The cultural conditioning that teaches women to be accommodating, agreeable, endlessly palatable is one of the most damaging things that has ever been done to us collectively and I think about this often. We are taught from childhood that being liked requires being easy, that being loved requires being low maintenance, that having needs and voicing them is a personality flaw rather than a basic feature of being a person. And the women who internalize that most completely are the ones who end up the most quietly miserable and the most consistently taken advantage of.
I believe women should be more difficult. Not difficult in the sense of being aggressive or combative or exhausting to be around. I mean having standards that do not bend, opinions that do not dissolve under mild pressure and needs that do not get sacrificed for the sake of keeping the peace for people who were never going to appreciate the gesture anyway. I do not believe in submission as a default. I do not believe in being relentlessly pleasant at the expense of my own wants and needs. I do not believe in swallowing discomfort just to maintain a harmony that is fundamentally false because it is built entirely on my willingness to pretend everything is fine when it isn’t.
None of this means I start arguments for sport. It does not mean I am aggressive or unpleasant to be around or that I manufacture conflict out of boredom. I am not afraid of confrontation when confrontation is warranted. I say the thing directly instead of sending signals and waiting to see if anyone picks them up. It means if something bothers me I tell the person it bothers me, I say it and It means if I want something to change I say what I want changed and I say it once and I mean it.
A closed mouth does not get fed and I have never been willing to go hungry just to avoid making someone momentarily uncomfortable. I do not do hints. I do not do implication. I do not let people spend weeks second guessing what I meant when I could have just told them in thirty seconds and moved on with my life. Directness is a courtesy, actually, when you think about it correctly it respects everyone’s time including your own and it leaves no room for the kind of prolonged ambiguity that breeds resentment on both sides. I would rather have the conversation once and cleanly than carry the weight of an unspoken thing indefinitely and I have made my peace with the fact that not everyone finds that easy to be around.
