“I know,” my friend said as she lifted her son onto her lap and began to breastfeed him. “I am weaning him, I swear. It’s just taking longer than anticipated. Don’t judge me.”
I looked at her in surprise. Her son is almost two, not twenty-two, and either way, it was none of my business. “It’s got nothing to do with me,” I told her. “Your body, your child.”
As a child-free woman, I try my best not to have too many opinions about how other people raise their kids. I don’t care if you had a C-section or a quote unquote ‘natural’ birth, I don’t care if you breast feed or use formula, if you co-sleep or not, if you practice attachment parenting or gentle parenting or whatever the new buzz term is. As long as you’re not leaving your child out to the wolves at night, we’re good. But it seems not everyone is as laissez-faire about *checks notes* random kids they have never met. Another friend of mine, an influencer who shares a lot online about her life, recently told me that she finds it difficult that the majority of trolling she receives is from other women, many of whom are mothers too. That’s bleak – do we think the menfolk have a group chat solely devoted to annihilating Kevin down the road for letting his baby cry themselves to sleep? Because I doubt it – but the way we discuss such matters can be strangely infantilising. Why do women feel the need to undermine each other?, that’s what people say when they talk about how ‘bitchy’ women are. Why can’t we just uplift each other? #WomenSupportingWomen #WomenPower etc
I’ll be honest, I find that line of debate boring at best, insulting at worst. It feels reductive to tell the girlies to be nicer to each other, as if playing nice will result in all our problems magically disappearing. It smacks of Choice Feminism, this notion that every decision a woman makes must be inherently feminist because it has been made by a woman. There has to be room for legitimate criticism, regardless of gender – I’m not going to suddenly become a Margaret Thatcher stan just because we’re both female. Let’s get real here; rape is a lot more traumatic than someone being ‘mean’ to me, and statistically, men are exponentially more likely to be the perpetrators of sexual violence than women. One in four women in Ireland are currently in, or have been in, an abusive relationship with a male partner. Globally, an average of 133 women or girls are killed every day by a male member of their own family. Reproductive rights are under siege – legislation which is predominantly spearheaded by male politicians – with research showing that if abortion is banned, the overall rate of maternal deaths could rise by 24% in the States alone. At this point, I would gladly set International Women’s Day on fire if we could just close the gender pay gap before 2067. There are many deeply distressing issues that solely impact women and sometimes I wonder if this attempt to turn the blame back on us – everything would be fine if you stupid bitches would just stop fighting amongst yourselves!! – is a convenient way of distracting us from the larger systemic problems at hand.
Having said all of that, I fully acknowledge that it does sting more when you see women acting as foot soldiers of the patriarchy. It hurts more when it’s other women who are policing ideas of gender, who demand we perform femininity, womanhood, and motherhood in a way which underpins the status quo rather than dismantling it. We want to assume that other women will be our allies, rather than adversaries. Over the last year, I’ve started attending women’s circles – an ancient tradition found across multiple cultures, where women and girls gather together to connect and heal – and it saddens me how many of the participants talk about how wounded they feel by other women, how unsafe they often feel in the presence of women, the scars that have been left by negative experiences in single-sex schools. (Truly, is there anything as devastating as the art-form that is teenage-girl bullying?)
But if one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman, so too we are not born inherently bitchy. There is no Bitch Gene that is uniquely female. We have been taught to compete with each other; it is social conditioning, not biology. As girls, we watch our mothers smile sweetly at their friends, then decimate them with one cutting remark as soon as they leave the room, and we learn that this is how to be a woman. Sorry to sound like that godforsaken Barbie monologue but we are taught to conform, to swallow our anger, to be nice and sweet. We must be the peacekeepers and the homemakers, the good little girls. We must keep ourselves small, and pure, and take up as little space as possible. We must be thin, attractive, always pleasing to the Male Gaze. Any woman who falls outside those norms, any woman who dares to be unruly, will be punished.
We don’t burn women as witches any more, no. We just call them whores or bad mothers.
A part of me wonders how we could be any other way. So many of us came of age in a time and culture steeped in misogyny and sexism; it was so entrenched, so normalised, how would we have even recognised it for what it was? How would it be possible for us not to internalise the messages about gender we were fed on a daily basis? The harm has been done, to an extent, but I still believe there is a way through. I know in my own life that the moment I stopped seeing other women as competition, when I point blank refused to see them as rivals, my female friendships transformed overnight. They deepened, became more loving, supportive, and vulnerable. The love and affection I receive from the women in my life has come to mean so much more to me than the scraps of male attention I once fought so fiercely for; it certainly satiates me more. A core tenant of those relationships is that while my friends are not blind to my faults, they always give me grace – there is no judgement. We cannot flourish when we are being judged. That’s the key element to this, I think, that many women feel most judged by other women and a part of me wonders if the reason why we judge each other so harshly is because we are afforded so little power in other aspects of our lives, personally and politically. Does the act of looking down on others make us feel a little more powerful, even if only for a moment? And does that feel good?
Let’s get into it in the comments, I can’t wait to hear what you all think x