/Don’t be so superior/Yes, well, you’re YOU’ as though keeping to a reasonable diet and exercise regime (it turns out I was eating healthier and less junk than the faddy diet moaners) and having a realistic attitude to my weight was wrong.

Also: complinsults. Trying to figure them out makes my head hurt, so I’m just taking them literally as compliments, even though I know I SHOULD read between the lines and feel bad and insecure like a good girl. But I really hate complinsults and so can’t be bothered spending any more energy on them than necessary.

(Also it’s a lot of fun to watch people’s faces when you do this, and the little implied insult just slides off like you’re made of teflon.)
“Thank you! I love this outfit too, I feel great tonight, and I’m having so much fun wearing this.”
Or, in response to Lila’s boyfriend’s mom: “Yes. Life is unfair sometimes.”

All said in a friendly tone of course, and then quickly change the topic of the conversation.

There’s a big gap between what describe as a good goal here and what Shirky does (“acting slightly more confident in a job interview than you actually are” vs. lying your way into a job because you think you could pick it up on the fly). In general, people are going to be better off if we stick to the former and avoid the latter–even if the lying, self-promoting, macho approach is a workable, maybe even optimal, strategy for the people like you and Shirky who are much more talented than 99.999% of us. (Seriously, if I had to name my three favorite writers, you and Shirky would be two of them.) Cuz you two are role model for other would-be world-changers, and if everybody went around acting like Shirky says women should do more, it would just make it all the harder for honest people with accurate views of their own strengths and weaknesses to compete, and all the more necessary to be a self-aggrandizing ass.

In my experience (as a dude and a grad student, among other things) academics (among other professional, no doubt) have these powerful norms of acting more competent and knowledgeable and sure of their knowledge than they are, basically all the time when they’re around each other. (This doesn’t usually apply to grad students when they are only with other grad students.) But successful ladies are much more likely to be transparent about the limits of their knowledge and their work than successful dudes. And maybe that means dudes do better climbing academic ladders, but it also means the value of their work is lessened because there’s no acknowledgement of shortcomings.

Obviously, the kinds of mutually assured destruction you describe adolescent girls putting each other and themselves through is terrible, and to be avoided. But in many of the women (and men) I admire most, that feminine norm of self-abasement seems to have been reforged into taoist-style humility: “[a wise woman] acts without claiming the results as hers; [she] achieves [her] merit and does not rest (arrogantly) in it: — [she] does not wish to display [her] superiority.”