Ooof, am I a misogynist? Hushing your inner woman-hating goblin
--
“Men have committed the greatest crime against women. Insidiously, violently, they have led them to hate women, to be their own enemies, to mobilize their immense strength against themselves, to be the executants of their own virile needs. They have made for women an antinarcissism! A narcissism which loves only itself to be loved for what women haven’t got! They have constructed the infamous logic of antilove.” — Hélène Cixous “Laugh of the Medusa”
I’ll paint for you the harrowing scene. It was a crowded night at San Francisco’s newest rooftop bar, Charmaine’s. In San Francisco, we only have, like, maybe two rooftop bars, so it’s a big deal when a new one opens. The throng of semi-fashionable (it’s California) yuppie techies was inevitable the instant the words “rooftop bar opening” were uttered.
I was late to meet friends, wearing a usual getup, sexy yet unremarkable — dark low cut top, leather jacket, black jeans and boots. The elevator opened to dark lighting, art deco furniture, marble floors, a long line to the bar, enamoured couples canoodling by the firepits, happening twentysomethings clamoring over $15 cocktails.
The scrutiny came in a wave, so severe and palpable I noticed it immediately and felt uncomfortable. As I walked slowly around the expanse of the bar trying to find my friends at their table, I felt the eyes of several young women on me. I met some of their glances head on. They looked me up and down, examining my outfit, posture, hair and skin, body and the way I was moving around. They unmistakably squinted in analysis. I felt like a dog at a park being sniffed and sized up by other pups.
Later, in the chaos of the crowd trying to get a drink, I bumped into a tall and pretty brunette woman, and apologized. She looked at me and scoffed. Finally, during a very casual conversation with a guy at the bar, a woman materialized behind me, “I would really appreciate if you would stop talking to my boyfriend.” As if the sting of paying $15 for a fancy gin and tonic wasn’t traumatizing enough.
What was it about this bar that brought out the catty and judgemental in all these women? Surely, in other situations, they must have been friendly, light-hearted and empathetic. Charmaine’s was the kind of hip, expensive place where all the women were conceivably wealthy, attractive, intelligent and had good jobs. Thus, it was exactly the type of place where women could regard each other as competition.
Some studies suggest women use this type of “indirect aggression” as a way of competing for the most genetically desirable sexual partners — an evolutionary instinct. This behavior serves its goal by “reducing her same-sex rivals’ ability, or desire, to compete for mates.” And yet, our upbringing in society has told us that all resources for women are limited. We have to fight other women for our share of everything, because there isn’t enough to go around. This goes deeper than just men — we compete for jobs, good looks, style, accomplishments, and coveted stool spaces at the bar. We are almost forced to be mean to each other as an act of survival, even when biological survival is not remotely on the table.
As women, whether it be at bars, at work, at school, or on the street, we reserve our harshest, most cutting criticisms for other women. Often it’s so embedded into our psyche we can’t recognize ourselves doing it. It’s just how we exist. I call my own compulsion to do this my inner woman-hating goblin. The goblin is at constant war with my inner good-natured, die-hard feminist fairy.
This is hard for me to write, but sometimes I am a misogynist. For example, I find myself being especially irritated by and critical of women in my Uber pools, but rarely of men. In fact, if there is a man in my Uber pool, I’ll pay him no attention. However, when there’s a woman, I’ll start judging her by the smallest of details, starting the second her name appears on my screen — her name, her outfit, even her destination. If she’s talking on the phone I’ll judge the tenor of her voice and the complexity of the sentences she constructs. If she’s with her boyfriend, I’ll judge their relationship. If she’s with her dog, I’ll judge her parenting skills.
The goblin is a sickness in myself that I’m recognizing and constantly reckoning with. Why was I so threatened by a woman in my Uber pool that I felt compelled to put her down or size her up? What did her life have to do with mine? After all, I am attractive, fun, smart and have a great job. But the nature of all these characteristics feels so precarious that I have to defend it from other women.
Maybe we are all a little bit misogynistic, but we shouldn’t blame ourselves. It is internalized, a product of the society in which we were raised. I am also a feminist, and part of that is deconstructing the misogyny that is invariably part of me.
I’ll propose a radical solution for us ladies: What if we regarded women with the same base neutrality with which we regard men? Or, to take it to another extreme, what if we made an effort to give off kind vibes to women, to actively try to hush the goblin voice telling us to cut her down?
For the past few months, we’ve borne witness to an avalanche of sexual assault allegations against powerful men across industries. Before that, we saw a slew of Silicon Valley companies accused of discrimination against female employees. Before that, the country elected a self-proclaimed pussy grabber to the highest office in the land. Women make up only 20 percent of Congress, they are only 6.4 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs. Just shy of 20 percent of law firm partners are women, even though they are over half of law school graduates.
I could go on and on with stats like these. The structural barriers against us are formidable and numerous, and for too long they have pitted us against each other as another method of keeping us down. As we work to change these structural blocks from the top down, we can also work from the bottom up, taking responsibility for ourselves and turning a critical eye to our own behavior. We can disentangle ourselves from the messaging we’ve heard throughout our lives: that there is not enough to go around. Let’s stop seeing things through the narrow lens of scarcity, and trade that lens in for one of not just solidarity, but the celebration of other women around us. Things like attractiveness and success are more like an infinite resource, and despite our proclivity towards comparison, other women’s looks or accomplishments do not detract from our own. There are enough men at Charmaine’s to go around.
