Girls are trained out of their instincts long before adulthood

Doyle argues that the process of "taming" begins early, when girls are rewarded for being agreeable, quiet, and accommodating and subtly punished for expressing anger, appetite, or desire. She describes this as a slow erosion of a child's felt sense of what she wants and needs, replaced by an acute sensitivity to what will make others comfortable. Over years, this training becomes so thorough that many adult women can no longer distinguish their own preferences from the preferences they've absorbed in order to be liked. Doyle treats this not as an individual failing but as a widespread cultural pattern, reinforced by family, school, media, and religious teaching, all of which tend to reward female self-erasure and label female assertiveness as a character flaw. The result, she argues, is a population of adults who are skilled at reading a room and terrible at reading themselves. Takeaway: many adults have been trained since childhood to trust everyone's judgment but their own.