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

But she’s a woman, so “she was a bitch,” as a former co-worker says.

That blunt and depressingly relatable observation comes from “Martha,” the frank Netflix documentary about the 83-year-old lifestyle legend. If we were talking about any other successful woman brought low by her own alleged actions, the film might end with the subject chastened and apologetic, as American society demands when you get too big for your britches.

But this is Martha Stewart, who doesn’t do chastened. It’s striking that she’s the only person interviewed on camera throughout the entirety of the film — seemingly saying that she wants you to understand that this is her, unflinching, in all her glory and foibles. She’s like, “That affair? Yeah, that happened. Those letters I wrote to my cheating husband begging him to come back? Here you go. Read them on-air if you want.”

She refuses to pantomime humility for the comfort of the less brilliant, and I think it’s not just her specific actions they wanted an apology for, but for ever having been such a boss lady in the first place. When she wouldn’t tap dance like a good girl, people were mad.

“I think the role women are expected to play to be penitent is irritating, if you think about it,” said Elizabeth MacBride, an author, veteran business journalist and senior knowledge and advocacy consultant for the World Bank’s Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative.

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

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 remembered. Can you imagine? If you’re a woman who knows you’re being watched extra closely by people who may be looking for cracks in your confidence, I bet you can. Ever the professional, she finished the interview and then quietly went to the hospital.

I asked what she thought would have happened if she’d acknowledged that she was literally in labor on-air. “Maybe it would have been, ‘Oh, cool, she’s having a baby! Congratulations!’” she said. “And maybe it would have been ‘Oh, we can’t show that.’”

It’s not that Stewart is some blameless angel. She’s apparently a tough boss I’d never want to work for; she’s seen in the documentary upbraiding an employee using a too-small knife to cut an orange. She was admittedly not 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 she was a “trophy” for prosecutors. (The involvement of James Comey, who would become the face of the investigation into a certain other high-profile woman a little more than a decade later, is noted.)

What’s startling is the cackling glee with which people from Jay Leno to everyday observers welcomed Stewart’s fall, like she’d crafted exquisitely homegrown holly wreaths too close to the sun or something. In the film, Isolde Motley, the founding editor of Martha Stewart Living, posited that “the degree of hatred that people have” for Stewart comes, in part, from the fact that her fame is rooted in the traditionally female and previously unheralded practice of homemaking, “something a lot of us could do, but she just does it better.”

Snoop Dogg’s best friend isn’t the only prominent woman seen as somewhat suspicious because they don’t get all mushy and sorry about their past decisions or their ambition. Stevie Nicks was recently asked how she would respond to those who “condemn” her decision to have an abortion as Fleetwood Mac’s success was heating up. “If people wanna 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 didn’t have “anything keeping her humble.” Harris retorted that there are “a whole lot of women out here who, one, are not aspiring to be humble.”

Hell yeah! I am nowhere near as accomplished as these people, but even I’ve been expected to fold myself into a conveniently cute little package when demanded or risk ridicule. As a baby columnist in my late 20s, a mentor half-jokingly told me I had a talent for being the center of attention, which I interpreted as calling me a showboat.

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

In 2018, Judge Maria L. Oesterreicher became the first woman on Carroll County’s Circuit Court. She said she is “not having it any longer” with the expectations of successful women to be humble. When people are offended by her calling out attempts to “gaslight me or undermine me, I have been conditioned to believe that I have to apologize,” she said. Nah. “It is no longer my job to make sure you are comfortable with my success. If your insecurity with my success causes you to behave poorly, you’ll have to sit with your discomfort. I won’t be offering an apology for it.”

Nor should she, because if she were a man, she likely wouldn’t be expected to. This is where Stewart stands. She never claimed to be nice. She claimed to be, as her former editor said, better than you at a lot of stuff. That’s your problem, not hers.