The Radical Pleasure of Being Difficult

One of the more effective ways to control women has always been to make being difficult seem like a character flaw.

A difficult woman asks too many questions. She has inconvenient opinions. She wants explanations. She notices inconsistencies. She changes her mind when presented with new information, but stubbornly refuses to change it merely because someone is displeased.

She has preferences, boundaries, and an occasionally spectacular unwillingness to cooperate.

She can be perfectly pleasant.

She simply cannot be counted upon to be accommodating.

That, historically, has made people nervous.

I think we should give difficult women a little more credit.

The price of being agreeable

Women learn early that being liked can make life considerably easier.

We learn to soften our language, anticipate discomfort, manage emotional atmospheres, and make our requests sound less like requests.

We become accomplished diplomats in relationships where nobody else appears to be negotiating.

We develop astonishing skill at recognizing what other people want before they ask for it.

Sometimes we become so good at accommodation that we lose track of what we wanted in the first place.

There is nothing wrong with kindness, cooperation, or compromise. These are essential ingredients in any decent human relationship.

But there is a difference between generosity freely offered and compliance extracted through the threat of disapproval.

One is a choice.

The other is a system of management.

And many women have spent a substantial portion of their lives confusing the two.

The woman who asks why

I have a particular affection for women who ask inconvenient questions.

Why is this the rule?

Who benefits from this arrangement?

Why am I expected to make the sacrifice?

Why is my disagreement being treated as disrespect?

Why does everyone seem more concerned with my tone than with what I'm saying?

These questions have a way of disrupting arrangements that depend upon nobody examining them too closely.

We are living in a world with a great many arrangements that deserve examination.

Political institutions. Religious traditions. Professional hierarchies. Family expectations. Economic assumptions. Social conventions that have survived for generations largely because challenging them has been made unpleasant.

Not every tradition is oppressive. Not every authority is illegitimate. Not every disagreement reveals an injustice.

But the legitimacy of an arrangement should be able to survive a thoughtful question.

If asking why is treated as an act of rebellion, that tells us something worth investigating.

Being difficult is not the same as being cruel

There is an important distinction here.

I am not advocating thoughtless contrarianism, hostility, or the idea that personal freedom exempts us from considering other people.

There are already plenty of people who confuse aggression with strength and selfishness with independence.

We don't need more of that.

The kind of difficulty I admire is rooted in discernment.

It is the willingness to disappoint someone when agreement would require betraying yourself.

The ability to listen carefully without automatically surrendering your judgment.

The courage to acknowledge that a relationship, institution, or expectation may need to change, even when everyone involved would prefer that it remain comfortably familiar.

It is possible to be gracious and unyielding.

Compassionate and uncompromising.

Warmhearted and impossible to manipulate.

In fact, I suspect those combinations are among the more interesting things a woman can become.

A life that belongs to you



There is a profound difference between being a good person and being a convenient one.

A convenient woman makes herself available.

She makes reasonable requests disappear. She adjusts her ambitions around other people's expectations. She absorbs discomfort so the room can remain pleasant.

A good woman, by contrast, may sometimes be inconvenient.

She may refuse something she considers unjust.

She may insist on having a conversation nobody particularly wants to have.

She may decline to continue a family tradition, professional arrangement, or personal relationship that requires her to become smaller.

She may decide that the life she has built no longer fits the woman she has become.

She may do all of this without becoming unkind.

This distinction matters because the pressure to be convenient is often disguised as an appeal to goodness.

Be understanding.

Be generous.

Be patient.

Be the bigger person.

These can be beautiful invitations when they arise from mutual respect.

They can also become remarkably efficient ways of persuading one person to carry responsibilities that properly belong to several.

The politics of a woman who cannot be managed

There is a reason women's independence has never been merely a private matter.

The ability to make decisions about our bodies, labor, money, relationships, education, and participation in public life affects the distribution of power.

Autonomy has practical consequences.

A woman with economic independence has different options from one who must secure permission to survive.

A woman who can question religious authority has different possibilities from one required to treat obedience as virtue.

A woman who has access to education, information, and community can examine the expectations placed upon her rather than simply inherit them.

A woman who knows she is allowed to say no becomes considerably more difficult to control.

This is not a particularly mysterious political observation.

Freedom changes what people can reasonably demand of one another.

It also changes what individuals are willing to accept.

The pleasure of refusing the performance

I think there is something delicious about discovering that you can survive being disliked.

Not universally, of course. We are social creatures, and affection, belonging, and companionship matter.

But being misunderstood by someone is not necessarily an emergency.

Neither is disappointing them.

You can decline an invitation without constructing an elaborate excuse.

You can disagree without offering seventeen assurances that you respect everyone's perspective.

You can have a strong preference without defending its legitimacy.

You can recognize that someone is unhappy with your decision and allow that unhappiness to exist without immediately attempting to repair it.

You can let a conversation end with disagreement.

And you can still go home, make a lovely dinner, put on your favorite music, and enjoy your evening.

There is enormous pleasure in discovering that another person's displeasure does not automatically become your responsibility.

A little more magnificent trouble

I would love to see more women become difficult in the ways that matter.

More women who are intellectually curious enough to question what they've been taught.

More women who are financially ambitious enough to want real options.

More women who are willing to reconsider relationships, expectations, and identities that no longer serve them.

More women who can appreciate beauty, pleasure, leisure, and delight without feeling obligated to justify those interests through productivity.

More women who understand that kindness does not require obedience.

And more women who are willing to be inconvenient when convenience would cost them their integrity.

We don't need to become relentlessly confrontational.

We don't need to turn every preference into a political declaration or every disagreement into a battle.

We can remain gracious, thoughtful, generous, and beautifully civilized.

But we can also stop treating our own accommodation as the price of belonging.

There is a whole world of possibility available to a woman who no longer organizes her life around being easy to manage.

She may be a little difficult.

She may be quite a lot difficult.

She may even become absolutely impossible.

What a marvelous development.

Private Coaching with Lisa Hayes

I coach women who want a less optimized life with more magic, beauty, pleasure, and room to breathe.

Sometimes that begins with reconsidering the roles you've inherited, the expectations you've accepted, and the places where being agreeable has become more important than being free.

Private coaching is $650 per month for four sessions, with support between our conversations.

If you're ready to make a little magnificent trouble in your own life, I'd love to work with you.