Martha Stewart is not a nice person. She doesn’t suffer fools. She built an empire, worth more than $1 billion, based on a skill she mastered as a child to help feed her family. If she were a man, she would be considered calculating and steely, a genius willing to risk losing her friends if it meant becoming an icon.

But she’s a woman, so “she was a bitch,” as a former colleague puts it.

That direct and depressingly relatable observation comes from “Martha,” the candid Netflix documentary about the 83-year-old lifestyle legend. If we were talking about any other successful woman brought down by her own supposed actions, the film might end with the subject punished and excused, as American society demands when you get too big for your pants.

But this is Martha Stewart, who doesn’t punish herself. It’s striking that she’s the only person interviewed on camera throughout the entire film—apparently saying that she wants you to understand that this is her, unflinchingly, in all her glory and foibles. She says, “That deal? Yes, that happened. Those letters I wrote to my cheating husband begging him to come back? We’re welcome. Read them live if you want.”

She refuses to feign humility for the comfort of the less bright, and I think it wasn’t just her specific actions that they wanted to apologize for, but because she was such a boss in the first place. When she wouldn’t tap dance like a good girl, people got mad.

“I think the role that women have to play to be penitent is irritating, if you think about it,” said Elizabeth MacBride, author, veteran business journalist and senior knowledge and advocacy consultant for the Women’s Funding Initiative entrepreneurs of the World Bank.

MacBride has some interesting parallels with Stewart, with whom she shares a physical resemblance (“I think I was her on Halloween once,” she said). MacBride, co-author of “The Little Book of Robo Investing: How to Make Money While You Sleep”, she also knows about the pressure on women in the public eye to pass as expected, no matter what. It was the moment she “kept it together” when her water broke during a 2004 television interview she did as managing editor of Crain’s New York business publication.

The subject? Stewart’s conviction on federal charges, including obstruction of justice. You can’t make this stuff up. “I feel like I’m peeing and I’m on TV news,” MacBride recalled. Can you imagine? If you’re a woman who knows you’re being watched closely by people who might be looking for cracks in your confidence, I bet you can. Being the professional she is, she finished the interview and then quietly went to the hospital.

I asked her what she thought would have happened if she had admitted that she was literally in labor. “Maybe it would have been, ‘Oh, cool, she’s got a kid!’ Congratulations!” she said. “And maybe it would have been, ‘Oh, we can’t show that.'”

It’s not that Stewart is a blameless angel. Apparently he’s a tough boss I’d never want to work for; she was seen in the documentary berating an employee for using a knife that was too small to cut an orange. She wasn’t a warm mother, had that aforementioned affair, and most famously did five months in federal prison in the 2000s on charges that, in retrospect, seem, as Stewart said, like was a “trophy” for prosecutors. (The involvement of James Comey, who would become the face of the investigation into a another famous woman a little more than a decade later, it is noted.)

What’s surprising is the chuckling glee with which people from Jay Leno to casual observers have greeted Stewart’s downfall, as if he’s created exquisitely cultivated holly crowns too close to the sun or something. In the film, Isolde Motley, the founding editor of Martha Stewart Living magazine, posited that “the degree of hatred that people have” for Stewart stems in part from the fact that her fame is rooted in traditional female practice and unheralded until then. housekeeping, “something most of us could do, but she does it better.”

Snoop Dogg’s best friend isn’t the only female celebrity seen as somewhat suspicious as they don’t go soft and regret their past decisions or ambition. Stevie Nicks was recently asked how she would respond to those “condemning” her decision to have an abortion as Fleetwood Mac’s success took off. “If people want to be mad at me, be mad at me. I don’t care,” she said.

Meanwhile, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders took a swipe at Vice President Kamala Harris’ lack of biological children, saying in September that Harris has “nothing to keep her humble.” Harris countered that there are “a lot of women here who, for one, don’t aspire to be humble.”

Hell yeah! I am nowhere near as perfect as these people, but even I was expected to dress in a convenient and cute little package when required or risk ridicule. As a children’s columnist in my late 20s, a mentor told me, half-jokingly, that I had a knack for being the center of attention, which I interpreted as showboating.

“I know you didn’t mean that as a compliment,” I said—I may have spun as I did it—”but I’ll take it as one anyway.” I’m a woman who pays her bills with her opinion. Do you think I’m going to apologize for being extra? man have you met me

In 2018, Judge Maria L. Oesterreicher became the first woman on the Carroll County Circuit Court. She said she is “no longer having it” with expectations of successful women to be humble. When people are offended by her attempts to shout “gaslight me or undermine me, I’ve been conditioned to think I have to apologize,” she said. not. “It’s no longer my job to make sure you’re comfortable with my success. If your insecurity about my success causes you to behave badly, you will have to live with your discomfort. I won’t apologize for that.”

Nor should it, because if it were a man, it probably wouldn’t be expected. This is where Stewart is. She never claimed to be pretty. She claimed to be, as her former editor put it, better than you at many things. That’s your problem, not hers.