Who is Allowed to Be Human?

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My mum used to tell me that women had to work twice as hard as men for a fraction of the pay and an even smaller amount of the recognition. I accepted it as one of those statements adults make when they are trying to prepare you for the world, even though you are still too young to understand exactly what they are preparing you for. It wasn’t until I began working that I realised she hadn’t been exaggerating. If anything, she had probably softened the reality.

The uncomfortable part is that the difference is not always found in the standard of the work itself. Sometimes it appears in the way we respond when that standard isn’t met. We are remarkably capable of finding compassion for certain people when they perform badly, make a mistake or fall short of what we expected. We talk about pressure, exhaustion, nerves and the difficulty of being scrutinised in public. We remember that they are human. With other people, the same failure becomes evidence of something much larger. It is no longer a bad performance or a poor decision. It becomes proof that they were never good enough in the first place.

Harry Styles performed at the BRIT Awards earlier this year and, from my perspective, it was shockingly bad. The vocals, the dancing, the whole thing was a mess. That isn’t a judgement of his entire career or an argument that he lacks talent. Quite the opposite, I think Harry has released some of the greatest pop songs of the past ten years. This was simply a poor performance by somebody who has given many better ones.

What caught my attention wasn’t really what happened onstage, though. It was the conversation that followed. The performance was described as stunning, energetic, flamboyantly choreographed and even boogie-inducing. One critic detected an echo of David Bowie in the way Harry performed, while another said he had blown away the BRIT Awards. The dancing I had found awkward was framed as him letting loose, fully embodying the meaning of the song and dancing his ballet pumps off. I began to wonder whether everyone else had watched a different performance.

Taste is subjective, of course, and perhaps they had simply enjoyed something I hadn’t. But it was interesting to see how readily the performance was placed within the larger story of Harry’s return to music, his new artistic direction and the excitement of seeing him onstage again. One poor evening was not going to be allowed to diminish everything else he had achieved. I agreed with that instinct. A bad performance shouldn’t define anybody. I just couldn’t imagine a woman receiving the same response.

When a female artist performs badly, the conversation often becomes less generous very quickly. Her ability is questioned, along with her preparation, her appearance, her relevance and sometimes even her right to occupy the stage. The mistake is rarely permitted to remain a mistake. It spreads across everything. A man can have an off night, but a woman is more likely to be exposed as a fraud.

The contrast became even harder to ignore at Coachella. Sabrina Carpenter presented the kind of carefully constructed headline performance that female pop stars are expected to produce. It involved scale, precision, choreography, costumes and the visible evidence of months of preparation. Justin Bieber’s performance was much looser and more minimal, prompting a great deal of debate about whether it was intimate and vulnerable or simply under-rehearsed. Once again, the explanations offered on his behalf were deeply human. He was reconnecting with his past, navigating the pressures of fame and choosing not to present the polished spectacle people expected from him.

Perhaps that was exactly what he intended. I don’t know. But it is difficult to imagine a female headliner arriving with the same level of apparent informality and having it interpreted as an artistic statement rather than a failure to do the work. Sabrina Carpenter had to demonstrate that she deserved the stage. Justin Bieber was allowed to inhabit it.

That difference isn’t new. I saw versions of it throughout the five years I spent working with Atomic Kitten at the beginning of my career. They went on to become hugely successful and sold around fourteen million records, but their success was never treated as inevitable. They worked relentlessly, while being expected to meet standards that extended far beyond the music. They had to perform well, look right, behave correctly, remain accessible and somehow sustain the fantasy that audiences and the media had created around them.

At the same time, there were boy bands with significantly less talent who could still receive priority because the industry understood how to sell attractive young men to teenage girls. Marketing girls to girls was treated as far more complicated. It involved a strange negotiation between admiration and threat, where the women had to appear aspirational without becoming alienating, desirable without being intimidating and successful without seeming too aware of their own success.

Even their relationships had to be managed as part of that equation. There were times when members of the band could not be open about who they were dating because it might alter how the audience perceived them. If one of them was involved with somebody from a boy band, the relationship had to remain private because the male artist’s fans might turn against her. His availability was part of the fantasy being sold, while her real life became something that had to be concealed to protect it.

Looking back, the strange thing is how normal all of this seemed at the time. There were conversations about positioning, audience reactions and marketability, but rarely about what it meant for the women themselves. Their lives became commercial variables. The boys were permitted to remain objects of desire, while the girls had to carry the emotional consequences of that desire.

The most extreme version of this dynamic may be found in Japanese idol culture. In 2013, Minami Minegishi, a 20-year-old member of the hugely successful girl group AKB48, was photographed leaving the home of Alan Shirahama, a 19-year-old performer in a male group. AKB48 operated under a no-dating rule intended to protect the fantasy that its female members were devoted entirely to the group and its fans. Minegishi shaved her head, recorded a tearful apology and pleaded to be allowed to remain. She was demoted to trainee status. Shirahama, whose participation in the relationship was presumably equal, did not face anything resembling the same public reckoning.

It would be easy to dismiss this as an extreme example from a very particular part of the entertainment business, but the underlying logic is familiar. His desirability remained commercially useful. Hers became a transgression for which she had to express shame. The fantasy was created for the audience, sold by the industry and then treated as the woman’s personal responsibility to preserve.

The music industry is particularly good at making these differences visible because so much of it depends on image, popularity and public judgement. The same pattern exists almost everywhere, though. Men are often allowed to be brilliant and difficult, whereas women are expected to be brilliant and pleasant. A direct man is decisive. A direct woman can quickly become aggressive or a bitch. A man who protects his time is focused, while a woman doing the same thing risks being described as cold or uncooperative. None of these judgements are universal, and the language has improved over the years, but the underlying expectations have proved remarkably persistent.

I try to remain conscious of them because none of us are entirely outside the culture that formed us. When I find myself criticising somebody, particularly a woman, I try to understand what the criticism is actually based on. Is it supported by what happened, or am I responding to an expectation I have absorbed without realising it? Would I interpret the same behaviour differently if it came from a man? There is no value in believing ourselves incapable of bias because that belief only makes our biases harder to see.

Being a gay man has given me a partial view of how some of these expectations operate, although I would never pretend the experience is equivalent. Gay men can be permitted greater emotional range in some situations, yet in the workplace that permission can disappear the moment the emotion becomes inconvenient. We are often expected to soften difficult messages, absorb tension and capitulate in situations where a straight man displaying the same firmness might simply be regarded as authoritative. Push too hard and the familiar accusations appear. Difficult. Dramatic. Emotional. The language is different, but the request underneath it can feel remarkably similar: remain capable, remain pleasant and do not make anyone too uncomfortable while defending yourself.

That has sometimes left me wondering how much of what we call professionalism is simply proximity to a particular kind of masculinity. The calm, self-contained man is treated as neutral, while anyone whose response falls outside that narrow model risks having the response examined more closely than whatever provoked it. This is not the same burden women carry, and gay men still benefit from being men in countless ways, but it has helped me recognise the exhaustion of being asked to manage not only what happens to you, but everybody else’s comfort with how you respond.

Social media makes the distinction even more difficult. It can create the impression that a particular judgement is universally shared simply because the people expressing it most aggressively are the most visible. Nuance disappears quickly when the reward is attached to certainty, outrage and speed. A human being becomes a position to defend or attack, and the possibility that several things might be true at the same time begins to feel almost inconvenient.

This is part of why the current backlash against feminism feels so dishonest to me. Feminism is sometimes presented as a threat to men, as though fairness can only be achieved by taking something away from us. But equality does not make life harder for capable men. It removes the protection that has allowed mediocrity to be mistaken for merit. Weak men are threatened by equality because it means they might finally have to compete on the same terms as everybody else.

There is anger in that, and I don’t want to pretend otherwise. I have watched women do exceptional work and then seen men speak over them, dismiss them or accept credit for what they created. I have watched women prepare more carefully because they understood that arriving with anything less than a complete answer would be used against them. I have known talented women leave the music industry because they could no longer see a route forward that didn’t require them to become exhausted, diminished or permanently defensive.

It isn’t enough for men to acknowledge that this happens. Agreement is easy, particularly when it costs us nothing. The more difficult question is what we do when we see it happening in a meeting, a conversation, a hiring decision or a discussion about somebody’s performance. Do we make sure the woman who did the work receives the credit? Do we interrupt when somebody is being talked over? Do we question why confidence is being admired in one person and punished in another? Allyship is not a position we announce. It is the accumulation of choices people may never know we made.

The sudden death of Alexi Cory-Smith has given these questions a different weight. Alexi was one of the women I met early in my career whose influence was lasting, long after we stopped working in the same places. She was tough, direct and seemed to have lived several lives before most people had finished their first. Whenever she was in Los Angeles for Grammys week, we would try to meet and catch up. She was engaging, funny and deeply passionate about the creators she represented. She believed in the power of music, but she also understood that a life needed to exist beyond it.

Her death came completely out of the blue and shocked many of us who knew her. The tributes that followed spoke about her leadership, creativity and the businesses she had built, all of which were true. For me, though, they also raised the question of the strength required to build a career like hers in an industry where strength in women is so often praised in public, where it makes for a flattering profile or a good headline, yet punished in private.

We tend to describe women like Alexi as formidable, which is usually intended as admiration. But I wonder what sits underneath the word. Sometimes it seems to acknowledge not only who somebody was, but everything they must have endured in order to remain that person. Strength becomes both an achievement and a requirement. A woman is celebrated for being resilient without anybody asking why she was required to develop quite so much resilience in the first place.

There is a cost to being held to a standard that leaves no room for uncertainty, error or fatigue. It places a person permanently on the defensive, unable to make the ordinary mistakes through which most of us learn. Every decision has to anticipate not only the outcome, but how it will be interpreted. Every weakness has to be hidden because it may not be treated as temporary. Eventually, the effort required to prove you belong can consume the energy that might otherwise have allowed you to grow.

If perfection is the price of entry, then growth becomes impossible. Growth depends on being able to try, fail, reconsider and try again without every mistake becoming a judgement on your entire identity. We understand this instinctively when talking about children, creativity, recovery or almost any other meaningful part of human development. Yet we continue to build workplaces and cultures where some people are granted that freedom and others are not.

I know the effect of that standard because I have internalised a version of it myself. It takes a huge amount of work for me not to process even a small mistake as an abject failure of character. The mistake itself can be relatively insignificant, but the internal response moves immediately towards what I should have known, what I should have done and who I should have been. It is never simply that I got something wrong. Somewhere underneath it is the fear that getting something wrong has revealed something fundamentally inadequate about me.

I don’t believe this response appeared from nowhere. Some of it belongs to my own history and personality, but some of it comes from having understood early that certain people are given less room to fail. Perfection begins as a form of protection. If I anticipate every problem, prepare for every possibility and avoid every error, perhaps nobody will have a reason to question whether I belong. The problem is that protection eventually becomes confinement. You cannot take risks, remain curious or develop freely while treating every misstep as evidence against yourself.

Sobriety taught me a great deal about accepting the things I cannot change, finding the courage to change the things I can and developing enough wisdom to recognise the difference. Thanks, Serenity Prayer. What it cannot resolve is the exhaustion of knowing that something should change while having very limited power to change it alone. Acceptance is not the same as approval, and it does not remove the frustration of watching somebody encounter the same barrier again and again.

Perhaps that is why individual action matters even when it feels small. None of us can dismantle an entire culture from a single meeting room, but we can decide whether we reinforce it. We can notice who is being allowed to make a mistake and who is being defined by one. We can question why we are searching for an explanation on behalf of one person while reaching for a verdict on another.

The standard should not be that women are judged less seriously or that poor work goes unchallenged. That would be another kind of condescension. The question is whether we can separate the work from the person with the same generosity we already extend so easily to men. A bad performance can simply be a bad performance. A mistake can remain a mistake. Directness does not have to become a character defect, and strength does not need to be the armour somebody wears every minute of their life.

Perhaps what women have been denied is not only equality of opportunity, pay or recognition, although all of those remain unfinished. It is something more ordinary and, in some ways, more fundamental: the freedom to be unfinished. To be talented without always being exceptional, confident without always being likeable, strong without never becoming tired and successful without having to prove, every morning, that yesterday was not an accident.

Men have been allowed that freedom for so long that we often mistake it for neutrality. It isn’t. It is grace, quietly and unevenly distributed. The challenge may not be to invent a new standard at all, but to offer women the same thing men have always expected: the right to be fully human.

As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Have you ever noticed someone being judged more harshly than somebody else for exactly the same mistake? Or perhaps you’ve experienced it yourself. Just hit reply, I read every email, even if it sometimes takes me a little while to get back to you.

Eric x