Why Everyone Wants Validation Instead Of Agency

Do you really need permission to resist beauty standards or to lead an unconventional life? Is it impossible to make your own choices and be at peace with them without needing society to personally endorse your lifestyle? Are the mounting pressures you feel from society even real, or are they your own anxieties and doubts giving themselves a form?

These are the questions I find myself frequently asking whenever posts circulate on social media insisting that society needs to “normalize” some hyper-specific peculiarity that the poster feels too ashamed and embarrassed to adhere to independently. Or it's some brave call to activism to dismantle the chains of familiar boogeymen like the patriarchy or the male gaze, but only if thousands of other women join their rallying cry to defect at the same time. They cannot simply opt out of beauty standards or resist patriarchal traditions of their own accord. They need a mass exodus, a cultural reprogramming to make it permissible.

Half the time, the complaint is not about anything permanent, serious, or morally significant, but the great burden of, like, wearing heels. Meanwhile, countless men pour into the comments to insist they have never pressured nor cared if the women in their lives wear them. That it's something of a self-imposed discomfort. You see similar posts from women about how we need to normalize bare faces, body hair, or natural beauty.

Women who wish to boast plumper physiques need society to do more than leave them alone. They need it to make plumper physiques a coveted ideal. People cannot even go out to dinner or see a movie alone anymore without asking social media if it's weird first. It's not enough to have the freedom to do something. There needs to be a reward or virtue in it, too. In the wise words of a generational thought leader, “I think you guys might be thinking about yourselves too much.”

It's not enough to have the freedom to do something. There needs to be a reward or virtue in it, too.

A since-deleted post complaining, “Men will never understand the pain we go through every day just to look good for them,” went viral on X recently, with the obvious implication being that women endure the pain and discomfort of wearing heels because men demand or expect it. Curiously, virtually all of the quote tweets coming from men insisted otherwise. They were dumbfounded as to why women insist on participating in these little rituals, saying it made no difference to them.

Men joked that women “dress up ‘for themselves’ only until such time as it’s convenient to become public martyrs,” and that “patriarchy is just a word for the things women choose to do together.” Other men were more forthcoming about being pro-heels, using Norman Rockwell’s iconic Freedom of Speech painting as a supporting meme to the statement, “Makeup, heels, red lipstick, pantyhose, perfumes, curls, dresses, skirts, the hourglass shape, they’re hot. All of them. You don’t need to pretend they aren’t anymore.”

Clearly, men’s preferences are not unanimous. There is a divergence of opinion: those who do not get why women bother with all the fuss, others who are attracted to overt displays of higher-maintenance femininity, and still others whose appreciation for these details might be subconscious. Their stated preference might be one thing, their revealed preference another. There's a divergence in women’s preferences and motivations, too. Some women wear heels frequently, others for special occasions, and some refuse the footwear entirely.

Of the women who wear heels, some do it for male attention, others to display certain markers of confidence, to accentuate certain assets, or because they personally find them beautiful. When we make a decision, especially regarding external presentation, our choices are seldom fully divorced from others’ opinions. It can seem like a personal preference is truly personal, but we also make these choices with the full knowledge that they will be perceived by others, and we will be treated according to those perceptions in ways that might benefit or harm us.

An accurate description would be that the proximate motive seems personal, but the ultimate origins are social and evolutionary. But being influenced by others and feeling pressure does not mean you need society’s permission to live by your own preferences. You cannot control whether people will be less attracted to you if you don't present in a certain way, and that's sometimes the social consequence you will have to come to terms with to live by your own aesthetic preferences, whether they're rooted in an ethical objection or not.

You don't have control over other people. If your fight is to “normalize healthy aging” in women, then do that, but other women are going to keep doing them, regardless. Men, likewise, will probably continue to be attracted to markers of youth and beauty. This may mean that your activism of “aging gracefully” results in other women looking better than you because they have opted for beauty enhancements free from moralization, while men are more drawn to those women, especially when that cosmetic work goes under the radar.

Shave or don't shave. Wear makeup or don't. Get plastic surgery or age gracefully. But please, for the love of God, don't also demand that the rest of us have to uphold your personal decision as the highest good, the pinnacle of bravery and beauty. Just do you, with your full chest. I have a similar perspective when it comes to an entirely different concern with social perceptions: aging female celebrities begging us to normalize being 36 and unmarried with no kids.

Let me clarify, it's not because I don't sympathize with the real pressure and perhaps subconscious shame they're feeling for not living up to some societal ideal or what their friends and family expect of them, but because they're submitting to the whims of society and making it everyone else’s problem instead of reorienting their locus of control.

Consider Pretty Little Liars actress Lucy Hale, who recently gave an interview lamenting that because she's a 36-year-old unmarried woman with no kids, she's being met with a lot of charged “ohhhhs” from people in her personal life. This has led her to believe “there’s probably a lot of women who need to be told that it’s okay to not have that at this point in your life.”

While she's witnessed countless people settle down and have families, testifying to the beauty of it all, and anticipates it will be part of her life soon, “it isn’t yet,” adding, “I do believe there’s some big lessons within being alone at this time in your life. There’s nothing wrong with it.” She bets that if you're in your mid to late 30s, like her, with no marriage or kids in sight, it's because you are probably “being called towards something really, really amazing, so enjoy the time with yourself.”

If you sincerely want to get married and have kids and you're not even in a relationship by your mid to late 30s, it's certainly a fantasy to encourage people to just “enjoy the time with yourself” and expect that their desires will be magically granted. The reason society places pressure, whatever is left of it, considering the birth rate is collapsing and the age of first marriage and first birth are being further delayed, is downstream of the biological reality that women have a relatively short fertile window.

I think it would be equally harmful to feed women white lies about how they have forever to settle down and have kids or that they're likely to be just as happy and fulfilled without them. That is simply not true, and it's far less true for the average woman than it is for a woman of Lucy Hale or Emma Watson’s means. I say this with great sympathy for these women and zero pretension, as I don't have a family of my own yet either.

I reject the idea that they are “beneath” anyone else. There are myriad reasons they may have ended up in this situation, some of which are up to personal preference and circumstances beyond their control. However, tolerance for the unconventional is different from normalization.

There is certainly something to be said for discussing the benefits of marriage and family formation in a way that doesn't come off as, and is not intended to be, concern trolling designed to stoke women’s anxieties around time, aging, and perceived value. I condemn this behavior fully. My point here is that I highly doubt Lucy Hale spends much time on dissident right-wing Twitter, where she might actually be met with a barrage of socially sadistic, tonally crass, empty egg carton memes from disenfranchised young men overcome with schadenfreude. That is not only antisocial behavior, but harassment that betrays a deep insecurity in the poster’s own propensity to find a mate and form a family.

But what sort of pressure is being placed on liberal Hollywood actresses surrounded by like-minded libertines, hardly the type to place excessive pressure on women to become mothers and wives? Do all lifestyles really need to be “normalized” in order for our unconventional choices to be valid? And is it even an unconventional choice if 45 percent of prime working-age women aged 25 to 44, “the largest share in history,” are expected to be single and childless by 2030? How can we normalize something that is increasingly becoming the trend?

Do all lifestyles really need to be “normalized” in order for our unconventional choices to be valid?

It's not only socially acceptable but culturally celebrated to de-center men from your life. It's incredibly common for women in their 30s to be unmarried with no kids. The real question is, do we need society to approve our every decision, or are we just thinking about ourselves too much? Social media has hijacked people’s brains and convinced them they need to be the center of the universe. Discourse, memes, discussions, talking points, they need to be inclusive of our every circumstance and individual quirks.

What I am arguing here is wholly different from reducing women’s value to mere biological reproduction and marriage. I want every woman to have the individual autonomy to make her own decisions, and you should never let someone concern troll you about your duty to propagate the human race or determine whether or not that life is for you. Kids are not quotas. They are human beings, and they should only be brought into this world with intention, love, and devotion.

However, studies consistently find that marriage and family formation have nontrivial effects on most people, but especially women’s life satisfaction, sense of meaning, and happiness. The fact that women who are single and childless are consistently found to have the worst outcomes when it comes to meaning-making, life satisfaction, and rates of depression is significant. Married moms are twice as likely to be “very happy” as single or childless women. The implication that not getting married or having children is abnormal is there for a reason. Once you're in your late 30s, you might miss the boat, and unfortunately many women who have missed the boat thus far have not fared very well.

Society is interested in promoting prosociality and behaviors that are in people’s best interest. I think it's hardly unreasonable that marriage and family formation remain coveted, celebrated, and implicitly expected ideals. But whether we can really say that is the case anymore is highly questionable. It's exactly why the internet was puzzled by Emma Watson’s recent rambling on Jay Shetty’s podcast about how the pressure to get married is a “violence” against young people.

Everyone had similar confused reactions that amounted to, “Are we all talking about the same society?” but I saw some interesting takes. Paul Skallas, who goes by the online pseudonym Lindyman, suggests it's precisely because all traditional patterns have collapsed and because we are truly free to do anything and organize our lives as we want, free from pressure from any group, society, or institution, people feel unnerved by the liberation and counterintuitively feel compelled to make up fake statements about things pressuring them.

TikToker @princess_milkyy said it best. “Something that has become more and more of a bigger pet peeve to me the older I get are people who are so desperate for other people’s approval in a way where they make it almost seem like they have zero agency or control over their life.” She uses the example of women submitting to “societal pressure” as if we are still in the 1800s. When she hears women sulking about the pressure society places on women to find a man or to have one by a certain age, she finds the whining rather uninspiring. “Maybe if this were the 19 fing 40s you’d have a point, but in the Lord’s year 2025, where you can have a bank account and sign a lease to an apartment, and have your own job? I think maybe you can just choose to tell society to shut the f up.”

As for the actual motives? “I think you feel some type of way about being the only one in your high school friend group who hasn’t gotten engaged yet,” she snipes. “That’s a ‘you’ problem.” Her point is not that these societal expectations and pressures don't exist. “I am not even going to sit here and pretend like society is perfect. Society does make it seem like women need to get a man after a certain point. I am just saying that at this point you need to grow up and be like, f*** it, I don’t give a damn.”

We will never be free of the burdens and expectations of others. Her argument is that at some point, you have to grow up and stop letting other people have so much control over you. “It’s just things like that I don’t have the patience for, and it’s when people make that their entire life,” adding that it's unnerving talking to people who treat it like it dictates every aspect of their life. “As a grown-ass adult, you are letting everyone’s influence around you make your decisions for you? Stand up. Have a spine.”

If you're taking an unconventional path or can't relate to the life choices of the people around you, it's better to cultivate security in yourself and confidence in your decision-making so you know you're making the right choices for yourself and don't need anyone to normalize anything in order for you to sleep at night. Sometimes that desire for social acceptance is intuition that we're not making the right choices, subconscious shame, or a conflict of interests. In any case, it's worth interrogating why you need others to give you permission to be yourself.