A few weekends ago, my sorority sisters and I decided to stay in one Saturday night and just hang out. With Saturday Night Live playing on the big TV downstairs, popcorn in hand, and all of us cuddled up together in dozens of blankets, it seemed like the most relaxing night possible. Sarah Silverman was hosting, the sketches were hilarious, and the company was fantastic. It was only when a sketch called “Forgotten Television Gems” came on that I began to feel uncomfortable. The sketch followed a short-lived fictional soap opera called “Supportive Women” that “broke away from the soap opera cliché of catty, back-stabbing female characters, and instead presents women as nurturing and empathetic.” I was startled. Not by the idea that a woman could be nice to another woman, but by the fact that this could actually be put into a comedy sketch. It made me realize that our society has become so accustomed to the idea that women are innately unkind to each other, that SNL could joke about it!
The first episode of the soap opera starts out with a blonde and brunette woman speaking to each other in an office. The blonde woman is a current employee of the company that the brunette woman has just joined, so the blonde is begrudgingly welcoming the brunette. It seems hostile and tense, and the blonde woman advises the new woman not to “work herself to death”. The blonde pretends to hear a knock on the door in order to guide the new woman’s attention in the other direction. She then slips something into the new woman’s glass and hands it to her to drink. After taking a sip, the new woman realizes that it is not just water. The scene then shifts and the atmosphere changes entirely, into a friendly, compassionate environment, as the blonde tells the brunette that she put in Emergen-C in her drink, because she noticed that she was coughing. They are so thankful to each other and the scenes ends with the host saying, “Isn’t that weird?! Women being nice and not hurtful to each other”. Each scene is essentially the same, as they each shift from hostile environment to a kind and considerate one. The humor in this sketch is how the audience’s expectations are shattered, because women are normally malicious towards each other. We would expect the blonde to poison the new woman in the office because she feels threatened, and therefore would kill her off.
The comedic effect of this really confused me; is it really unrealistic to expect women to look out for each other? I was sitting in my sorority basement with my sisters thinking, am I supposed to look at these women as competition? How would that be beneficial for me at all? I want to look at these women’s accomplishments as inspiration for my own motivation, not as obstructions to my ambitions. Is that possible in the society we live in?
It is obvious that poisoning another woman doesn’t happen in reality (at least hopefully not), so I began to explore how this cliché of women developed. How is it perpetrated in our every day life? Personally, I believe that our hostility towards each other does not manifest itself in our actions; rather, it presents itself in our lack of action. Women do not actively try to ruin each other, but we do not actively try to help each other either. Why? Because we think that helping another woman might give them an advantage. We can’t even seem to give simple compliments easily. Consciously or unconsciously, if another woman is killing it in a discussion section, or if her outfit is super cute, our initial reaction is ‘Damn, why aren’t I speaking up like she is’ or ‘Damn, I look like a slob’. Another woman’s success somehow translates to our personal failure. I think this problem lies within the fact that we judge and compare ourselves to each other, rather than the best version of ourselves. Therefore, we think that if another woman is a rock-star, we are somehow belittled. We minimalize our successes based on other women’s lives. It really is still a man’s world in many respects. So if we still can’t seem to find full and complete acceptance in a man’s world, can’t we at least try to find – and grant – acceptance in our own women’s world?
If we see the guy we have a hard-core crush on flirting with another girl, our friends try to console us by calling her ugly and promiscuous. And somehow that makes us feel better! Bringing another woman down innately helps us brings ourselves up. But it doesn’t have to be this way. So this is why I am proposing that we all go out into the world today with a goal: to compliment at least three women a day. This is a very small step towards cultivating a campus that is supportive and compassionate towards women. There are so many things in college that can so easily bring us down; we aren’t doing well in our classes, we don’t have a boyfriend, we haven’t had time to go the gym, etc. So why make this worse by having to worry about competition with the people that are naturally supposed to feel our pain?
Imagine a beautiful girl coming up to you just to say that she really adores your shoes, or that you made a really great point in class. You would probably be so caught off guard that someone was genuinely praising you that it wouldn’t even hit you for a few minutes. But then you would walk around all day feeling great about yourself, and you would do great things. This is something we can all do; so let’s start this. Go be that girl who makes someone’s day! Give out a few compliments, they’re free. Then, hopefully, we can begin to grasp how to change the stereotype. One step at a time, ladies.
Watch the sketch here: http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/forgotten-television-gems/2…