There's a moment in the pilot of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt where the women are rescued from the bunker and put on a daytime talk show and Matt Lauer asks one of the women how she ended up in the bunker:
"I had waited on Reverend Richard at a York Steak House I worked at, and one night he invited me out to his car to see some baby rabbits, and I didn’t want to be rude, so… here we are."
And Matt Lauer responds: "I’m always amazed by what women will do because they’re afraid of being rude…"
It's often hard for men to understand the societal pressure placed on women to be accommodating and not be rude and how this can be manipulated to constrain female agency in the world.
I've found they also have an amazing ability to make excuses for the behaviors of others.
I had an ex who got into a lot of sketchy situations because she refused to believe people were exactly who they were telling her they were. Guys would do inappropriate things that clearly bothered her, but she would claim they were "joking" or believe she misunderstood, etc. etc. So she wouldn't set any boundaries, and of course they would see that as a signal to escalate until she couldn't handle it anymore and would have to call in the cavalry. (That got old fast.)
Of course, in moderation making excuses for others (or rather, putting a positive spin on their actions) can lead for an easier and more stress free life. I have been amazed at times when behaviour from others I have considered unremarkable has been interpreted in any entirely different way by someone else.
For example, a boss I considered to be trying his best is considered by others as an upper management ass-kisser who would back stab any of his team members in a heart beat to get ahead. This is working off the same information as I had. The person holding this view seemed to spend their days in a state of seething resentment, compared to my (blissful) ignorance. They would of course consider me stupidly naive!
This. So much this. Where a lot of posters here see "downtrodden victim of societal pressures", I see people who like to take the easier route. Speaking up for yourself is hard. For everyone. It's pretty much always easier to let it slide, not rock the boat, appease, downplay etc.
Making excuses can be a way to try and protect yourself. If you're afraid someone will escalate if you say no then you will try to tolerate or say yes as much as you can and hope that is a slower route to the escalation.
This line of thinking could be used to justify all sorts of stereotypes. Not saying that's good or bad,but one could talk about the median woman, black, white, asian...etc.
Generalization is important. It helps us manage complexity.
When making generalizations, or stereotyping, it is definitely a good thing to talk about the median person.
For instance, Bernie Sanders gets a lot of his appeal by appealing to the generalized, stereotyped american public. Its an incredibly important skill to be able to make those generalizations in order to get appeal. When talking about "Wall Street" his message is not "this is a multifaceted topic". Instead Wall Street is stereotyped to simplify his arguments.
While I take mild offense at your characterization (#notallwomen!), I will point out that many women are trained from a very young age to make those excuses and not set boundaries. They have to hug the family member who creeps on them because else they are rude; they can't hit back the kid who hit them first and they're told to think, "Maybe he's having a bad day -- you should give him a hug instead!"
For fun, check out the time out chairs at this Etsy shop: https://www.etsy.com/listing/247648122/boys-and-girls-time-o... Girls are supposed to be nice and listen. Boys are supposed to not kick or shout. Be nice -- that's where the excuses start getting made. It's a hard message to get out of your psyche.
I had one of those gems too. I now have a deviated septum.
It was in my thirties, and she was hot.
When I realized she went into situations looking for drama; I finally told her to get lost.
I was drinking pretty heavily when I was dating her. I thought she was this misunderstood goth chick. Well, when I stopped drinking, I saw the sutle cues she was giving out. The little coy looks, while I was getting drinks. Actively stretching her neck in order to hear some idiot say anything remotely sexist.
I think she enjoyed the fights I got in over her. She just needed to know she was pretty enough to fight over?
Well--no one is fighting over her anymore. The labial facial
lines are deep. The gray is comming through the black die. The magic is gone. Her fiery personality is now just angry, and bitter. Age is a leveler of that beauty asset.
I thought I was the least superficial man in the world. I used to laugh at guys who doted over pretty women. I used to tell girlfriends upfront, "I'm not one of those guys who momma will like. I wish I was more like your other boyfriends?" I thought I was in charge. Thought?
Boy, I was wrong. And I have a nasal cavity to prove it. She was an anomaly though. I never had this problem(defending thy maidens honor) with anyone else. She definetly had me fooled, or my drinking blinded me from seeing the person she really was?
Agree with this, but men are victims of stalking as well (considering the theme of the article). Perhaps the article insisted too much that it is a women's problem. In any case, if the laws related to staking don't exclude male victims, good enough.
They don't exclude men. The ability to get LEO to give a crap varied by jurisdiction but plenty of guys have managed to get consequences enforced on their male or female harassers.
Mostly I think it's a result of the average LEO/judge being older and having no clue what the consequences are of the ongoing harassment. It's definitely true that lots of judges/prosecutors have told people to "just get off the internet".
Laws don't exclude, but their application and interpretation sometimes does.
Not long ago in my country, there was a proposal to add funding to research domestic violence committed by women.
The women's organisations of all major political parties (except one) signed a common statement which opposed the funding of this research. They said it was diverting attention away from the main problem which is violence by men. This they were saying without looking at the actual numbers. They were in fact opposing research to find out and evaluate the actual numbers.
The actual numbers in this country from crime statistics: in 2008, the victims of domestic violence in homicide and grievous bodily harm cases were 116 men and 111 women. This was irrelevant, according to these political women's organisations.
The issue was raised to public consciousness when a man, assaulted by his wife, brought to publicity the response he had got from calling 112 (emergency number), where the police dispatcher said to him: "What, are you letting a woman beat you up?"
Yes, laws are in principle gender neutral, but their application is in many cases favouring one gender. Often the favoured gender is women.
There is a huge gender bias in play. In the US(and probably most other western countries), domestic violence is viewed as only something that men do to women.
It's treated as a joke when a woman is violent against a man and it's completely ignored that lesbian couples have the same rate of domestic violence as heterosexual couples.
Um how is the "societal pressure" not to be rude different for women and men? In general people try not to be rude. Not only because of societal pressure, but also to avoid escalation of conflicts. What is different is that women get asked out a lot more than men, so maybe they are more often confronted with the task of rejecting somebody.
There is no indication here that being rude would have prevented the stalking.
> Um how is the "societal pressure" not to be rude different for women and men?
Where to begin? A rude man might be described as "tough", "assertive", or "confident". What would a rude woman be described as? Moreover, what constituted rudeness for a man? How about for a woman? See the double standard?
No, not in real life. Wherever you live/work is fucked up if you do (academia, perchance ?). Rude men are just described as rude, often in less polite ways. I've worked bars, factories, manual labour, all the way up to board rooms and I have never once seen this particular double standard applied. I say this as someone with both a keen eye for and a near zero tolerance of prejudice and discrimination of any kind.
Imagine a business meeting. A person is talking, and a man interrupts and talks over that person.
The person asserts themselves, and tells the interrupting man not to interrupt.
That person is more likely to be seen as confident or assertive if they're a man, and more likely to be seen as shrill or bitchy if they're a woman.
> I have never once seen this particular double standard applied. I say this as someone with both a keen eye for and a near zero tolerance of prejudice and discrimination of any kind.
I'm surprised by this, because it's very very common, and has been written about in national newspapers in different countries.
I think you have changed the subject, though. Interrupting somebody in a group discussion may or may not be rude at times, but it is hardly the same kind of rude as brushing off somebody who invites you to a date. Taking a woman's ideas and pretending they are your own is completely unrelated.
Edit: more specifically, your links are about non-rude actions by women being considered rude, whereas the discussion is about rude actions by men not being considered rude. For example, from one of your links, I don't think anybody thought Kanye West was not rude for grabbing the microphone from Taylor Swift.
Huh. I would have thought that the woman in question is assertive and putting an asshole in his place, but now that you've told me society at large thinks of her as a bitch, I'll make sure to fall in line.
Do not try that mock outrage here. You know exactly what was said. It is not a new thing that most people will think that an assertive woman is acting like a bitch, even if they're doing the same thing a man is doing.
While true, it ignores the very pertinent fact that the behaviors that are called rude in women are often called something entirely different when they're done by men. Women behaving assertively tends to get them called bitches, and ball-busters, and other, far less printable things.
That's just a claim you make. And I doubt people like assertive men so much. In what context, anyway? So if you have an assertive male boss, you go "thank god I don't have to make decisions myself, he is so great", if you have an assertive female boss you go "what a bitch"? Seems very unlikely to me - more likely, your opinion is based on lots of one-sided anecdotes by women who only noticed themselves. (Meaning they noticed a backlash against their assertiveness and assumed it must be a woman problem, never noticing any backlash against men because of confirmation bias).
Hopefully this is changing, and people will come to view rudeness as equally negative (or positive) regardless of gender. I for one would not describe a rude man in any way that wouldn't also apply equally to a rude woman.
They are more often confronted with the task of rejecting somebody...
...who might attack them.
When your experience of "rejecting" someone includes having been subject to verbal, or even physical abuse, you learn very quickly to dissemble, dodge the question, and otherwise avoid confrontation.
Don't think it happens? Ask your girlfriend, or your sister, or any other woman in your life. After you've heard their stories, ask yourself if you'd start to behave differently around rejecting people, if you had to risk that kind of treatment.
I have been screamed at by women, too (for example once I asked one who was struggling with a vending machine if I could help her). As I said - in general we try to be polite to prevent escalation of things.
And it doesn't sound from the story as if the girl agreed to meet for dinner because she feared an abusive response otherwise.
Yeah? And were you physically intimidated by that woman? Could she obviously have overpowered you and visited violence upon you, if she'd wanted to? That is a very real threat that almost every woman (okay, maybe not Rhonda Rousey) faces in almost every interaction with almost every man.
Is it likely? No. Absolutely not. In many — if not most — cases, it's vanishingly unlikely. But is it possible? What do you think? Frankly, it's delusional not to believe that it does — and should — legitimately play into a woman's thought process pretty much every time she has to turn a man down for a drink, or a date, or when she says no, or tells him to stop.
It seriously blows my mind how many people apparently can't even attempt to look at the world from someone else's perspective, and instead just assume — and not even consciously assume, but the more insidious, unconscious kind of assumption — "Welp, this is how things are for me, so they must be the same for everyone else, too." That is some of the most myopic, unexamined "thinking" I can imagine, and it literally causes me pain every time I have to confront it, or try to engage with it, in whatever form.
And you just offered a perfect example of it: "I didn't feel threatened when that woman at the vending machine yelled at me, so women must not feel that way in a confrontation with men!" I know you don't actually believe that — at least not completely — but that's precisely the perspective that offering your anecdote as a counter to my comment conveys.
And then, on top of all of that, there's your victim-blaming. "She agreed to meet this taint smear for dinner, so clearly she invited his attentions!"
You really exaggerate. Most such interactions happen in public spaces. A man can not just beat up a woman in a public space on a whim. Most woman don't walk around in constant fear of men, either. Perhaps the opposite is true: we are all so used to people being polite that we don't know how to react when somebody isn't, like a stalker who doesn't get the hint. (And can I just say Trump...). If that girl had had more encounters with messed up men she would perhaps have reacted differently.
I actually tend to be afraid of women going mental. These days, they might be armed. When I walk home from the tube at night I always worry the woman in front of me might get it into her head that I could be following her and suddenly draw a weapon on me. So, in your own words, it is unlikely, but also possible that a woman could go violent on me. There are also the false rape accusations - women have many options to ruin a man's life.
Also, I never said she invited the attention, just that her agreeing to go for dinner was not because she was afraid he would become violent otherwise. There is nothing in that statement that validates his actions. Don't just shout "victim blaming" as a knee jerk reaction in any discussion about women, it's ridiculous.
I boggles my mind that you assume so many things, and seem to be so cocksure in your opinions.
Women may be more afraid of escalating conflicts than a man would. Surely it's not controversial that an average woman is physically weaker than an average man.
Maybe, but in general it is a bad idea to provoke a conflict without good reason. Even if you are very strong, there is always a probability > 0 that you receive some damage in a fight.
Be a guy and have a women ask you why their car isn't starting or can you help change a tire. Saying no in many parts of the world / US is unacceptable and considered rude. So, I guess male agency can be constrained in the same manner. Its amazing what guys will do not to look like an a__hole.
> the societal pressure placed on women to be accommodating and not be rude and how this can be manipulated to constrain female agency in the world
Without commenting on whether this is a fair assessment, I will observe that in order to make this case for this to be true, more evidence than a single (fictional) anecdote would be necessary, and one would also want to accurately assess whether non-women are also expected not to be rude.
Strong username for this reply. If you don't think women are socialized to be accommodating you have your head in the sand. Look at profession choices, look at the plethora of anecdotal stories, and look at how parents interact with their daughters.
I don't understand how people are always so shocked that some people are unaware of these issues. For a related example, I didn't know catcalling was that prevalent (outside of the assumedly anachronistic stereotype of construction workers I'd seen in movies) until shortly after college. I'd never witnessed it happen, and none of my female friends had ever mentioned it happening to them, so why would I assume that it happened super often?
It was only after we all graduated and moved to denser cities that female friends started experiencing it and mentioning it (and since then I've read plenty of articles about it). Since none of my friends are assholes, my initial "wow it's really that universal an experience?" was met with affirmation instead of "you really are a pervy creeper with your head in the sand".
Your specific example about socializing women to be accommodating is also not something I knew existed until a couple years out of college. I didn't see how my friends' parents raised them firsthand and my sister was/is a holy terror, by far the least polite and accommodating of our otherwise fairly reserved family (myself included). The girls in our friend group tended to be less demure and more confident. Again, I wouldn't know about it if I hadn't read so much about it, and there are plenty of people who haven't been exposed to articles about it.
The claim in question was "societal pressure placed on women to be accommodating and not be rude and how this can be manipulated to constrain female agency". It seems to me the links you provide are only marginally related. The first is also paywalled, and the last does seem to be an opinion piece. Or does it include some actual data later on (I only looked at the first quarter or so, as it is rather long)? It proposes some experiments, but then goes on with "it is safe to expect result x" - so why even bother proposing experiments?
One example they provide is
(a) "Oh dear, you've put the peanut butter in the refrigerator again."
vs
(b) "Shit, you've put the peanut butter in the refrigerator again."
And we are meant to decide which one was said by a woman. Then it goes on "It is safe to predict that people would classify the first sentence as part of 'women's language', the second as 'men's language'"
Really??? Because women don't say shit (even in 1973)? And men don't say "oh dear"? If that is seminal and what the modern opinion is based on, excuse me for not being impressed.
Edit: just read more of the second link about negotiations. What I see is them just making another unsubstantiated claim ("it's because of socialisation"). But they asked people over the internet when they last negotiated. Have they taken into account that many women perhaps don't even have a job where they get a salary (ie they are house wives)? Or maybe they are more likely to take on jobs that are unionized (teachers, for example), so that the salary is fixed anyway? And so on. Surely there are reasons - maybe it even is socialization, but there is nothing in the articles to substantiate that claim. It is just the author's bias.
When you ignore that nearly the entirety of the experiences that people share you're probably filtering out signal. But knowing HN some people won't be satisfied until we do a double blind study over the entirety of someone's life until they're an adult. Ooh and don't forget n must be ge 1000
Try to keep up. The OP stated "and one would also want to accurately assess whether non-women are also expected not to be rude".
So I provided two very good examples. Donald Trump is another. Unless you believe that Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison were/are expected to be polite constantly.
> It's often hard for men to understand the societal pressure placed on women to be accommodating and not be rude and how this can be manipulated to constrain female agency in the world.
Sorry, but I'm going to have to call out this statement as sexist. There are also several other strange "facts" being passed around in other comments which are similarly biased. To be clear, I'm not calling you sexist. In fact, I think your comment makes a great point about submission to societal pressures leading to these sorts of problems.
Getting back to the quoted statement, I strongly suspect both genders are equally susceptible to being manipulated by societal pressures. I also don't think men find it hard to understand this. If there's data to show otherwise, I welcome it. In its absence, I believe it more wise to hold this neutral view rather than perpetuating a gender bias.
Let's use Curb Your Enthusiasm as a means to elucidate my argument. The lead character in that show gets into all manner of uncomfortable and disastrous situations as a result of bending to societal pressures; not wanting to be "rude". The lead character is male and I'll bet more guys than not can relate. Perhaps not to the same scale as what is portrayed in the show, because the show is meant to be entertaining, but perhaps more on the level of The Office (US) awkwardness.
So I doubt that societal malleability differs between the genders. You're still right in bringing it up, though, because indeed this habit of not wanting to be rude is clearly a contributing factor to cyberstalking cases. I just don't think it's what leads to a greater number of females being victims versus males.
It is not sexist to observe that, in many or most societies on Earth, men and women are systematically treated differently in many social and professional contexts. Nor is it "perpetuating a gender bias" to posit that some of this difference in experiences between the genders may cause one group to be more affected by some societal pressures than the other.
I'm not saying it is one way or the other. Regardless, playing the sexism/bias card here is overreacting: you have one hypothesis, OP has another, neither of you has presented any evidence or argument. Larry David doesn't count.
And no one is claiming that. What is being claimed is that it is hard for men to understand this particular societal pressure that women experience.
That is, if a man understands the concepts of societal pressures, they still may not be immediately aware of this societal pressure; it may not be obvious to them, as they do not experience it.
Both genders are subjected to the pressure to conform to social expectations, and those pressures by themselves are often harmful and holding us back. But the pressures exerted on men and women are often very different, and it is important to be aware of those differences. Only by being aware of these pressures and understanding the differences, can we really address them and do something about them.
That women are expected to be polite and accommodating is absolutely sexist, and resisting that pressure can sometimes be just as dangerous as giving in to it.
But that men are expected to not cry and be strong and dominant and all that crap, that is just as harmful. To men, and to society.
I agree that men also feel pressure to accommodate requests they might rather not.
I think it can arise due to an imbalance of whatever sort. I've been in that position with males with whom I didn't want to escalate a situation and with males while on their home turf (say, in a strange country). But I tend not to fear being assaulted by a woman or tricked/trapped by a woman in a foreign country. People routinely get scammed because they are too polite or fearful to say no or walk away.
you're railing against the observation, making discussion of the causes difficult and therefore possible solution discovery possible.
If we are to tackle social problems, we can't argue about language of the problem for fear of being branded as *ist
we don't do this about high blood pressure, or diabetes. The way you are arguing is actually a logical extension of the original observation in the parent. The original statement was actually present rather well.
You make the correct observation that women and men have the same mental faculties (if taken as a whole, individuals will vary.) However you make a grand gesture of pointing out that women and men are the same. We know this, the original post implied this.
The societal pressures tend to be different, and it is not sexist to say that members of each gender may not immediately understand the particulars of the pressure they receive.
Both genders receive societal pressure. But they receive different societal pressure. It is not sexist to suggest that members of a gender many not understand the particulars of the pressure experienced by the other gender.
I won't pretend that I know what the answer to this is, but the idea that the answer is evident is fucking absurd. Gender roles cut quite sharply both ways, and the only way to think otherwise is willful ignorance: for one extremely obvious example to anyone with even a second of thought, how often do you see men crying?
Perhaps the one that is absent from any group of older people in the mall because it dies 5 years earlier? The one that is most often sent to war? The one that has substantial more suicides?
Which gender gets killed most often at work because of a social pressure that your value is determined by having a job, so if the only job options are dangerous, you best take one anyways?
Unless we can get a well defined and agreed upon definition of 'more social pressed' and a way to measure such, we could spend all day running in circles on this issue.
> Sure but which gender does society place more pressures on?
I'm not sure that there is a good, unambiguous, and meaningful way of doing a unidimensional quantification of that to make that comparison. Its probably better to recognize that each gender has different socially-imposed expectations, that create problems in different situations and present different opportunities for conflicts with between internal preferences and drives and external expectations.
You can then meaningfully discuss differences (including "which gender is more affected") between pressures in particular contexts, such as pressures to accommodate social advances in situations that compromise personal safety, without getting into a competition on the vague issue of "which gender is exposed to more social pressures" in some murky overall sense.
well to take your question a bit literally, men have quite a long history of being pressured into soldiering. First thing that hit my mind when i read your question: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_feather
I was responding to varjag's post, which was saying that the grandparent post was downplaying the societal pressure, which it wasn't. It was a correction to that false statement.
The situation for the genders is asymmetric and so the effects of non-conformance have different outcomes. If I had to post an "all lives matter" argument in a thread about racism on blacks it would absolutely be downplaying racism, even if the statement is technically correct.
I am not familiar with this 'all lives matter' thing, so I will ignore that for the moment, it also seems to be off-topic.
Did you know that the effects of non-conformance have different outcomes with different people. You might say that is a useless thing to say, and you'd be right. Just as the non-explanation you put about genders and non-conformance is as well. And my post had nothing to say that it wasn't asymmetric, so your response was changing the subject.
The grandparent post you mentioned in your post before was asking for evidence before assuming that females were more susceptible to societal pressures, as that is playing to a stereotype. He suggested that it is wiser to take a neutral view. My post corrected you when you said that that post was trying to downplay the societal pressure, it wasn't.
Your response with the "all lives matter" sideshow is changing the argument again and is quite dishonest. Just like you misrepresented the "grandparent post".
I would like to mention my sympathies are with that lady, saying that it was here fault for not being rude is obnoxious. There is way too little being done about stalking and other repeated behaviours that aggregate to the detriment of someones life.
Humans aren't averages. A randomly chosen woman will almost always have some fraction of men out there she can physically dominate. And some women are just plain tough and could physically impose on nearly all men. And yet men don't worry and walk faster when the woman they're alone with in the parking lot looks like she could bench a truck.
I'm not certain what your point was intended to be, but human men are far stronger than human women with very rare exception. A randomly chosen women is unlikely to be able to physically dominate any man at all, absent deformity. The difference is quite stark.
Certainly a highly trained female body builder is an exception, but they are also vanishingly rare in the population and very unlikely to be randomly chosen.
Sorry. This is one area that feminism doesn't cover with its hypothesis of equality.
I'm not sure what this whole chain of reasoning has to do with the argument at hand.
Most of the violence and rape committed to male victims has male perpetrators. Does it follow that most men can overpower an average man? Are feminists still to blame here?
Do we count the men she can get help using social leverage? One only needs to watch the videos of domestic violence experiments where they swap genders. The reactions show that while men might be able to win if they were isolated on an island, the total power within society is not in the man's favor. Unless you are in a culture which tolerates DV regardless of gender, in which case men do have it better.
But if you don't conform to social pressures you are either an "asshole" or a "bitch" depending on your gender. Being an asshole is socially acceptable if you are successful. Being a bitch is not under any circumstances.
Wut? (Some) Successful/attractive women carry their bitchiness as a badge of honour. As in "I am so attractive/successful, I can be as bitchy as I please". Which is why some people are attracted to bitches/assholes.
BS because:
Man get conditioned from a very young age to get their sheet together and not let their life be steered by fear. And if they do. They are a fail. THIS is societal pressure.
Not being able to saying no just means she is weak. She gives absolutely no reason for her being unable to say no. Except that she would like to NOT confront that bad feeling she might have.
And YOU coming here and talking about her being socially pushed is exactly the opposite. YOU/WE (Society) (except me) are helping her with making her story become viral to not be socially pushed, but socially comforted.
She has been socially comforted so much, that she has become unaccountable, unable to stand for herself.
Thats my I'm taking the counterpart. I'm actually helping them get what they want. All they have to do is work for it.
>Not being able to saying no just means she is weak.
Or you know, since the guy started stalking her from the age of twelve, she may have been conditioned to accept that type of behavior, or otherwise failed to realize how serious it actually was until later.
It's also very possible she didn't want to confront her stalker out of fear. Have you ever tried telling a crazy person they're crazy? Hint: it's usually impossible and almost always turns ugly.
But, to expand this, you explain that men are generally conditioned to be fearless, if they are not, they are labelled girly, or something similar right?
So conversely women are conditioned to be compliant/delicate right? Women are not allowed to fight, confront or be violent. After all women fighting is a fetish right?
Now, lets get to the point, if a man writes a blog post about his crippling fear of something that might seem easy overcome, like water, or rain. Does that make him weak? Admitting to society that he is not what he is supposed to be? No.
I'd also postulate that actually if she stood up to him, would he have stopped? Its unlikely, its a special type of person that stalks for 15 years.
Its also a shame that you didn't feel confident to air your views under your real account.
This is simply not true. The 'societal pressure' on women to be accommodating is the cost levied on women for being allowed to be judge and jury about how someone is treating them. To quote, 'with great power comes great responsibility'.
By missing the power part of the equation, you are creating a victim of responsibility.
In a world where women actually don't have to face any repercussion for being irresponsible, I think you are making a grave mistake.
"I had waited on Reverend Richard at a York Steak House I worked at, and one night he invited me out to his car to see some baby rabbits, and I didn’t want to be rude, so… here we are."
And Matt Lauer responds: "I’m always amazed by what women will do because they’re afraid of being rude…"
It's often hard for men to understand the societal pressure placed on women to be accommodating and not be rude and how this can be manipulated to constrain female agency in the world.