Do you know those moments when something feels off in a seemingly nice interaction? When care is loud, but there is something you can’t quite name? When offers present themselves as protective, yet feel unsafe both to accept and to refuse? Or when rejecting an offer, or setting a boundary, is met with shock or accusations of ingratitude, oversensitivity, or character judgments?
A couple of weeks ago, I visited a Lebanese minimart here in Berlin, for markouk bread and labneh. The shop owner, after asking where I was from, said: “If you need anything at all, we’ve got your back.”
And it didn’t sit right with me.
It irritated me. I didn’t respond, but what I thought in that moment was this: perhaps the offer was extended because I’m a woman, or perhaps it was rooted in some assumed national bond. Both readings were familiar. Neither fully accounted for the unease. What felt off was not the gesture itself, but the position it quietly assigned. A position that assumed I needed guidance, or reassurance in order to remain safe. And what made that positioning even harder to respond to was the ambiguity of the offer itself. Accepting the offer would have meant agreeing to the role it assigned. And there was no obvious way to refuse it without seeming ungracious or suspicious.
When I later shared this interaction with a few friends, their reaction was immediate. Raised eyebrows. Mild amusement. I was told I was making a big deal out of nothing. That it was, at best, an innocent gesture of support, or at worst, a meaningless social nicety, a pro forma offer fulfilling some unspoken obligation between people of similar origin in a foreign place.
Someone said I should have simply said no if it made me uncomfortable. Another suggested I should have accepted it graciously and moved on. The emphasis, in both cases, was not on what had been said, but on how I had received it.
Their responses defined what was considered reasonable and what was expected to be dismissed. Politeness and gratitude entered the conversation as moral instructions for how to receive an offer like this correctly. Refusal was treated as neutral and safe, ignoring the ambiguity of the offer, and demanding boundaries retroactively while denying the cost of setting them.
This is usually where the conversation stops, because once moments like this are framed as personal sensitivity rather than a gendered form of infantilization, self-authority is no longer something exercised, heard, or negotiated. It is displaced into an endless requirement to demonstrate credibility, clarity, and proportionality. Insisting further becomes depleting, as the conversation simultaneously denies the authority to interpret and the legitimacy of trusting one’s own perception.
However, the inner conversation doesn’t stop. The irritation lingers, unsettled by the reactions that followed it. Doubt sets in quietly. Was I overreacting? Maybe I should have taken the offer at face value. Maybe it was nothing. And thinking about the offer itself keeps circling back. It came unsolicited and ambiguous by design, without context, without evidence of need, and with a built-in demand for accepting.
And that inner turmoil feels so familiar. It echoes other moments that carry a similar shape.
When women’s interpretations, doubts, and refusals are frequently questioned or minimized, especially when care is foregrounded. What appears as help or guidance quietly reorganizes authority, shifting credibility and decision-making away from the self and toward those who claim to know better. When women challenge conditions, the response is rarely to question the conditions themselves, and far more often to question the women. Boundaries they name are cast as personal triggers, requests for clarity in conversations are reframed as deflection, and any attempt to clarify their own perspective are considered defensiveness.
Different settings, different actors, different tones, yet the response remains strikingly consistent. Power operating through care, with protection, benevolence, and concern functioning as modes of control that establish relations of reliance on external authority. Resistance is absorbed, minimized, dismissed, redirected, and returned as something to be self-managed. In this way, infantilization operates as a governing mechanism, securing the conditions it depends on.
RADICAL COACHING 