The tyranny of nice: how compliance puts women back in the box

Patriarchy hates when girls say "No"

When I wrote about how patriarchy harms men, hundreds of men commented that they were also tired of being tough, stoic cowboy superheroes. Even this article from the NYT suggested that Trump-voting men don’t want to return to a more traditional masculinity.

Then Barbie blew up pop culture, and Kamala Harris usurped the Dem ticket. It seemed like patriarchy was finally going the way of Blackberry phones and barefoot toe shoes.

Empathy was making a comeback! Kindness and softness were becoming cool again!

But the seeming progress was just a veneer of gold plating over the garish walls of Trump Tower. Scratch below the surface, and it’s still asbestos.

Because, plot twist! America’s brand went from performatively nice to ketamine-fueled chainsaw wielders, an executive branch bloated with sexual predators, and the Tate Bros are legally back in the United States. The women running things have just as much big di©k energy as the boys, except with hair extensions.

Any softer, collectivist paradigm we were building suddenly shifted back to a feudal, Wild West ethos where empathy is seen as weakness, weakness is punished, and the President is putting military tanks in the street for his birthday.

And as for smashing patriarchy? Women are now being offered money to have children while watching our rights get stripped away. Misogynistic legislation is moving through Congress. Project 2025, called anti-woman by many, is in full swing.

Sorry, Barbie, you’re going back in the box.

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How do we get out? a.k.a. why my resting bitch face is resistance

If you’re a woman, you were probably taught to be a people pleaser and become who others told you to be. You were conditioned to mask, shapeshift, and abandon your autonomy and yourself to survive.

What if I told you that when you complied, you became complicit in your own oppression?

Female compliance reinforces patriarchy in that it teaches girls to do most of the placating and compromising (i.e. dance backwards in heels). It requires women to serve as the family Zamboni by managing everyone’s feelings. It teaches women to do the lion’s share of the emotional labor, managing the social, parasocial, and familial relationships.

Teaching girls to be compliant teaches them that their value lies in pleasing others. They learn to make themselves smaller, exchanging their wants and needs for a perpetual state of what-do-people-want-or think-about-me anxiety. I see this particularly among adolescent girls, who look to other girls before answering questions as simple as “Would you like another pancake?”

Eventually, this leads girls and women to police each other and themselves. The self-policing and parasocial anxiety prevent women and girls from accumulating power, resources, and influence.

Patriarchy wins.

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Compliance v. defiance

Most of the time, it’s inexplicable to me why my daughter resists conformity, or the urge to please, or stay quiet, even at the cost of being exiled from the social group. It’s often a mystery why she is often so defiant.

Of course, I write these newsletters to explain to myself the inexplicable. I write to rewrite the narrative. And now I understand that perhaps her refusal to conform or please or “just get along” can be a good thing. Inspirational, even.

Maybe if I had learned earlier to, like her, use the word no more often, to put up boundaries and push back as opposed to people-please, maybe I could have avoided being taken advantage of by men and ending up in a relationship that ended up both psychologically and physically abusive. Maybe I wouldn’t have stayed in that relationship for several years, and sought out my worth based on another man’s opinion, and saw myself through the male gaze, and believe that if I were just more beautiful or sexier or loved by a man, then I would be worth loving.

Maybe in this Barbie-in-a-Box-Broligarchy culture, where both men and women suffer from toxic masculinity, the first word girls need to learn to say is no.

No, no, no, no.

Enter the resistance of No.

No to all this. No to all that. We say no.

While still encouraging cooperation, compromise, and discernment to know when to resist, and without glorifying defiance, we can encourage our daughters to show up authentically. To let them be angry. To let them proclaim their autonomy and agency and, when needed, say To hell with all that.

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