Feisty

By Mae Wright

Most dictionaries define feisty as 'having or showing a lively aggressiveness'; 'tough, independent, and spirited'; 'lively, resilient and self-reliant.'  Sounds like a good thing to be.

The Collins dictionary adds the essential element that restricts which words feisty can be combined with 'often when you would not expect them to be, for example because they are very young, old or ill'. We see a feisty 85 year old who is active and assertive in their local community, and not what you would expect them to be: the elderly archetype of retiring, quiet, decrepit, submissive, helpless, ill.

But when it's combined with the word woman then feisty usually has had a negative meaning.

Quote from P!nk

A feisty woman. The adjective feisty implies the individual behaves differently from how women are expected to. Tough, having a lively aggressiveness (i.e. assertive), independent, spirited, resilient, self-reliant. Not what she is expected to be: gentle, sweet, tolerant, deferential, caring and sensitive. Not secondary and dependent.

I've never heard the phrase a feisty man. That's because men are expected to be tough, assertive, independent, spirited, resilient, self-reliant. For men, not behaving as expected earns them different negative adjectives. (I've heard of men giving feisty speeches or taking a feisty approach, in which case feisty means 'stepping up to the fight' but not the man himself being feisty.)

I have wondered about this as I've struggled my way through life as a feisty woman. It's complicated.

My reading of contemporary culture suggests that the (young) feisty woman is considered desirable by those hetero men who bolster their masculine status by 'winning' the difficult woman. She's a challenge to woo and keep, so it's a major achievement to succeed. So on one hand, feisty is not how you would expect a woman to behave, but on the other hand, desirable. Mm…

But there is a trap for unsuspecting players: the women I call faux-feisty. One type is the irrational, unstable, immature, emotionally-dependent woman who is trying to portray toughness and spirit. (Easy to confuse with the genuine article blokes, just a tip!). High maintenance is not the same as feisty. Another type of faux-feisty woman is in an extended adolescence and relies on unpredictability, argumentativeness, irresponsibility and a general lack of care about others to create an illusion of independence and self-reliance. (Only attractive for about three weeks, second free tip!). Keen to fight is also not the same as feisty. The faux-feisty woman is all show and no substance. She will tell you 'women can do anything', but she secretly or perhaps unconsciously looks forward to some point in the future when she finds a man to look after her and she can relinquish full responsibility for herself. (She is also often confused and sad.) Unfortunately for both men and women, the faux-feisty woman is very common and can be hard to detect initially.

In contrast, the genuinely feisty woman is much less common. For a few reasons.

Life is not easy for the genuinely feisty woman. You are not as others would expect you to be, you are often uncompromising and unyielding. Women can experience brutal criticism for not being compliant and sensitive. Being different from how others expect you to be can become a part of your identity, which can feel good, but can also lead to stubbornness, resistance to help, and an isolating fear of vulnerability. It can be accompanied by dismay, frustration or a festering anger with the many men who find your way of being a woman offensive or threatening.

Feistiness requires tempering with the tolerance, sensitivity and humility that often only come with maturity. The feisty woman can be hurtful and unpleasant if she has no regard at all for others. Against the intense resistance that feisty women so very often experience, it can be hard to maintain assertiveness without becoming destructively aggressive. But it is also a deeply satisfying and rich way of living, of making your own life. With others, but not dependent on others. With a strong sense of your own value, your own status and an assurance that you are a complete person on your own. (Of course, feisty women can be uncertain about lots of other things, but not their own value as an individual.)

So what are the conditions that create a feisty woman, someone who is genuinely tough, independent and spirited, despite the Western socialisation that shapes women to be anything but. How do these uncommon women come to be?

In the past, I have considered it's a matter of individual disposition and of course opportunity. I now think the source is their parents, and in our culture, more often the father. As Deborah Conway told Melissa Fyfe (Sydney Morning Herald, Feb 2 2019) about her dad, "He was an extreme character. He created this beast that I am. We fought a lot, so I am feisty because of him, and that's good." Conway is often called a feisty woman for sticking to what she wants to do and for refusing to follow trends or the dictates of the music industry. Some say she is 'difficult', but I say that is just the 'not as expected she should be' feature of feisty making itself apparent.

Like Conway, I think the training ground for toughness and independence of thought is verbal and physical sparring and challenges, often unwinnable against the much more skilled parent (or other significant adult). Not violent, never crushing, not grossly unfair, but pushing you always to do more, learn more, get better, win. Learning how to hold your own, to participate as an equal, to play hard but fair. It is part of how boys get in their cultural training to be a man. And some few girls get it too.

My father was a demanding, curious, exuberant, achieving, striving man who loved a good story and a good debate. He was motivated (as he told me later) to instil in me the skills and value of independence, ironically so that if I ended up married to an alcoholic or 'no hoper' I could look after myself. He had seen women dear to him suffer through this and didn't want it for his daughter. His interests were diverse spanning intellectual, pragmatic and creative pursuits. My father was a 'DIY extremist', a product of his frugal upbringing. Because of this, he provided regular examples of working things out for yourself and the sense of satisfaction of independent and creative problem-solving. 

A 'sparring' father is three-quarters of my story. It could equally be a resilient and tough minded mother for other women. A role model of a docile, reliant and deferential woman isn't any help in the training, but it could well be motivation for a girl to avoid this role in the future. While my mother was also a strong, resilient and calm woman, with her own inquiring mind and sense of what she wanted, she was overshadowed by my father most of the time. Observing this was a factor in my own fierce determination to be independent.

Together, my parents also instilled in me a keen radar for con artists and charlatans who will take whatever they can get from you, which is also part of self-reliance.

So becoming a feisty woman starts with a certain disposition and motivation, but also takes a young life of positive training in independent thought, experiencing self-reliance, finding your toughness and necessary aggression to deal with challenges, and learning to trust yourself to work things out. Not everyone gets that, and unfortunately many women don't.

But maybe being feisty, genuinely feisty, makes it harder to understand those occasions in which other women fail to act as needed for their own welfare.

When asked about inappropriate touching by men in social situations later in the SMH interview, Conway says, "But why wouldn't you go: 'F… off'?" (To be clear, she's not talking about rape or domestic abuse, a totally different situation.) She obviously finds the failure of a woman to assert herself puzzling and foreign. Conway is a tall, feisty woman who clearly wouldn't allow unwanted touching to continue and wouldn't avoid embarrassing someone who had done the wrong thing.

I understand Conway's comment but I am not puzzled about why women don't assert themselves more often.

Over a lifetime of training, feisty women have learned numerous personal resources to manage tricky social interactions. Perhaps the feisty woman can simply not understand how hard it is to 'just be assertive' without those years of practice and encouragement. I think possibly Conway doesn't fully appreciate the rarity of her prolonged 'training' to be genuinely tough and resilient.

Instead of preparation for social interaction as equals, many girls have been 'trained' through their upbringing to be passive, powerless, dependent, reluctant to assert themselves. This is the training for submission to their future husband; a remnant of an archaic view of marriage. In addition, girls often see feisty woman criticised as nasty, unpleasant, contrary and unfeminine. Most young women fall into line, some after a brief period of faux-feistiness. This exacts a big price throughout life for women: on those occasions when a straightforward, direct, and assertive (not aggressive) statement of 'don't do that' might be enough, she has inadequate resources. 

Lack of training and encouragement to be feisty means women can too often fail to claim their power in social interaction.

Women with limited experience of self-reliance training might also find the feisty woman offensive, threatening or ill-informed. Reflecting this view, Conway's interviewer challenges her, "How about [the man] just doesn't do it [unwanted touch]? How about women get to walk around without being molested?" To which Conway and her partner Zygier reply, "People are imperfect… courage to say what we need to say and not be cowed by what we think is an imbalance of power".  

Conway continues that there is no clear boundary of appropriate and inappropriate behaviour in most social interactions. I agree; this is particularly relevant in the early stages of romantic or sexual interactions. She asserts that social interaction requires each person involved to be clear and direct about what they want, or more importantly, what they don't want. Human interaction is complex and people sometimes do the wrong thing or misinterpret things. Men and women get it wrong. So men and women both need to speak up for what they want and what they don't want. Clearly, directly, immediately.

However, it's not a matter of saying women just need to be more assertive. It's a matter of recognising that adult resilience, independence and interpersonal assertiveness take a lifetime of training and practice. Parenting is the best training option; if this is missing the opportunities will be much more haphazard and limited.

Women need the opportunity to become feisty. It's a better way to be, for everyone's sake.

(Post Script: Because it's too easy for the 'outragers' to misinterpret this, I'll state it clearly: this opinion relates to those social interactions that can be fumbly, awkward, sometimes overstepping what is appropriate, sometimes taking advantage of social niceties, and even sometimes intentionally insulting and unpleasant. I'm not talking about the unacceptable criminal behaviour of some men and the misuse of physical power by some men over some women. I'm not talking about violence - that is clearly wrong. I'm also not talking about senior men in certain industries consistently misusing their institutional power to impact female subordinates' careers. But I do wonder if there might just be a bit less of that if there were more feisty women.)