Letting Go of Being Liked

Obsessing about being 'nice' -- not happening

It’s been about a year since the release of Barbie, and the delivery of America Ferrara’s now-iconic monologue about how impossible it is to be a woman. So many waves of feminism have crashed upon the cultural shores and yet, as Ferrara’s character, Gloria, reminds us,

You have to be thin, but not too thin. And you can never say you want to be thin. You have to say you want to be healthy, but also you have to be thin. You have to have money, but you can't ask for money because that's crass. You have to be a boss, but you can't be mean. You have to lead, but you can't squash other people's ideas. . . You have to never get old, never be rude, never show off, never be selfish, never fall down, never fail, never show fear, never get out of line. . .

Apparently, during filming, all the women on the set were sobbing -- since it took over 30 takes for the actress to nail the speech, everyone must have been very tired and dehydrated by the end of the day. I totally get it (I wrote an entire book wrestling with how we might break free of all this damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t lunacy), but what has always struck me in Ferrara’s speech is the line near the end that no one much talks about: “I'm just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us.”

Why are we females so obsessed with being liked by everyone? For that’s the root of all this agony — trying to live in a way that avoids criticism or disapproval. What if only half of the people we know liked us? Or, only the people we liked? Wouldn’t that loosen that knot a little?

Some time ago, during a talk I was giving to celebrate the publication of my book How to Hepburn, a woman raised her hand and asked, "But I heard Katharine Hepburn wasn't a very nice person, especially as she got older." Two years later, at a reading from another book, The Gospel According to Coco Chanel, after all the questions about Chanel's greatest contribution to fashion, and whether or not she was really a Nazi spy, someone asked "but, wasn't Chanel sort of a bitch?" Two years after that, I toured with How Georgia Became O'Keeffe, the third in my so-called kick ass women series, and like clockwork, someone asked whether it was true that O’Keeffe could be rude and unpleasant.

These questions were always asked by women. Even though there were men in the audience, they didn’t seem to care whether these accomplished, legendary women were nice. Possibly it’s because men have the advantage of knowing that being thought of as as "a nice guy" is tantamount to being thought of as a pushover, a non-entity. Nice guys finish last. Nice women also finish last, but that appears to be our only option.

Why do we women, generation in, generation out, place so much value on being thought of as nice? I'm not talking about cultivating genuine positive human traits like kindness, compassion, tolerance, fairness, and generosity -- but being perceived as amiable and agreeable. I'm sure there's some evolutionary reason for this. Plus, someone has to chair the school auction.

Katharine Hepburn, Coco Chanel and Georgia O'Keeffe put no premium on niceness, because going along to get along got in the way of what they wanted to do, of achieving their goals and ambitions. The sugar and spice and everything nice cultural imperative of their time couldn't survive in the face of their basic human desire to make their lives count for something. All three were known for being demanding, direct, driven, and difficult, to which they all basically said, "and your point is?"

They were all prodigies of not being nice; they had no need to wait to late middle-aged to piss people off. But most of us are not prodigies. We say yes when we want to say no, until the day it finally sinks in that those overwrought lyrics we'd crooned into the end of our hairbrush in front of our bedroom mirror were true, we really are just dust in the wind. On that day, what we want becomes more important than what people think. It's shocking how quickly being nice slips to the bottom of the list.

Which is as it should be. Being nice, like wearing band t-shirts with the necks cut out of them is something we outgrow. To paraphrase Carl Jung, being nice only takes you so far. ". . .we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life's morning, for what was great in the morning will be little at evening and what in the morning was true, at evening will have become a lie.”

Once, I turned the question back on one of the women who asked me whether Chanel wasn't a bit of a bitch. I asked "why does it matter?" I thought I was clever, deflecting the question this way, that the woman wouldn't know why she was asking it. But she said, "because if she was nice, on top of everything else, then I would feel terrible about how I haven't really done anything with my life. But if she was as selfish and horrible as I've heard, then I can say to myself, 'well, at least I'm nice."

[A version of this essay appeared in the Huffington Post when God was a boy]

Please leave a comment! I’d love to hear how you’re managing what seems to be an intractable lady problem.