Last week, I got to announce some very exciting news: I’m up for an award in the Holly & Co Independent Awards 2022 (and you can vote for me here!)

Of course, being nominated at all is a real honour — I mean, look at my fellow nominees! My business icons! — but in particular, in the Female Founder category.

The female founder category celebrates “those female founders who are smashing stereotypes, defining a new narrative and helping their fellow sisterhood, by paving the way and making that path an easier journey to tread for others.” I set up The Enthusiast to encourage everyone to be more enthusiastic, sure, but it’s undeniable that enthusiasm is a feminist issue: women and non-binary folk in particular are the ones most denied by the way society treats enthusiasm, and dismisses its importance.

Inspired by the nomination, today I’m writing about 5 ways that society views women’s enthusiasm.

5 ways women’s enthusiasm is looked down on

1. It’s seen as fluffy and frivolous

Take, for example, the terms “chick flick” and “chick lit” (a film/book seen to be enjoyed by/marketed at women). For so many people, these phrases conjure up the idea of fluffy (pun intended) books and films, without much substance.

A few years ago, Marian Keyes pushed back on the phrase “chick lit” on a panel at the Hay Festival of Literature & Arts in Wales. “It's definitely a pejorative term,” she explained. “This (is) very much a patriarchal society, and I think one way of keeping women less well paid and having to do more work is to mock them and anything they love. And I'm not saying this in anger - it's a simple fact that one way of keeping women shut up is to call the things they love 'fluff'. It's a device.”

“I think people probably aren’t even aware that’s what’s going on, but it’s absolutely innate in our society that anything pertaining to women will be treated with less respect and given disrespectful names.”

— Marian Keyes

This goes for the stuff they write about, too. Chick lit or flicks are often thought of as synonymous with mushy romance — but when men write about the very same topics, they’re applauded for writing epic insights into humanity. And, as Lily O’Farrell pointed out on her instagram the other day - why is there anything wrong with writing about romance? Time and time again, studies into human happiness tell us that our interpersonal relationships are what make us happy. So why wouldn’t we want to consume content about it?

2. Without merit

Another area where this shows up is music. Music that is traditionally seen as being liked by women is, at best, seen as bad. (Enter the famous Harry Styles quote in his Rolling Stone interview back in 2017: “Who’s to say that young girls who like pop music – short for popular, right? – have worse musical taste than a 30-year-old hipster guy? That’s not up to you to say. Music is something that’s always changing. There’s no goal posts. Young girls like the Beatles. You gonna tell me they’re not serious?”)

How can this be at best, you ask? Because at worst, it’s not even valued musically at all - it’s just seen as something we like because we fancy the musicians who make it. (I recently finished my dissertation on how fangirls are treated in the media, and one of my favourite findings — by which I, of course, mean one of the findings that made me want to bang my head against a wall the most — is that some academics posited that the screaming of Beatlemania was because the female fans were preparing for childbirth.)

3. Tryhard, or vapid

Picture the scene: a woman goes into a coffee shop to buy a coffee. Ok, cool, fine. Now make that drink a Pumpkin Spiced Latte: congratulations, you’ve broken the internet.

Even the most basic enthusiasms are seen as tryhard in a world where everything we do is assumed to be for others. Instead of the most likely reason - the drink is nice, we like how it tastes - it’s automatically the case that we must be doing it to look cool, to post on instagram.

Alternatively, the basic bitch trope could be a harking back to the above — that is, indicative of an enthusiasm that doesn’t have much worth. As Nian Hu notes: “There is no vapid and air-headed male stereotype who is unoriginal in his embrace of all things masculine.”

4. Just for fun

Look, enthusiasm can be just for fun - and if it is, that is great. I love that for you! But the problem comes when you’re enthusiastic about something that you’re really good at, and you want to turn it into a career. (A gender pay gap? You exclaim. I am so shocked. I know! Who’d have thought?!)

Two places this is really obvious is in the fashion industry and the food industry. Cooking and clothing are both thought of as primarily female pursuits, yet both industries are dominated by men at the highest levels. In the fashion industry, less than half of the designers, only 26% of board members, and 4.8% of the clothing CEOs in the Fortune 500 are women. In the culinary industry in the UK, only 18.5% of professional chefs are women. This isn’t because women don’t enter the workforce in the first place, either: it’s just that they time and time again are prohibited from making it to the top.

You also might see it in small business life, when (even well-meaning) family and friends ask how your “little business” or “project” is going. They would probably use very different wording if they asked a male counterpart the same question…

5. And entirely unnecessary

The stats show that women have less hobby time than men. Generally, this is attributed to a higher amount of unpaid, domestic labour, as well as longer working hours. And part and parcel of this is not being given the space to prioritise things that are just for us. Traditionally, we’re wives, mothers, grandmothers, aunts, carers first - and then ourselves second. This means that we’re judged more heavily for carving out time for a hobby, which is seen as a ‘nice-to-have’, rather than a fundamental element of a good life. And, again, sorry to sound like a broken record: but I bet we don’t have a go at the working man who blocks out an hour in his calendar to do a hobby!!!

This is why I think enthusiasm is so important, and why it’s such an honour to be nominated for the Holly & Co Independent Awards in the Female Founder category.

VOTE HERE

If you fancy voting for me, I’d be forever grateful - voting closes on Thursday 24th November 2022!

Please note, the use of woman/women here unequivocally includes non-binary folk and trans women.