Keeping the Feminist Troops Solid

One of the side effects of having a vagina (or wanting to have one) is that when you hit puberty, the world starts to tell you that your best friend is your biggest rival. That she is the enemy. That everyone else who has or wants a vagina is too. That you are competitors in a vicious, no-rules, blood brawl. You are fighting for men, you are fighting for jobs, you are fighting for attention. You know you won’t be able to have it all. But you best make sure you beat the other women and winsomething.

A friend of mine asked me recently how I don’t let this steaming pile of bullshit affect my day-to-day life. How do I rise above the competition and what do I do when other women force me to compete? How does this societal narrative not worm its way slowly into all of my friendships and poison them from within?

I was pretty flattered that he thought I was so above it. It means that what I’m doing is working and that’s a good thing.

I don’t rise above it all the time. I try to. Because rising above competition with other girls is the way towards fulfilling friendships and greater agency over yourself. But sometimes it isn’t easy, because sometimes the lies the patriarchy is telling you are so damn loud. It’s the type of thing that you have to be conscious of in your interactions with other girls, almost all the time. And if you let it slip and don’t think about rising above it, all of a sudden you find yourself moored right back into it.

I do have a couple of strategies for how to drown out everything that is telling me she is the enemy. On men. On jobs. On attention.

On Men.

In an episode of How I Met Your Mother, Robyn says to Lily that, “men are like subway trains. Miss one, and another will come along 5 minutes later”. Lily replies, “Unless it’s the end of the night, then you’ll just hop on anything!”. And they both laugh, because it’s girls night and that’s where jokes like that hit home.

But Robyn’s got a pretty good mentality about dude. It just doesn’t allow you to get too worked up about men. Sometimes the guy will want to talk to you, sometimes he’ll want to talk to your friend, sometimes he’ll want to talk to the other girl at the bar. But whatever, because, you know, he’s not the only train. He’s not the only person with a penis in the entire world. This guy or that guy thinking your friend is cuter than you does not mean that you have lost any chance to have sex or love you’ll ever have. There will be other guys.

Subway trains are also pretty indifferent to who gets on them. If you miss a train because it’s too full, it’s not like it was because you weren’t charming enough, or flirty enough, or pretty enough. And even though, it’s easy to talk yourself into believing otherwise, it’s the same with random guys at bars.

Let me elaborate. One night last year, I went out with a guy friend of mine and it was just one of those nights. I got hit on HARD by like 8 guys in two hours. It was intense, there were a bunch of them, and they all wanted to buy me a drink.

So eventually, Sam and I dip. And he says “wow, that was crazy! Is that what it’s like every night you go out? You had those guys eating out of your hand, good for you girl!” (or something similar to that, I’m paraphrasing).

And I kind of laughed and told him, “Um, no, that’s not an every night thing. It’s random. Besides, none of that had anything to do with me.”

“Oh, come on,” he goes “you know that you’re cute!”

“Right,” I tell him, “I am cute. That’s not the point. None of those guys were hitting on me, they were all just hitting on the cute girl in the bar that all the other guys seemed to be having fun with. I just happened to be the girl tonight. You easily could have replaced me with someone else and they’d have acted the exact same way.”

I find it important to distinguish between male attention that is focused on you and male attention that is directed at you. It’s the difference between the guy in your Econ class who thought you were cute the first day he saw you and likes your comments in class and asks if you want to grab a drink and the guy who is sitting next to you at the bar and says “hey, where are you from?”. The first one is about me and it is something that my actions can control. It’s focused and it’s personal. The second is about him and it is something that my actions don’t really control at all. It’s the equivalent of him spinning around with his eyes closed and hitting on the first girl he points to.

You are not going to have a good time if you compete with girls for something that is ultimately about guys and out of your control. It is the equivalent of getting angry at your friend because she won blackjack. It’s the equivalent of feeling bad about yourself because you didn’t. And when you start looking at it that way, it starts to seem very very silly to compete with your friends over something that isn’t even about you.

As for male attention that’s focused on you — most of the time, when a guy likes you, he’s not going to also be chatting to your friends because it’s specific and personal to you. In this situation, it usually doesn’t even come up. And the more sparks fly between you two, the less need there would be to get competitive with your friends. And any guy who is personalizing attention to you and your friend is the worst anyway.

On Jobs.

This aspect of false-competition is where I am most tempted. Because society likes to give women the idea that in your chosen field there is not enough room for all of you. Or, as Aziz Ansari puts it in Master of None, it’s the diversity idea that there “can’t be two”. You can’t have two women on the Exec Board, you can’t have two head engineers, and hoo-boy are there not enough awesome lady-journo jobs out there so you know you can’t have two of those.

But you just have to tell yourself all the time that YES THERE CAN. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler are both successful. And because they are both successful, Tina Fey helped Jane Krakowski be more successful and Amy Poehler helped Aubrey Plaza be more successful. More successful women is GOOD for your career, not bad. You guys aren’t competing, you guys are co-creators. And whenever you start to feel competitive, or panicky that you aren’t doing well enough, just remember that’s the patriarchy trying to sew discord in the troops. That is the patriarchy trying to make women not help one another.

On Attention.

Competing for attention is slightly more universal thing than the other two competitions. It’s something we’re all, regardless of gender, naturally inclined to do. But women, specifically, have a tendency to tie up being the center of attention as something that should be effortless. The prettiest girl at the party. The girl at the party that all the people are captivated by . The men want her, the women want to be her, but she’s not even trying for it. She’s just has an aura that is so captivating that everyone else around her is drawn to her like a magnet.

Right.

You can tell when girls are caught up in this idea when you start seeing them competing for attention by doing silly, over the top things. When they seem to be forcing themselves to be whimsical. When they’re trying to act like a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Because you want to be the center of attention but you cannot, under any circumstances, make it seem like that’s what you have in mind. Because magnets don’t have to carefully plan out how they are going to attract.

But it’s a flawed understanding of how getting attention works. People pay attention to things that are interesting and most things that are interesting are trying to be interesting. I can get very competitive when it comes to attention. And sometimes it makes me talk way too much, makes me trip over the words of other people in an effort to get them to LOOK AT ME. But I realized that someone only bringing to the table that they want you to be drawn to them, it’s boring. When I feel like I’m not getting enough attention, I try to figure out how to be more interesting. And the most interesting thing you can do to (most) people is to respond to something that they said. So I’ve learned that if I feel like I’m not getting enough attention, I should shut up and listen so that I’ll actually have an interesting and memorable thing to add to the conversation. Because then people will actually want to pay attention to what I’m saying. It’s not quite breaking down the competition. But it is getting the competition to work for you.

Those are my strategies for listening to the dulcet chorus of feminist cooperation instead of the siren song of patriarchy inspired competition. But, like I said, I don’t always do manage to break out of it. Everything I just laid out for you is very logical and it makes perfect sense. And that is not the part of my brain the urge to compete comes from. When my best friend told me she got an interview at a news website we’re both obsessed with, I ¾ felt like there was a balloon of excitement in my stomach and ¼ felt like there was acidic bile in my throat. I was so excited for her, and I think it will be a great opportunity. I’m genuinely very, very happy for her. But I still had this gut feeling that said if she gets this, it means I didn’t and there isn’t enough room! But I swallowed it. And I told myself that, of course, there is enough room. That her doing well and (potentially) getting this internship doesn’t hurt me, it helps me. That her success is not a blow against me. And now I am 100% happy for her, 0% jealous. You have to be on your toes. If you don’t make a habit of beating your instincts down with logic, they’ll just beat you down.

But if other women aren’t doing that, you just keep using your strategies to stay out of the fray. Because you can’t be dragged into the game if you just refuse to play. I’ve had to take enough gym classes to know that for sure.

After Lily and Robyn decide that men are like trains on their girl’s night, a guy hits on Robyn. Then another. And another. And Lily ends up taking her engagement ring off, trying to get a guy to buy her a drink by flipping her hair like a deranged bird, and sitting in a grape. But you know what? Robyn doesn’t tell her she’s being a stupid girl or being a bad feminist because she gets competitive. Robyn just doesn’t play until Lily realizes she wants to hang out with her friend, not prance for a guy at a bar. Because we are all forced to listen to the same sirens. We all have the same voices that whisper to use when we don’t want them to, that tell us that she’s winning when someone talks to her at a bar or she gets a callback or everyone laughs at her joke. And judging other women for giving in to the competition for a minute won’t make it go away. The only thing that keeps the troops in the battle against patriarchy solid is the troops themselves.