Intimidation tactics
Am I intimidating, or is it just my hair?
Friends introduced us to Flip 7, the card game, last summer and it’s become an instant family favorite (thanks Suzanne!). Essentially you’re drawing numerical cards, trying to get high numbers but no repeats so you don’t bust. There’s some strategy with enough luck that I don’t get psycho-competitive and angry when I lose because I can blame the gods instead of myself. While it’s mostly a solo game, there are occasional opportunities to “freeze” your opponents or force them to draw extra cards.
Yesterday while playing with our kids, there was a moment when Middle should have frozen me — I was winning by the most and there was no point in freezing anyone else — and he chose to freeze his dad.
When asked why, he had no real answer, but I realized it’s because I’m the scary one. Jeff is the nice one and the familiar one and their real dad and I’m the intimidating one whether it’s said or not.
I don’t remember when I was first called intimidating. I know a friend’s babysitter mentioned it (and my friend decided to tell me) when I was in 8th or 9th grade but I’m sure it came up earlier. It absolutely came up in high school where, courtesy of going to an all-girls’ school, I was rejected for the winter formal by one boy from the boys’ school for being both tall AND intimidating. It’s certainly come up in several workplaces.
Occasionally, people choose other words or descriptors that are intimidating-coded. Most often “intense” but sometimes “tightly wound.” The combo of being tall, having a “severe” face (per my mother, who also told me when I wore my hair back I looked like a “scary German real estate agent” – one of many times my mother introduced a comparison to something I doubted she’d ever encountered personally). A work mentor told me to wear navy over black and knits over suits to try and seem more approachable. Finding out in my late 20s I have some natural curl in my hair was a gift: curly-haired me is way less intimidating than severe-German-real-estate-agent me.
The thing is that describing someone as “intimidating,” is never actually describing them, it’s describing someone else’s experience of them but delivering it as a problem they need to fix or a character flaw. It’s a projection that’s dressed up as an observation. It tells you nothing about the person being described and everything about the person doing the describing. “Too tall” is the tell since height is not a personality trait; tall people take up more visual space and visual space can be a proxy for overall presence.
I’ve had “intimidating” be used as an attempted compliment — as in “you’re so smart and assertive, it’s very intimidating to people.” The word gets deployed at women specifically in contexts where the same behavior in a man would get labeled “confident” or “direct.”
It’s come up enough I wonder whether it’s innate or changeable at all; should I be trying to be less “intimidating?” I know I can’t be all the time; I certainly can’t imagine surviving as a day camp counselor if the children were fleeing from my presence. So it must be situational, which then begs the question: why is the burden on me to carry? Why do I have to change who I am, what I wear, how I do my hair, to make someone else feel differently?
My thumb actually stopped scrolling on Instagram when I came across an inspirational quote graphic that read “Am I intimidating or are you intimidated?” This quote was shared with no attribution and then when I tried to find an originator, I came up dry but did appreciate the Gemini summary at the top of the page saying “As an AI, I am incapable of feeling intimidated. My primary job is to process information and assist you.”
I saw thousands of women loving it and sharing it with various emojis like 💯 and 🙌 . As cheesy as it was, I felt something shift. Thirty-plus years of other people’s discomfort, and it had never once occurred to me that it wasn’t mine to manage.
Maybe it’s theirs to carry. Maybe the question was never about me at all.
Going back to Flip 7, Middle chose to freeze his father because freezing me carried more risk. I won that game.
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