05.29.07
women and competitiveness
My best friend is possibly the least competitive person I have ever met. She’s intelligent and has all sorts of talents, from perfect pitch to outdoor cooking, and she has always been successful in all the traditional respects, but she shuns competition and the high pressure that sometimes goes with it. I mean this even at the most basic level: in grade school, she was always the first one to stand up in the pool during a handstand contest, while the rest of us were all turning blue under the water trying to outlast each other. She would say that she was tired, or that her lungs just couldn’t take it, and she would swim over to the side of the pool to wait for the ice cream truck. She has run a marathon and a half marathon, but she has absolutely no idea what her times were in either event, and in both races her strategy involved a hodge podge of running, walking, and talking to other racers from other places. She remained complacently, almost willfully, non-competitive.
I bring this up neither to celebrate nor to criticize my friend, but because sometimes her complete lack of competitiveness is a source of wonder to me. I can’t even fathom my world without its including some wrestling with the issue of competitiveness - often, but not always, in conjunction with my running. Am I too competitive, in a way that is destructive or that limits the amount of fun I can be having? Am I not competitive enough to really reach my potential? To what extent is it an insult to be called a competitive person? A noncompetitive one? Who would I be if running (not exclusively, but largely) had not provided me with this cyclical model for living - constant striving and planning and executing? And what would running provide me with, if I did it like my friend, without thoughts of competitiveness? None of these questions have easy answers, which is what makes them interesting: competitivenes is an unstable concept, ripe for theorizing.
Many cultural feminists say that competitiveness is a negative masculine trait, and they suggest that women who have developed it have somehow bought in to the masculinist culture that is the source of all the world’s problems. If we would only all be as non-competitive as possible, these feminists say, we could end war and greed and bring peace. I disagree with this because, among other problems, it oversimplifies what competition brings to the lives of those who experience it. It makes you know yourself, search out your inner boundaries, and confront the things about yourself that you may not otherwise have to admit were there. It helps you to prove yourself to yourself, and not just to the rest of the world in some monkey contest. The race or the spelling bee or whatever it is are just the means to an end.
I’m not saying that competition is for everyone, or that competition is the only way to achieve the self-awareness I have described above. I just find it fascinating to think about the thoroughness with which competition stamps some of our lives and not others, across culture, race, gender, time, class, etc. Competition is a way of knowing and reacting to the world, and it is one in which I am so much immersed that it is hard for me to imagine how my life might be structured otherwise.
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joan said,
May 30, 2007 at 8:15 am
I really loved this post, Sarah. To add some insight into this female issue, let me tell you about how “women on the street” react to my seejanerun group of moms. The word on us is that we are “visciously competitive” (actual quote) which cracks me up because very few of us actually race. Most of my 25 Janes use the time together to chat on warm ups and to blow off steam [life/mom stress] during intervals. But we are viewed by those outside our circle as “viscously competitive.” Why is this? Well, I think it has to do with how COMPETITIVE the women are who judge us. Competitiveness in direct, physical challenges is healthy and normal for all human beings (not just for men) … but indirect, back-stabbing competitiveness is what results, I think, when our natural selves are denied.