in my experience women will kind of infantilize ourselves or act immature but it’s often not to impress men but to diffuse men’s anger, it’s a safety measure like saying I’m not a threat to your ego so you can stop simmering with rage now
I know that Joan Rivière is really outdated but she describes this phenomenon in “womanliness as a masquerade”:
“In everyday life one may observe the mask of femininity taking curious forms. One capable housewife of my acquaintance is a woman of great ability, and can herself attend to typically masculine matters. But when, e.g. any builder or upholsterer is called in, she has a compulsion to hide all her technical knowledge from him and show deference to the workman, making her suggestions in an innocent and artless manner, as if they were “lucky guesses.” She has confessed to me that even with the butcher and baker, whom she rules in reality with a rod of iron, she cannot openly take up a firm straightforward stand ; she feels herself as it were “acting a part,” she puts on the semblance of a rather uneducated, foolish and bewildered woman, yet in the end always making her point. In all other relations in life this woman is a gracious, cultured lady, competent and well-informed, and can manage her affairs by sensible rational behavior without any subterfuges. This woman is now aged 50, but she tells me that as a young woman she had great anxiety in dealings with men such as porters, waiters, cabmen, tradesmen, or any other potentially hostile father- figures such as doctors, builders and lawyers; moreover, she often quarreled with such men and had altercations with them, accusing them of defrauding her and so forth”.
(Source: vladtheunfollower, via kuntsuragi)