There is a leak in our apartment. It’s in our living room, to be exact, right above the dinner table. The leak turned a spot of ceiling above my seat at the table a shade of dark blue, as if the plaster were being bruised.

It was difficult getting a contractor here, with the whole process a special type of impossible challenge, like nailing jello to the wall. But I’ve learned that in Portugal, the impossible, with time, and the occasional help of an insider, becomes feasible.

This morning, the long-awaited contractor rings the doorbell, an hour late. I have learned this is considered a mild delay.

At the door is a young man, around my age. “I’m here for the air conditioner,” he says with minimal eye contact and an air that is very much disinterested.

This must be the wrong apartment, I tell him, because our air conditioner is just fine. The man refers to something on the screen of his phone and looks up at me – “Sorry, the leak. The leak.”

“Oh, okay, that’s what I thought, great,” I say to him, trying to be friendly and ‘connect.’ “Thanks so much for coming,” I continue. “If you don’t mind, could you please take off your shoes before you come in?”

He looks confused, so I try to clarify, “We don’t wear shoes in the house.”

I shrug theatrically, pretending to be apologetic (really, I am not – I am particularly averse to shoes being worn in my house. If you could see the amount of dog feces on the cobblestone sidewalks of my neighborhood, I promise you’d be on my side). I point to the shoe rack by the front door, which is populated with sneakers and flip flops, so the man could see that this was not a personal affront to his shoes in particular.

It’s as if I’d asked him to strip himself of his clothing and fix the leak al fresco, although part of me suspects this type of request would have elicited a more favorable reaction.

“What do you mean? I need my shoes.”

My inner litigator wants to press him as to how exactly he substantiates the notion that his shoes are mission-critical.

Instead I say benevolently, “I know, but we just don’t wear shoes in the house, and I would really appreciate it if you could remove them.”

“I’m going to have to dirty the house anyway when I fix your air conditioning, so you’re going to have to clean the floor either way,” he says to me, as if I were the designated housekeeper – because clearly a woman opening the front door of an apartment holds vacuuming as an inevitable destiny.

And just like that, the interaction escalates from being about the nuances of indoor footwear preferences to power. This guy of course doesn’t know there are frequent exceptions to my shoe rule, often involving in-laws, friends with a killer pair of new high heels, and cordial people generally who ask nicely.  Also, this guy clearly doesn’t know me. I do not sympathize with imposition, in particular of something as unfortunate as ill-informed as gender rules. But okay, game on.

He continues in protest. “In Portugal this isn’t the way we do things” he says, now using the foreign accent he’s noticed in my speech as ammunition. “So you should do things our way here.”

At this point I decide there is no turning back, with zero possible scenarios in which this guy now enters my apartment whilst wearing his shoes. I dig my barefoot heels into the wooden floor and pull a Gandalf:

“I understand, I’m so sorry,” I say in a tone that’s deliberately unapologetic. “No problem at all. You don’t have to remove your shoes, and you also don’t have to come in. If you wish to work inside this apartment, your shoes must come off here.”

He looks at me with disapproval. He removes his shoes.

The contractor spends the rest of the morning playing nice, shuffling around the house in his socks and making small-talk about the weather and Lisbon’s booming tourism industry, proving himself to be of the personality type that requires standing up to in order for him to back down. I know many Latin males of this variety. After making a rectangular hole above my seat at the dining room table, he even asks for a broom with which to sweep up the debris.

As I write this I can hear words of disapproval from specific people. I can picture their faces along with commentary directly and indirectly addressing the unattractiveness of female anger.

To which I say: in this, as in all matters of freedom, be headstrong. If anger is a resulting descriptor, so be it. As the French would say, Je m’en fous.

It occurs to me that headstrong women of self-determination are often accused of anger, (1) as if female anger were a shameful thing (read Leslie Jamison here) and (2) as if female boundary-setting were overreaching in an entirely unacceptable way in the first place.

I am reminded of an incident from last December. I was at the crowded bar of a south Florida restaurant waiting to order a glass of Chardonnay for me, a glass of Merlot for Pete. Pete was outside, holding our spot at one of the tables outdoors with a sunset view. At the bar, and older man comes up behind me and puts his hand firmly on my waist. “Don’t report me for this,” he said, “because I’m not sexually harassing you, I just need to get to the bar, but you know, these days we have to be so careful with women, you never know what they’ll say about you for the tiniest thing, right?”

I have no idea what made this man, with a full head of white hair, an overgrown belly protruding over his khakis and a red cap proclaiming Make America Great Again possibly imagine I’d sympathize.

I explained to him that the way to the bar did not go via my waist. “Do not touch me,” I said and recoiled. I shifted my purse onto my shoulder in a way that lodged it firmly between me and his expansive, repulsive waistline.

“Don’t be so angry,” he said. “I’m just playing with you.” He rolled his eyes. “I should have known, you’re one of those. So sue me,” he said. As if his hand on my waist were his right as a male.

As if shoes in my apartment, as if my vacuuming male debris, were a gender-born privilege.

In matters of freedom – in all of them, be they about footwear or your body – be headstrong. There are boundaries, and we each have our right to them. Dig in your heels and make them take their shoes off. Angry is not a descriptor that offends me.

Feminist writer Lindy West wrote in a November piece for The New York Times, “I am perpetually cast as a disapproving scold. But what’s the alternative? To approve? I do not approve.”

Make it known.