Not Here To Be Liked

by Michelle Quach

Because everyone loves a girlboss until she tries to tell you what to do.

A girl who seeks a leadership position must be smart, competent, hardworking, attractive, and, above all, nice. She must be all of those things in order to stand a chance against a male opponent, who frequently only has to be some of those things, and sometimes isn’t any of them. A guy who seeks a leadership position just has to try not to mess up too much. Girls get judged for their past; guys get judged for their potential.

You know how there’s often that one thing someone, usually a parent, becomes convinced is the solution to all your problems? And even though the thing is so specific and trivial that no otherwise rational person could possibly believe it’s the driving factor behind anything, they still manage, with prodigious creativity, to find ways to make everything about it?

The man has never had one in his life – why does he get to have an opinion about it?

I’m in the hallway before I register his comment, and when I glance back over my shoulder, he gives me a small smile that makes me forget, just for a moment, that I have anything to worry about at all.

I questioned then, standing alone in the dark corridor, whether there was any point in being pretty if it could so easily, and arbitrarily, be lost.

“Don’t lie,” I say. “You want me to say that I like you.” The words come out before I can stop them. “You want me to say that every time I have a bubble tea now, I can’t help thinking of your sad boba-drinking technique. That I sped through three hundred pages of Life: A User’s Manual with a confusing sense of urgency because you lent it to me. That I’ve read all about Tommy John surgery even though I don’t give two shits about baseball, because I wanted to know if you would be okay.”

“Because none of you have noticed how everyone’s reaction to this entire situation has still been one hundred per cent sexist.”