tiredblondy
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- Jul 29, 2004
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I must not have communicated well, so I'll try to explain.
What I meant when I said that women (myself included) should stop being so nice is simply the fact that there are so many times where our boundaries are crossed, where people around us, particularly men, make us uncomfortable by something they are doing, or want to do, or say, or they try to convince us to do something that crosses a line, goes against our values, inconveniences us, etc. The reason why I think this is a problem is because so many women have this "you have to be nice" idea taught from a very early age. We are taught that we need to be "nice", that the opposite of nice is a "b*tch", and that, foremost, we must put others' perceptions of us and our behaviors ahead of our own feelings/wants/needs/boundaries.
That worries me, a lot. It worries me as the mother of a young daughter. And I'll tell you, I see a heck of a lot of parents correcting their daughters and telling them to "be nice", or, my favorite, "nobody will like you if you do things like that"... and almost 99% of the time, it is over something totally minor, like telling a friend that you don't want to play a game of their suggestion, etc. I used to hear that daily on the playground after school... and that is what I was talking about. It disempowers our daughters and teaches them that what other people think about them is more important than what they feel, and that when taking an action they should consider what other people's perceptions are of them first, rather than whether or not they are comfortable with what someone is doing/saying to them.
MOO/JMO/IMO, etc.
This is what I was referring my previous post to. .