The Female Addiction To Self-Esteem

CH has written about the problem of exploding female self-esteems, its causes and its manifestations, as well as the shallow (if broad) nature of the epidemic of bloated gogrrl egos and what it all means for players looking to exploit sexual market loopholes for love and romance.

Apparently (and unsurprisingly), the results from a recent social ❤science❤ study confirm CH field experience and idle theorizing.

Self-Esteem Instability and the Desire for Fame

The desire to become famous was examined among individuals with stable and unstable forms of self-esteem. Participants were 181 female undergraduates who completed measures of self-esteem level and fame interest along with daily measures of state self-esteem (i.e., how an individual feels about oneself at the present moment) for seven consecutive days. Our results show that individuals who possess unstable high self-esteem reported a stronger desire to become famous than did those with stable high self-esteem. These findings suggest the intriguing possibility that individuals with unstable high self-esteem may want to become famous as a means for gaining external validation. Implications of these findings for understanding the connection between self-esteem and the desire for fame are discussed.

181 self-reporting female subjects doesn’t qualify as a huge (or unerring) study, but it’s enough to glimpse penumbras of the womanly craving for external validation, aka attention whoring.

Why were only women studied?

We focused exclusively on women in the present study because previous research suggests that women were more likely than men to report being interested in fame as a way to gain status (Greenwood et al., 2013) and use their interest in celebrities as a way to establish their own identities (i.e., celebrity worship; Reeves, Baker, & Truluck, 2012).

Paradoxically, men gain MUCH more reproductive fitness from fame than do women, and yet women appear to crave fame more. It could be that women’s self-esteems are naturally more unstable than men’s self-esteems, and that women also have a stronger constitutional need to “feel good in the moment” than do men, so they turn to fame and facsimiles of fame (posting Africa AIDS kid pics to Instagram while assuming the missionary position (double entendre intended)) as a sort of palliative to rub their hamsters with the grain.

The most interesting aspect of this study (because let’s face it the results pretty much internally and externally validate generations of conventional wisdom about women’s natural disposition to flaunt their prime nubility goods for ego assuaging feels) is the finding that unstable high self-esteem women are the most likely to attention whore.

What is an unstable high self-esteem woman?

The present study focuses on self-esteem instability, which refers to fluctuations in moment-to-moment feelings of self-worth over time. Accounting for both self-esteem level and self-esteem instability is important because it allows researchers to identify those individuals who possess secure and fragile forms of high self-esteem. That is, individuals who possess high levels of self-esteem that are stable over time (i.e., stable high self-esteem) are believed to be secure in their feelings of self-worth because their positive attitudes about themselves appear to be well-anchored and do not fluctuate a great deal based on external circumstances. In contrast, individuals who report generally high levels of self-esteem but experience considerable fluctuations in their feelings of self-worth over time (i.e., unstable high self-esteem) are thought to possess a relatively fragile form of high self-esteem because these frequent changes in their self-esteem suggest that the positive views expressed by these individuals are at least somewhat uncertain.

Self-esteem instability has been found—both by itself and in conjunction with self-esteem level—to be associated with a variety of important life outcomes including anger (Kernis, Grannemann, & Barclay, 1989), aggression (Zeigler-Hill, Enjaian, Holden, & Southard, 2014), defensiveness (Zeigler-Hill, Chadha, & Osterman, 2008), interpersonal style (Zeigler-Hill, Clark, & Beckman, 2011), humor style (Vaughan, Zeigler-Hill, & Arnau, in press), academic outcomes (Zeigler-Hill et al., 2013), and psychopathology (e.g., Zeigler-Hill & Wallace, 2012; see Jordan & Zeigler-Hill, 2013, for a review). These results are consistent with the view that unstable high self-esteem reflects vulnerable feelings of self-worth that require external validation as well as some degree of self-deception (see Kernis, 2003, for a review). Unstable high self-esteem is thought to be associated with a wide array of negative outcomes (e.g., poor psychological adjustment, defensiveness) because this form of high self-esteem may lack the protective mechanisms that seem to shield those with stable high self-esteem from experiencing these outcomes. These results suggest that self-esteem instability is an important moderator of the associations that self-esteem level has with an array of life outcomes. Our goal for the present study was to examine whether self-esteem instability also moderates the association that self-esteem level has with the desire for fame.

In the study description provided at the link, you’ll read that fragile (unstable) high self-esteem women tend to be “unrealistically optimistic” and mean-spirited. Sounds about right. You know the type: Those hyperactive drama whores who backstab perceived enemies one minute with foul-tempered fury and then crow about how great life is the next with a phony sing-song chirpiness that’s carried aloft by bluebirds and garland.

The fame-starved, superficially high self-esteem girl (a close cousin of the BPD girl) is the bread and butter of nightgame pickup artists. To game one of these chicks, you have to know first that feeding her fragile ego is absolutely the OPPOSITE of what you should do. Once a SHiSE girl has gotten her external validation, her vagina shuts down. To keep that vagina open and curious, her ego needs to be kept on tenterhooks, always waiting and anticipating but never getting that next hit of validation. Not without clauses and stipulations, at any rate.

And do you know what game tactics perfectly exploit this innate weakness in the female psyche?

Disqualification (“Oh, we would never hit it off. You’re too uptight”).

Negs (“Nice hamster. Is it real?”).

Warning: You would never want to LTR or wife up a SHiSE woman. Her constant annoying need for validation will either drive you insane or drive you to jealousy when she strays to get her feels from other men. Cheating is almost inevitable with these types of girls, because one man can only externally validate her so much before the value of his validation, no matter how tantalizingly wielded, drops below the price of inflating her ego.

Maxim #29: Think of female egos and female vaginas as opposing forces. The more one is stroked, the less the other wants to be stroked.