Triin Luhats: "Being Strong Can Exact a High Price on Women"

Superproducer and content creator Triin Luhats discusses in the show "Women's Stories" how societal expectations for women to be strong can actually cause harm. Luhats admits that this pressure was one of the reasons she stepped down from her well-known producer role.

Superproducer, content creator and mother Triin Luhats is a woman who has been praised her entire life: "Oh, you're so strong!" In the show "Women's Stories," she reveals the hidden side of this compliment and explains why being seen as strong is far from entirely positive.

"I have, just like everyone else, those moments where I feel like in a song lyric: Sometimes it seems that love walks hand in hand with death," Luhats says in the show. "You know, I think we are all trapped in certain roles, we switch them several times a day, and there's nothing wrong with that, that's actually what life is called."

Luhats explains that women are raised according to a certain mindset: be good, hardworking and strong, then people will like you. Yet, according to her, it often turns out that women who take a different approach reach happiness more easily. Strength works as a success mechanism in the short term, but in a longer perspective it can create a situation where people simply pile their burdens onto the strong person's shoulders.

"Yes, the role also comes with wearing certain masks, and I don't necessarily see that as bad," Luhats adds. "Not everyone needs to know everything about you. It's neither possible nor healthy for you."

In part, it is this very pressure, the constant expectation to be strong, that led Luhats to recently step down from the producer role that brought her fame and recognition, but at a high cost. In the show, she also reflects on why expectations placed on women are often contradictory and essentially impossible to fulfill. "Women's Stories" is also available as a podcast.