#GAReads | Fighting the tyranny of 'niceness': why we need difficult women
photo credit: Luz Fuertes, via Unsplash
“Fighting the tyranny of 'niceness': why we need difficult women”:
The word [bitch] is particularly pointed since it recurs so often when women talk about the consequences of challenging sexism. The TV presenter Helen Skelton once described being groped on air by an interviewee while pregnant. She did not complain, she said, because “that’s just the culture that television breeds. No one wants to be difficult.” The actor Jennifer Lawrence told the Hollywood Reporter that she had once stood up to a rude director. The reaction to the incident left her worried that she would be punished by the industry. “Yeah,” chipped in fellow actor Emma Stone: “You were ‘difficult’.”
All this is edging towards the same idea, an idea that is imprinted on us from birth: that women are called unreasonable, selfish and unfeminine when they stand up for themselves. “I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is,” wrote Rebecca West in 1913. “I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat, or a prostitute.”