The impossible task of being a woman
'You’re a walking tangle of contradictions. Most of us are. How could we not be?'
I had an epiphany on the Tube the other day. I was changing lines at Moorgate, heading up the escalator, when I noticed something strange about the framed advertising posters on the wall beside me. Perhaps I should say, more aptly, a strange absence: because out of about a dozen adverts featuring a person, there were precisely zero men.
You’re overthinking this, I told myself. I changed on to the Metropolitan line. I walked up and down the Tube carriage, testing my hypothesis. Nothing.
I saw advertisements for pregnancy supplements. A recruitment website featuring a woman in a hardhat and high-vis. A Flying Tiger/Shopify partner ad. A laundry company. A fatigue supplement. High protein meals from The Gym Kitchen. Eventually, I found the exception that proved the rule. An advert for a Stocks & Shares ISA, featuring Swedish footballer Zlatan Ibrahomović.
Growing up, I naïvely thought the impact of advertising was exaggerated. When the Beach Body Ready advert was banned by Sadiq Khan in 2016 – together with any adverts promoting unrealistic body ideals – part of me considered it to be an overreaction. Then again, I grew up watching back-to-back music videos on MTV in the early Noughties. Protein World had nothing on them.
As I walked up and down the Tube carriage, I felt differently. It dawned on me that my twice-daily commute had been accompanied by an insidious soundtrack I didn’t choose. A voice inside my head, whispering: get pregnant! Smash gender stereotypes! Buy cute paper napkins! Outsource your household’s laundry! Be less tired! Work out! Look after yourself! Look after your kid! Read to the kid you don’t have! Send cash (and naan) to your extended Punjabi family!
According to stats, in 2021/2, 57 per cent of adverts featured women. On this commute, it was more like 94 per cent – and that’s a conservative estimate. Is this how gender equality looks in 2025: feature women in everything, a cover-all-bases approach to debunking sexist stereotypes?
Or is it just strategic? I can’t help thinking that the 2023 IPSOS insight that women featured in ‘non-traditional’ roles in adverts boosts short-term sales by 24 per cent might have something to do with this prevalence. Meanwhile, 58 per cent of adverts continue to feature women in traditional roles.
However, I’m no advertising expert. What I can testify is how it made me feel, which is exhausted – and angry. I hadn’t even arrived at my workspace, yet I’d be smacked in the face on my Thursday morning with about 16 conflicting versions of the woman I could (and should?) be.
Is it just me? I don’t think so. More than ever, I’m seeing a backlash to what I can only describe as the impossible task of being a woman. Entering Billboard’s Top 20 this week was Lola Young’s song, ‘Messy’. As the chorus goes,
‘I'm too messy and then I'm too f**king clean/You told me get a job then you ask where the hell I've been/And I'm too perfect 'til I open my big mouth/ I want to be me, is that not allowed?’
(For my fellow millennials and older, it reminded me of Meredith Brooks’ 1997 song, ‘Bitch’: ‘I’m a bitch, I’m a lover, I’m a child, I’m a mother…’).
Last week, Minnie Driver performed at a Letters Live event – the footage was later shared online here. She did a reading from
’s advice column, which came into being in New York Magazine and now exists here on Substack. Driver did a reading of Havrilesky’s response to a reader who asked: ‘How can I be less nice?’. The whole performance is powerful, with stellar takeaway at the end from Polly – I highly recommend it for people-pleasers especially. But the part that really got me is this line:‘You’re a walking tangle of contradictions. And that’s OK, most of us are like that. Women, most of all. How could we not be? People want us to be sexy warriors who roll over and play dead on command.’
Then, of course, there was that speech in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie film, delivered by America Ferrera’s character Gloria:
‘It is literally impossible to be a woman… 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.’
Just after the film came out, I discussed this speech with a male friend who – essentially – didn’t buy it. ‘Being told to be different things at once… that’s not being a woman,’ he argued. ‘That’s being a human.’
I accepted his point. We receive opposing messages all the time. From our personal versus professional lives; our partners versus our upbringing; our cultural conditioning versus mainstream culture; our gendered conditioning versus a masculinised or femininised workplace culture. I could go on. We receive external ‘shoulds’ all through our lives, and we have to forge our own pathway through them.
So why does it feel harder as a woman – indeed, why do so many women resonate with this experience? Maybe this is what feminism looks like in 2025. You can be anything – so why not be everything? Shouldn’t you try?
I can only speak for myself – as someone who looks like some of the adverts in Moorgate Tube station. For me, it’s not just a case of receiving all these messages of who to be; it’s the mistake I make, time and time again, of being accommodating to them. Of folding myself up into different origami shapes in order to be that perfect hostess/career woman/doting girlfriend/empathetic friend/gym bunny/Mother Earth/glamorous wedding guest.
And I’m seeing the error in that. The necessity of, instead, taking the time to ask: which of these serve me right now, and which ones couldn’t I care less about? Of prioritising the simple question of: ‘What do I want?’.
I want my thoughts to be my own. I want my life choices to be my own. I want to decide what tangled mix of contradictions to hold within me. And I need to make these decisions for myself. Because if I don’t, then – as a sobering journey on the London Underground taught me – the outside world will decide it all for me.
Reading…
Widely pegged to win the Booker Prize (although it lost out to Orbital), Percival Everett’s James more than lived up to its rave reviews. Pace-y, thought-provoking and unexpectedly funny, I inhaled it during a trip to Bologna the other weekend.
Trying…
I went to my first Nite Writes with
this week – an in-person write-athon to live jazz, followed by a mingle. Founders Matt and Parul pulled off yet another successful, stimulating event – and I got to catch up with fellow Substacker , a new writer friend behind the brilliant . Talking of in-person writer events, Michaella hosts quarterly Substack meet-ups in London – so if anyone’s been looking for something similar, she’s your woman.
Until next week!
Francesca
Flashbacks to sitting in my Grandma's living room after school watching MTV and The Box all afternoon and being utterly desensitised to the impossibly gorgeous scantily-clad women...
Not sure why I'd not already subscribed to this, but I have done now! And I'm definitely looking into those writer's groups you've mentioned too, thanks so much Francesca.
This was such a powerful one Francesca, just that moment of epiphany when you realise impossible, contadictory and unsustainable standards are being shot at us all over. Coming back to the question you ask: what do I want? That's the hard bit xo