I just love bossy women. I could be around them all day. To me, bossy is not a pejorative term at all. It means somebody’s passionate and engaged and ambitious and doesn’t mind leading.
-Amy Poehler
I’ve said this a million times and I’m sure you’ve heard it before -women are raised to be enemies. We are taught from a young age to see other women as competition. We have to be smarter, taller, skinnier, more beautiful than others to either get a guy, find a job or anything really. In my case, this made me grow up extremely self conscious and competitive. At home, I felt like I would never be as good as my sisters -who were at least a half a foot taller than me and several pounds lighter- and in school I would try to outshine those who I saw as a threat. But then I turned 16 and I remember thinking this type of mentality and behaviour only hurt me and decided to give it up and just be who I was and stop comparing myself to others, since I would never live up to my expectations of who I was supposed to be and when I graduated high school, I finally understood the joy -yes, joy- of supporting others, especially women. Not only was it liberating to separate other’s success from mine and be happy about it, I think it changed me as a person and made me a little bit more positive –
– until I came to college and experienced the worse sexism in my life from women. Yeah, that’s right, women. Because if there is one thing that’s even worse than men not supporting women and shaming them for who they are, is women doing that exact thing. And when I decided to talk about this with my mom, she told me she had experienced this her entire life in her work place. And she assured me that if I thought being reprimanded by a man was bad, try having another woman tell you how to dress or behave in a situation so you don’t upset a male boss… Till this day, this type of thinking makes no sense to me.
Especially since I know that we, as women, can do better. And I know you might be sick of hearing about today’s political climate, but we face so many obstacles in society, we really don’t need to add any negativity in our lives -despite our culture’s nasty habit of trying to turn us against each other. We need to embrace intersectional feminism and not only apply it when we see a cute shirt with a good logo or when it’s convenient. We need to understand that as women and human beings, we may have overlapping identities -like race, sexuality, religion, to name a few- and these impact the way we see things and experience oppression and if we’re ever going to move forward, we need to move forward together and I’ll say this a million more times: SUPPORT EACH OTHER.
Let’s forget about the jealousy and the competition because just like Melinda Gates said, “A woman with a voice, is by definition, a strong woman.” And we are stronger together. We are better together. I encourage you, reader, to go outside and feel the indescribable feeling it is to find other women with your same purpose and see them rise and become successful and celebrate each other. Go and make friends with a woman who is nothing like you and find something in common because you know what? We truly are the change we want to see and we are a generation who wants to see change.
Let’s show society what exactly it’s like for a woman. Let’s show them the power of being a woman.