Let me tell you about a compliment that isn't one.
"Intimidating presence" has been trending on TikTok and I've been posting about it because I have THOUGHTS. The phrase is doing something interesting in the discourse right now, being reclaimed, reposted, worn like a badge. "She has an intimidating presence" as a compliment, as aesthetic branding, as something to aspire to. And I understand the impulse, I really do. But I want to pull on this thread a little because I think we're collectively letting the reframe do some work that needs to be examined first.
Listen: "intimidating" is not a compliment. It never was. It is a description of someone else's discomfort being handed to you as your problem. When someone calls you intimidating, they are telling you that your existence, your confidence, your stillness, your refusal to perform accessibility, is making them feel something unpleasant. And the social move is for you to fix that. To smile more. To apologize for your posture. To make your presence easier to be around.
We've started treating the word like it got a promotion. It didn't. It got spray-painted, which is different.
The Resting Stage Face and What It Actually Costs
I have what my aunt Deb calls "a serious face." She's been saying it since I was probably eight years old: "Vixen, you've got a serious face." What she meant, with the most loving intentions, was: you look like you're thinking something and people can tell and it makes them nervous. The correction implied was think less visibly. Or smile.
The thing is, I was always thinking something. I was almost never plotting anything alarming. I was just not performing contentment I didn't feel, not molding my face into the "approachable and warm and non-threatening" shape that girls are socialized to maintain as a constant default. And that absence, the absence of performed warmth, read as intimidating.
I've been playing live since I was eighteen and I have a very specific stage face: still, concentrated, direct. I look at the audience like I mean it. I don't manufacture big grins between songs unless something genuinely funny happened. I hold the space of a song at the end instead of rushing to fill it with banter. Multiple people over the years have described this as "intense" and the word they chose second, when pressed, was "intimidating."
You know what that stage presence ACTUALLY is? It's respect. For the song. For the room. For the people who paid attention and gave me their thirty minutes. Taking it seriously because I think they deserve to be taken seriously.
Apparently seriousness, on a woman's face, looks threatening.
the church version of this
I want to trace where this particular piece of my wiring came from because it matters for the full picture. Growing up in my church community, there was a specific feminine presentation that was rewarded: soft, pleasant, available, easily approached. Women who laughed readily, who made themselves non-confrontational, who deferred to the room. Who made others comfortable as a primary personality trait.
This was theological, not accidental. The model was submission, not as cowardice but as spiritual virtue. Softness was holy. Accommodation was Christlike. The harder-edged women in my world, the ones with opinions delivered directly, with a certain uncompromising energy, were described in code. "Strong" which meant difficult. "Independent" which meant dangerous. "Intimidating" which meant doesn't perform meekness on request.
I absorbed all of this. It took years of active work to stop apologizing for my own directness. Years to stop hedging every strong statement with a softening "but maybe that's just me" or an unnecessary laugh. Years to understand that the demand for perpetual approachability is a control mechanism designed to keep women accessible on other people's terms.
This is not abstract theory. This was the air I breathed for the first twenty years of my life. And the "intimidating presence" trend, whatever it means now aesthetically, is picking at a real wound that hasn't fully closed for a lot of women who came up the same way I did.
What "Taking Up Space" Actually Means
There's a phrase that gets used a lot in these conversations, "taking up space," and I want to be precise about what I mean when I use it because it gets flattened into vibes quickly and loses its meaning.
Taking up space is not about volume or aggression. Not about being louder than everyone else or filling every silence. It's about existing in your full dimensions without pre-apologizing for them. Walking into a room without immediately calibrating yourself to be less. Holding an opinion when challenged without collapsing it to make someone else comfortable. Looking at someone without blinking first.
These are genuinely small things. They feel enormous if you've been trained since childhood to make yourself smaller. The first few times I held eye contact in an uncomfortable conversation without looking down first, I felt like I was being rude. Like I was doing something wrong. Because I had internalized a social code where looking down and away was the correct move for a woman in a disagreement, it signals deference, it signals "I'm not a threat," it signals that you know your place.
That's what they're calling intimidating when they call it that. They're calling it intimidating that you forgot to signal submission. That you stood in your actual dimensions. That you looked directly instead of away.
the reframe has limits
Okay. So here's where I push back slightly on the trend itself, because I do think the reframe is doing something real and something incomplete at the same time.
Wearing "intimidating" as a badge assumes that the discomfort it describes is the other person's problem to manage, and I agree with that completely. You don't owe anyone your shrinkage. Their discomfort with your presence is theirs to work through, not yours to solve.
But there's a version of the trend that turns "intimidating" into a personality aesthetic the same way previous decades turned "mysterious" and "dangerous" into feminine brands. And those aesthetics have a way of hardening into performance. Into armor that you can't take off. Into a presentation of toughness that starts to cost you things you actually wanted: ease, warmth, connection that doesn't have to be earned at arm's length.
I am not a soft person, particularly. I will not pretend I am. But I also do not want my toughness to be the most interesting thing about me, and I'm wary of trends that turn self-possession into an aesthetic brand because brands flatten things. Your whole complicated self, compressed into "intimidating presence" as a personal concept, loses too many edges.
The goal isn't to be intimidating. The goal is to be free. Those are different destinations even if they pass through the same territory on the way.
what I actually want
I want to not flinch when someone looks at me with expectation. I want to finish sentences I start without scanning the room for permission. I want to play a set and hold the silence at the end of "Bite" for as long as the song needs it without rushing to cut the tension because someone in the back row looks uncomfortable. I want to take up exactly as much space as I actually take up, no more out of ego and no less out of apology.
If that reads as intimidating to certain people, specifically to people who are accustomed to women performing accessibility as a default service, then I have made my peace with that. Their comfort with my smallness is not in the budget. I ran out of that particular resource some years back and the supply chain is gone.
But I want to be clear that this isn't a performance of intimidation either. It's not a look or a brand or a stance I've curated. It is the ongoing quiet work of being a person who was trained to make herself small, choosing daily not to, and building the resting face of someone who has decided that her own presence is, at a bare minimum, acceptable.
That's the whole deal. Not fierce. Not a vibe board. Just refusing, one day at a time, to apologize for existing at full size.
If you've been called intimidating, especially if you were called intimidating as a child, if you had the "serious face" note delivered to you when you were eight years old and still figuring out who you were, I see you. It was not a character flaw. It was just your full self refusing to compress on demand. And I love you for it. Even when it cost you, which I know sometimes it did.
Keep the face. Hold the room. Don't flinch first.
There's something I want to say specifically to the people who grew up in religious communities where this softness mandate was baked into the theology, and I know you're reading this because you always find your way here. The doctrine was not neutral. The demand for feminine meekness as a spiritual virtue was a specific political arrangement dressed in the language of holiness. It served the people at the top of the structure and it cost the women at the bottom their voices, their opinions, their claim to their own anger. Anger in a woman was sin. Confidence in a woman was pride. Directness in a woman was transgression. You were supposed to be the helper, not the agent. The softness was the point, the softer you were, the less resistant you'd be to the structure that needed you to be manageable.
I am not soft. I tried to be. I was good at performing it for a while in the way that front-row church girls learn to perform things, with total conviction, with the genuine belief that the performance is also the reality. But eventually I could hear the seam between who I was performing and who I actually was, and the sound it made was a song I've been writing for two years. That's another conversation. The point here is: the demand for softness was never about you. It was about the structure's need for you to be accessible on its terms. You have no obligation to meet that need.
And if you're still in a community or a relationship or a job where your directness gets called intimidating as a way to manage you, I hope you're keeping track of how often that happens, and I hope you're asking yourself what the management is for.