As Suzanne Clisby and Julia Holdsworth explain in their novel, Gendering Women: Identity and Mental Wellbeing Through the Lifecourse: “[Young] girls are rewarded for certain behaviours, such as ‘being good’ and not being disruptive and that more outgoing behaviours such as speaking out and being disruptive attract censure from both peers and adults”.

If so many of us are taught that niceness and complacency are a woman’s desired – nay, our natural – state of being, then, it should come as little surprise to learn that many balk when a woman breaks out of her box and embraces her so-called nasty side. Why? Because they know that, if she escapes the confines of “niceness”, there’s no limit to what she can do.

“Why are you such a bitch?” asks the dude you reject after he slid, entirely uninvited, into your DMs. The online community demands you “keep your opinions to yourself” after you dare to voice an alternative view in a forum. You fail to smile after receiving negative feedback about your dance performance, so you’re branded “up yourself”. Your colleagues insist you “aren’t a team player” when you refuse to work late for the fourth day in a row. A stranger assaults you and you lash out, so you’re labelled “unladylike”. The public don’t think you’re as “warm” as the woman you’re covering on maternity leave, so your entire career is thrown into jeopardy. You’re forced to spend 15 years in exile after shoplifting from Saks department store on Fifth Avenue. You’re threatened with arrest after simulating masturbation during a staged version of your hit Like A Virgin song. You’re branded “overrated” after using your platform to speak out against a high-profile misogynist. Your Twitter account is disabled after you publicly name your rapist. You’re dubbed a “gold digger”, “bitch” and “fame-whore” for accusing your famous husband of domestic violence (despite the fact you have video and photographic evidence). Your opposing candidate in the US presidential campaign describes you as a “nasty woman” for challenging his opinions and refusing to let him interrupt you every few minutes. You’re told you “should have stayed sober” when a college swimstar rapes your unconscious body behind a dumpster. You’re shot point blank in the head for daring to even write about life under Taliban rule in Pakistan.

And so it goes on and on, forever and ever.

“We need to talk about the real problem with ‘unlikeable’ women”