The Pleasure of Being a Woman With Opinions

On intellectual confidence, cultivated taste, and the exquisite freedom of no longer needing everyone to agree with you.

A woman who knows what she thinks is extraordinarily attractive. She is a curiosity in a world that usually rewards women for becoming wallflowers.

I don't mean a woman who is certain about everything. In fact, I tend to find certainty rather boring. I mean a woman who has spent enough time reading, observing, experimenting, traveling, making mistakes, and paying attention to the world to develop her own perspective.

She has opinions about art, politics, and religion. She knows which books changed her mind and which ones she couldn't finish. She has thoughts about how people should treat one another, what makes a room beautiful, and whether the entire wellness industry has become an elaborate scheme to convince women that being alive is a condition requiring constant treatment.

She might have strong feelings about the appropriate hour for a cocktail.

She might also change her mind tomorrow.

I find all of this delightful.

For a remarkable amount of our lives, women are encouraged to cultivate likability rather than intellectual distinction. We learn to soften our observations, qualify our opinions, and carefully measure how much of ourselves a particular room can tolerate.

We become conversational diplomats, adept at keeping everyone comfortable.

There are practical reasons for this, of course. Women have historically paid enormous social, professional, and sometimes physical prices for being outspoken. There are still places where an opinion expressed by a woman is treated as a provocation simply because she had the audacity to express it.

Reading a room can be a form of intelligence and, occasionally, self-preservation.

But I wonder how many of us have become so practiced at accommodating everyone else's perspectives that we've neglected to develop the full richness of our own.

Having a Point of View Is a Form of Self-Possession

I think developing taste is one of the great underrated pleasures of adulthood.

Taste is more than knowing what you like. It's the gradual accumulation of experiences that allow you to understand why you like something, what moves you, what offends your sensibilities, and what you find worth defending.

You might adore opera and detest contemporary country music. You might love Catholic architecture while finding Catholic theology utterly unconvincing. You might be passionately devoted to feminist politics and still enjoy certain extravagantly impractical feminine traditions.

Human beings are wonderfully inconsistent creatures.

A mature point of view doesn't require us to resolve every contradiction into a coherent personal brand.

In fact, I think some of the most fascinating women I've known have been gloriously difficult to categorize.

They have interests that don't seem to belong together. They know surprising things. They are willing to admit that they enjoy something unfashionable, dislike something prestigious, or have absolutely no idea what everyone is talking about.

Their personalities have texture.

They haven't allowed an algorithm, a political tribe, a professional identity, or a collection of lifestyle influencers to do all their thinking for them.

There is an enormous difference between having a carefully curated identity and having an interesting mind.

You Are Allowed to Be Wrong

One of the things I find most tedious about contemporary public discourse is the expectation that every opinion must be delivered as though it were a permanent declaration of moral and intellectual allegiance.

People are understandably reluctant to change their minds when doing so might be interpreted as weakness, hypocrisy, or betrayal.

I would argue that the ability to revise an opinion in response to new information is one of the more sophisticated things a person can do.

I have changed my mind about religion, relationships, politics, ambition, motherhood, and what constitutes a successful life.

Some of those changes arrived through study. Others came through experiences I wouldn't wish to repeat. A few appeared because I encountered someone whose perspective was so radically different from mine that I couldn't continue thinking quite the same way afterward.

That is one of the reasons I love being around people who know things I don't.

I want someone to tell me about an obscure artist, a historical scandal, a scientific discovery, or an unfamiliar philosophical argument. I enjoy having my assumptions challenged by someone who has done the reading.

I would rather be occasionally embarrassed by what I don't know than become so invested in appearing knowledgeable that I stop learning.

There is no intellectual glamour in being impossible to educate.

The Particular Freedom of No Longer Performing Agreement

Something rather wonderful can happen as women get older.

We begin to recognize how much energy we've spent making ourselves socially convenient.

We have laughed at jokes we didn't find funny. We've tolerated conversations that bored us senseless. We've agreed with people simply because disagreement would require an explanation we didn't feel like giving.

Some of that is ordinary social grace. Nobody needs to turn every dinner party into a philosophical tribunal.

But there is a difference between exercising discretion and habitually abandoning your own perspective.

You can disagree without becoming hostile. You can enjoy someone's company without sharing their worldview. You can acknowledge the intelligence in an argument you ultimately reject.

You can even allow someone to dislike your opinion without rushing to repair the relationship.

That last one is particularly liberating.

A woman who doesn't require universal agreement becomes much more difficult to manipulate through disapproval.

She has the luxury of considering whether the criticism is useful before deciding what to do with it.

She can listen.

She can reflect.

She can remain entirely unconvinced.

Become a Woman Who Has Something to Talk About

I would love to see more women make intellectual curiosity part of their pleasure practice.

Read books that have nothing to do with your profession. Study an artist whose work unsettles you. Learn the history of a place you love. Develop an opinion about architecture. Go to a lecture. Find out why an unfamiliar political movement emerged. Have dinner with someone who has lived a profoundly different life.

Take an interest in subjects for which you have absolutely no practical application.

You don't need to monetize your curiosity, turn it into content, or use it to become a more impressive person.

The experience itself is sufficient.

There is pleasure in discovering that the world is much stranger, more complicated, and more interesting than you previously understood.

I also think we underestimate how sensual intellectual life can be.

There is pleasure in a beautifully constructed argument, a surprising conversation, the discovery of a new idea, or the sudden recognition that something you've believed for decades no longer makes sense.

A genuinely interesting conversation can be as intoxicating as a beautiful evening.

Curiosity is not merely an academic virtue. It is one of the ways we remain available to life.

You Don't Have to Be Everyone's Cup of Tea

I have reached an age where I find the prospect of universal likability profoundly uninteresting.

There are people who will dislike my politics, my spirituality, my opinions about marriage, or the fact that I am entirely comfortable discussing sex, death, money, religion, and the occasional magnificent scandal over dinner.

That's fine.

There are other people who will find those conversations absolutely delicious.

I would much rather spend an evening in vigorous conversation with someone who challenges me than spend it carefully maintaining a pleasant but vacant social performance.

There is an entire world of knowledge, beauty, pleasure, history, art, and human experience waiting to be explored.

We have such a relatively brief time to experience it.

I cannot imagine wanting to spend that time becoming less distinctive in the hope of being more agreeable.

Cultivate your tastes. Develop your perspective. Learn things that make you uncomfortable. Have opinions that belong to you, and hold them with enough intellectual humility that they can evolve.

Become the woman who introduces people to unfamiliar ideas, asks unexpectedly good questions, and occasionally says something at dinner that makes everyone put down their forks.



You are allowed to be complicated.

You are allowed to be difficult to categorize.

You are allowed to be wonderfully, unapologetically interesting.

And you are certainly allowed to have opinions.