Women are always empowering other women…right? Just scroll through your average millennial feminist woman’s Instagram feed, and you’ll find a plethora of posts from Refinery29 showing women of all kinds, from actresses to activists, encouraging and empowering one another. Scroll through any feminist Tumblr, and you’re bound to scroll past posts from users infuriated that society so often portrays women as “catty” and “competitive” when their female friends have always been so encouraging and empowering.
While I agree that it’s time that we as a society stop portraying women as backstabbing, catfighting harpies — waiting, with lipstick-rimmed mouths watering, anxious to call other girls out for “stealing boys” or “acting like sluts” — when we act like women empowering women is always the new narrative, we miss the opportunity to solve a persisting problem in our society. Women – even those fighting on the frontlines of feminism – are often still participating in a misogynistic culture that teaches women to compete with one another. Think of the last time you heard a girl call another girl a “slut,” or the last time your friend ranted to you about her crush’s girlfriend. Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche says it best in her TED talk, “We Should All Be Feminists:” “We raise girls to see each other as competitors, not for jobs or for accomplishments, which I think would be a good thing, but for the attention of men.”
While we are past living in a society where women are only being raised for whatever dowry they may earn their parents, that doesn’t mean that we have conquered misogyny. For example, as Adiche suggested, girls are raised to compete with one another. Before I had my first falling-out with a friend or watched another girl flirt with my crush, my mother had already told me six stories about times in her life where she concluded that “women were sneaky” or “women couldn’t be trusted.” I was warned not to let a friend hang out with my boyfriend or crush – otherwise, my mother warned, I would surely lose him to this potentially vicious, sex-crazed, backstabbing harpy.
And if women don’t receive this influence at home, they certainly receive this influence from modern media sources. Pop song lyrics warn women to consider the threat their fellow females might have on their chances at true love. Taylor Swift’s “You Belong With Me” is a great representation of this idea. In the song, Taylor proudly sings of her crush’s girlfriend: “She wears high heels, I wear t-shirts/She’s cheer captain, and I’m on the bleachers.”
In these seemingly innocent song lyrics, Taylor Swift draws two important distinctions. She labels herself as “the girl next door,” hopelessly innocent and geeky, and labels her crush’s girlfriend as the superficial cheerleader. In other lyrics, Taylor notes that her crush’s girlfriend doesn’t get her boyfriend’s sense of humor (“She’s going off about something you just said…because she doesn’t get your humor like I do”). Taylor paints this unnamed “crush” as someone who is bitchy and stuck-up — clearly unworthy of her guy’s love and affection. Overall, in these lyrics, it is made clear that Taylor sees this girl as competition. And if you watch the music video for this song, you’ll get to see Taylor show up to a school dance, white and glowing, where the boyfriend casts aside his girlfriend, dressed in a revealing mini dress, and dances with Taylor, the virginal sweetheart. After constructing this “other woman” as a vicious, stuck-up sleaze, Taylor Swift portrays herself as the clear winner of this competition. It’s the musical equivalent of telling your crush his girlfriend is a cheap slut, and having him leave the party with you instead.
If Taylor Swift songs aren’t evidence enough of this phenomenon, pop culture supplies plenty of other examples. There are movies like Mean Girls, in which we see Cady Herron learn about the dangers of “girl world” from the position of an innocent outsider. Even though Mean Girls critiques the culture of women competing with each other for the attention of men, it is able to do so with a narrative that is very relatable for a modern female audience. The relatability of Mean Girls,“ and its raging popularity in “girl world” is only evidence that we as a society are very comfortable with the girls-competing-with-girls narrative. But what is so problematic about all of this? Perhaps it’s all innocent, and the narrative that inspired “You Belong With Me” is based on a girl who picked on Taylor Swift before she got into high school, and started dating Taylor’s best friend. Perhaps Mean Girls is just a commentary on girls bullying other girls. We could very well show a parallel movie about guys bullying other guys. However, in our society, is it easy to imagine a Mean Guys movie in which guys are fighting over the hottest senior girl in school and constantly stabbing each other in the back? Can you picture a “Jingle Bell Rock” scene with men dressed in black tights and cropped red vests? What about a guy running next to his friend’s car and calling him “a mean boy…a bitch!”?
The narrative of a Mean Guys movie simply wouldn’t be the same. To construct it in the same way as Mean Girls would be to insult heteronormative, patriarchal gender roles that insist that men be portrayed as aggressive, assertive, and strong. In our culture, we would never label men as “back-biting” or “sneaky” in the same way that we might label women.
And this is not to say that we should label women as “sneaky” or “backbiting.” It is important that we recognize that misogynistic societal structures have encouraged a culture where women are frowned upon for being assertive and aggressive like their male counterparts. Can you imagine a version of Mean Girls where Regina and Cady fought by making fun of each other’s physical weaknesses and proceeded to beat the sh*t out of each other over Aaron?
In 2017, I think it’s great that feminists are promoting a culture of women empowering other women. I love scrolling through my Instragram feed, and seeing women promote other women and praise their strengths. However, I wish we had more dialogue on why it’s so important that women empower other women. We should because women are still labeling each other “sluts” and “prudes.” We should because women are still competing for male attention. And we should because some of the ugliest fights between female friends seem to happen over a guy. In a misogynistic society, women empowering women isn’t always the narrative. We lose some of the value in female empowerment when we act like it’s a completely commonplace in the same society where women make a fraction of every dollar a man earns. Our feminism could be much stronger if we valued female empowerment as a response to “raising girls to see each as competitors.” Once we look at women empowerment through this lens, we can appreciate empowerment as something even more important: a backlash against misogynistic gender roles.