A neighbor walked up to me the other day maskless. Even though I'm in the high-risk category for COVID-19 due to an autoimmune disease and haven't left my home since the end of February 2020 except to walk my dog, I smiled politely and tried to put six feet between us. A stream of thoughts flooded my mind: It’s fine, I'll cover myself in hand sanitizer and take a shower and drink an Emergen-C and pray I'll be okay when the only thought that should have been on my mind—and which I should have vocalized—was “put on a mask and back the hell up.”
I’ve since determined that women's “be polite now, solve the problem later” mentality has got to go in 2021. Being polite is not more important than protecting yourself from COVID-19. Interviews with over two dozen women, spanning Gen Z to Boomers, residing in over a dozen states and four countries, reveal that women resoundingly agree. If anything is going to incite our conviction to say “no more” to politeness, it might as well be living through an actual plague.
Of course, that’s easier said than done. Women’s pathological politeness, an everlasting ploy of the patriarchy, is very much alive and well. Dr. Leela Magavi, Hopkins-trained psychiatrist and Regional Medical Director for Community Psychiatry, California's largest outpatient mental health organization, says girls and women being polite—often at the expense of their safety and wellbeing—is learned behavior. “During childhood and adolescence, girls are socialized to respond to individuals’ remarks in a courteous manner, irrespective of the content,” Magavi says. “Over time, young girls evolve into women who prioritize other individuals’ comfort and emotions over their own.”
Politeness in women is a two-pronged problem: It’s not just that girls grow up inundated by the message that being “polite” means praise and brownie points; it’s that when they do speak their minds and demand to be heard, they’re often labeled “difficult” or “nasty.”
“Even when I had COVID-19, I was worried my doctor would think I was overreacting,” says Aileen Weintraub, author of the social justice book We Got Game! 35 Female Athletes Who Changed the World. “I write about women’s empowerment, but I still have to remind myself that I am my own best advocate.”
The compulsion to be polite extends even to those voluntarily putting themselves in harm’s way. Michelle Fishburne, a 57-year-old woman from North Carolina who is RV’ing across the country, says, “I would love to tell you that I have jettisoned politeness in return for protecting myself from COVID-19, but that is sadly not the case. I still cower, to be honest, when I ask people to wear a mask to protect my safety. I don’t want to push them away or start a verbal standoff, so I often stay quiet.”
Pushing paralytic politeness one step further, Fishburne says she feels guilty wearing a mask when others are not—and sometimes asks non-mask wearers permission to protect herself. “I say things like, ‘I hope it's okay that I am wearing a mask. I am traveling all over the U.S., so I don't know if I've been exposed. I hope you don't mind.’”
Dr. Magavi says that women’s people-pleasing preoccupation with putting others’ needs above their own is a pattern that can be broken. She routinely leads girls and women through exposure therapy, role playing real-life stressors—moments where it feels impossible to speak up—until doing so becomes muscle memory. She’s heartened that the pandemic has been a catalyst for girls and women to flex the “I’m speaking” muscle that Vice President Kamala Harris personifies. “I think this time has transformed social etiquette,” Magavi says.
The fear of getting sick, dying, or losing a loved one has proved a major impetus for foregoing politeness. Niya Panamdanam, a 30-year-old self-taught engineer living in Toronto, Canada, says her Indian heritage, as well as working in a field that is overwhelmingly male, often meant she “shied away from confronting rude behavior.”
“It was a survival mechanism that helped me navigate an industry where I have had to always prove my skills and credibility over and over again,” Panamdanam says. The pandemic forced her to realize that not speaking up “meant risking my family and my mental health.” While she admits “it's not easy to unlearn bad habits, you bet that I no longer silence myself.” Her pandemic-imposed isolation inspired her to reevaluate what’s most important to her in life, and her priorities changed. “The pandemic forced me to realize my life and my time are way too valuable for me to waste away in politeness,” she says.
Panamdanam has now not only mustered the will to tell anyone approaching her to put on a mask; she found the resolve to leave her well-paying job for the uncertainty—and joy—of cofounding her own business. She says her newfound boldness is “showing up in my work and other relationships where I do carry myself with a lot more confidence.”
The high stakes of the pandemic have forced Christine Sloan Stoddard, a 32-year-old Salvadoran-American artist living in Brooklyn, to reassess her learned reflex to “be a lady and not cause a scene.” As the child of a Central American immigrant, Stoddard says she was raised to be “exceedingly polite, almost timid at times.” Now she’s over it. “Who cares about being polite when health and safety are at stake and the world feels like it's ending?”
Letting go of caring what others think has been a welcome gift in a year plagued by so much loss and grief. Angela Diaz, a millennial graphic designer from Los Angeles, says the anonymity of using Zoom without her camera on has emboldened her to speak her mind—and only smile if she damn well feels like it. As a Black woman, Diaz says, society has always expected her to counteract the stereotype of the “angry Black woman” with superfluous, almost sickening politeness. Pre-pandemic, she felt pressured to “work a little bit harder, smile a little bit longer.”
Now working from home, to protect the privacy of her baby and five year old child, Diaz rarely turns her camera on for work meetings. The fact that her co-workers can’t see her facial expressions has increased her confidence in saying what she really thinks. Diaz isn’t hiding; she’s finally being fully, unabashedly herself: “I no longer sugarcoat anything.”
The pandemic also prompted Karin Hitselberger, who has cerebral palsy, to quit apologizing for her body and speak up for her health. “Niceness is a trap laid to get marginalized people to stop standing up to oppression, and stop calling out injustice,” says disability rights activist Karin Hitselberger, a millennial living in Washington D.C. Hitselberger says she “always feared taking up too much space or being too much, especially as a disabled plus size woman.” She believed that openly stating her needs to her caregivers would make her seem unappreciative. Now, she readily speaks up. “I think part of what inspired this change is having to spend so much time in my own environment and realizing that I should at the very least feel comfortable in my own space,” she says.
According to Dr. Magavi, it’s a blatant lack of comfort that is most likely to disrupt women’s autopilot politeness. If someone is flagrantly rude or if there's a fear of danger, a flip is switched.
Which is why politeness was nowhere in my M.O. when a man tried to frighten my dog on a recent walk. She’s a pit bull, and ever since I rescued her, I’ve noticed a pattern of men barking at her in an attempt to rile her. She’s my baby, and I would protect her with my life. So in that moment, I loudly told him to get the hell away from us and held my ground, not flinching when he lunged at us and called me a bitch.
Why was I able to speak up to protect my dog but failed to protect myself when my neighbor approached me without a mask? Part of it is an overriding maternal instinct, but Dr. Magavi says it’s more than that. In the case of my unmasked neighbor, dangerous as the situation may have been, there was the illusion of civility, which blocked my fight-or-flight response. She was personable as she risked my life and, according to Magavi, “even fabricated kindness may be enough to elicit a pleasant response.” With practice, Magavi says women can learn to be just as triggered by the subtext of danger as we are by blatant threats.
Let’s be honest: This is not going to happen overnight. A pandemic is not going to magically undo decades of learned behavior. But in an era where all hell is breaking loose, where women are choosing sweats over Spanx and fresh faces over foundation—minimizing and concealing ourselves be damned—we can and should resolve to break up with politeness, once and for all.
