“You like me! You really like me!”

The Mask spoofed her. Madonna mocked her. To this day, she’s regularly quoted by mere mortals in self-aggrandizing shows of appreciation.

But Sally Field never actually said, “You like me! You really like me!”

When she accepted her second best-actress Oscar for Places in the Heart in 1985, just five years after her first for Norma Rae, Field gave a speech that reflected her gratitude at being recognized by her peers even after getting her start in lowbrow fare she hated, like The Flying Nun. “I haven’t had an orthodox career, and I’ve wanted more than anything to have your respect,” she said that night, adding that she hadn’t really felt the impact of her first Oscar win. “This time I feel it. And I can’t deny the fact that you like me. Right now, you like me!”

But that’s it. Her speech included no admission that she was “so in love” with her brother. No political statement. No sudden drop to the floor to do a series of one-armed push-ups. All it took for Sally Field to become a primordial meme was spontaneously admitting she was happy to be respected.

“It so wasn’t insecurity,” she told the Washington Post last year. “It was about acceptance. It was about the work.” If she could go back and be “more articulate,” she told the paper, she would have said, “Right now, in this moment in time, I have succeeded in what I have been trying to do. That you think I was excellent.”

Field still features on lists of the “worst,” “weirdest,” and “most outrageous” Oscar speeches, and she’s admitted that people still yell that (misquoted) line at her. But she’s far from the only woman who’s won an Oscar and taken heat for failing to fall within the impossibly narrow margins of acceptability for an acceptance speech.

When Halle Berry made history in 2002 as the first black best-actress Oscar winner, she sobbed when she spoke of “every nameless, faceless woman of color that now has a chance because this door tonight has been opened.” She was also accused of being over-the-top, giving too many thanks, and, worst of all, “blubbering.”

“I would have loved to have been so composed like some of the other winners that night, but at the same time it was such a monumental moment not only for me but for so many other people and I felt the weight of that,” she told the Guardian that year.

And then came Anne Hathaway, who spawned an era of Hatha-hate for her admittedly rehearsed speech in 2013. (“It came true!” she cooed while cradling her supporting-actress Oscar for playing Fantine in Tom Hooper’s Les Misérables.) She later explained that this theatrical moment was born out of pressure to perform a certain way, even though she was still reeling from the physical ordeal she put herself through for the role.

“I had to stand up in front of people and feel something I don’t feel, which is uncomplicated happiness,” Hathaway told Variety in 2016. “I tried to pretend that I was happy and I got called out on it, big time. That’s the truth and that’s what happened. It sucks.”

True, male Oscar winners routinely receive criticism of their own. But it seems to take a lot more for them to earn it—say, something like barking like a dog and declaring you’re “king of the world” as James Cameron did in 1998, or waxing poetic about how you’re your own hero à la Matthew McConaughey in 2014.

Meanwhile female winners, like so many female politicians, often face criticism no matter what they say or do.

“No advanced step taken by women has been so bitterly contested as that of speaking in public,” Susan B. Anthony reportedly once said. “For nothing which they have attempted, not even to secure the suffrage, have they been so abused, condemned and antagonized.”

Even in her personal life, Field wasn’t allowed to be colorful and outspoken until she found comfort in performing as a child. “My grandmother would say to me, if I got angry, she would say, ‘Don’t be ugly,’” she told CBS This Morning. “When I first got to a stage, something cleared and I could be me.”

Now, if only that stage could expand to include the Oscars.

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