Calling Kim Kardashian “Unlikable” Misses the Enneagram’s Gender Double Standard

Whether you’re reading this because you’ve already made up your mind, or because you’re ready to go to war for Kim K, I’m glad you’re here. Because this piece is not so much about Kim's likability—or lack thereof—so much as why “likability” is treated as a qualifying criterion for women in the first place, and why a woman's refusal to perform warmth and approachability is treated as an open invitation to dismiss everything else about her.

We do not frame it as likability, of course. We call it authenticity. Or talent. Or deservingness. But strip away the vocabulary and the verdict is always the same: Kim Kardashian has not made herself “easy to like,” and for a woman in the public eye, that is an unforgivable offense.

The Likability Tax 

The thing about likability as it applies to women is that it is rarely just about being pleasant.

For men, likability is optional. They are allowed to be brilliant, difficult, cold, arrogant, ruthless, socially exhausting or openly unpleasant, and people will still separate the person from the achievement. Ironically, Kim's ex-husband Kanye West is one of the starkest examples of that. You may not want to have dinner with him, but people will still call him a genius despite his deeply problematic behavior.

For women, the achievement is often not allowed to stand unless the woman herself is palatable enough. Are you warm enough? Humble enough? Easy-going enough? Successful without seeming too pleased with yourself? Ambitious without being power-hungry? It’s America Ferrera's Barbie monologue all over again: “It is literally impossible to be a woman. You are so beautiful, and so smart, and it kills me that you don’t think you’re good enough... I’m just so tired of watching myself and every single other woman tie herself into knots so that people will like us. And if all of that is also true for a doll just representing a woman, then I don’t even know.” 

Men are allowed to be impressive without being pleasant. Women are often expected to be pleasant before they are even allowed to be impressive.

Naturally, I am not suggesting that men move through the world without their own impossible standards—they do, and that is a conversation worth having separately. But the likability tax, specifically, is one that is almost exclusively collected from women.

Which brings us to Kim.

From a Dirty Hand to a Royal Flush

Kim’s story is, at its core, one of the most extraordinary reclamations of narrative in modern history. Yes. I mean the tape. Released without her consent, in a way that was humiliating, objectifying, and entirely outside her control. She then took that humiliation and turned it into a career. And people don't like that.

What they like even less is that she never apologized for it. The rule still stands that a woman who has been publicly sexualized must spend the remainder of her visible life proving she is more than that. Respectable. Modest. Suitably chastened. The bigotry is alive and well.

This is where the whole story makes me think of Monica Lewinsky. She had her name dragged through the dirt on a global scale with no tools to defend herself. Her story was filtered through tabloids, politicians and late-night hosts who treated a young woman's harassment as a punchline.

Kim, however, had access to tools that gave her agency. And instead of disappearing into oblivion and spending her life repenting for an offense that was not even hers, she recaptured the narrative. She took the thing that was meant to break her and turned it into a business. As for those who believe she orchestrated the whole thing, consider that plenty of women have had private tapes made public, and precisely none of them catapulted into a billionaire's club.

My theory is that this is what people find so intolerable. Not the tape, but the absence of shame. The refusal to don the metaphorical nun's robes and disappear. We are still far more comfortable with women who survive sexual humiliation by becoming cautionary tales than with women who survive it by becoming CEOs.

The Enneagram Type Three Double Standard 

That whole story of recapturing narrative and controlling one's image sounds like a very specific Enneagram type. Kim is a canonical Type 3: driven, image-conscious, strategic, relentlessly adaptive. 

Not coincidentally, this personality type is most likely to be wildly successful, at least in the sense of having a senior job title and out-earning their peers.

Now consider how we talk about Type 3 men. Michael Jordan is a good example. The documentary series The Last Dance gave the public an unfiltered look at the man, and he came across as cold, ruthless and controlling. But instead of canceling him, people only loved him more—even justifying his behavior as the price of greatness. 

Then there’s Bill Clinton. His PR team spent decades curating his image as the brilliant, empathetic everyman, and even after an infidelity scandal that ended Monica Lewinsky's life as she knew it, he was canonized as a statesman and celebrated as the comeback kid. That’s just wild. Tiger Woods also humiliated his family in the most public way imaginable, but his legacy as the greatest golfer alive was never in question. Because, you know, boys will be boys.

The way the public perceives Type 3 women is wildly different. Take the mother of pop herself—Madonna. The biggest-selling female music artist in history. And what has she been called for six decades? She said it herself in 1991—"I'm only seen as this cold, calculating, ambitious bitch.” A legend whose influence is undeniable, and yet the scrutiny never stopped. I remember people joking when I was younger that she slept her way to fame. I was too young to understand it then. Looking back, it gives me chills. Nobody questioned the system that may have made that the only way for a woman to succeed, but her methods, talent and reputation are freely speculated.

Similarly, Taylor Swift was called “calculating” so relentlessly that she's recorded an entire album about it—Reputation. She’s routinely questioned, undervalued and declared overrated, and yet this woman has done things no artist has done before. She’s a genuine trailblazer and still the lion's share of conversation about her centers not on what she has built, but on whether she deserves the credit. 

And now Kim. She built a shapewear company valued at over $4 billion. She passed the California “baby bar” law exam—which has an overall success rate of about 20%, according to various media reports—whilst running multiple businesses. She invented the influencer economy before we even had a name for it. She is, by any measurable standard, a remarkable businesswoman. And yet, as you’re reading it, your mind probably automatically questions the value of these achievements. That’s how deep the programming runs.

Even the vocabulary used to describe men and women in business differs. A man who manages his image is strategic. A woman who does the same is scheming. He is assertive; she is bossy. He is demanding; she is difficult. He is persuasive; she is manipulative. He is driven; she is ruthless.

Same traits. Completely different verdict—and the only variable is gender.

Why Do We Need Women to Be Likable?

This did not come from nowhere. For most of recorded history, likability was a survival strategy for women. A woman who was not palatable to her community risked losing her reputation, her marriage prospects, her livelihood and, in darker chapters of history, burnt on a stake. Being liked was the only currency women were permitted to hold. It was the one lever of power available to them, and so it became conflated with virtue itself.

We have kept the standard long after we discarded the conditions that produced it. Women can now own property, run companies, hold office and build billion-dollar empires, and yet we still ask, before anything else, whether we like them enough to let them do all that.

That is the thing about inherited standards. They outlive their origins. We enforce them long after we have forgotten why we made them.

So what’s the verdict on Kim? I am personally ambivalent about her. I respect what she has built. Her character is frankly none of my business. But I find people who are universally beloved a little suspicious—as Aristotle once said, “a friend to all is a friend to none.” The fact that Kim Kardashian is not universally beloved makes her seem more credible to me, not less. Worldwide adoration is generally a sign that someone has sanded off their edges.

But having any kind of “verdict” on her is missing the point. Yes, she may be unlikable, and she might have even given us some reasons for that. But the real story here is not whether Kim is or isn’t easy to like. It’s why women are still expected to make themselves easy before they are allowed to be impressive. And until that changes, the question says far more about us than it does about her.