We, as people who identify as females, never neglect or deny the fact that we are at a relatively unequal position in society compared to men - even today. However, we as women go out of our way to reprimand, gossip about, or shame those of our own for no apparent reason.
We, as girls, write long posts on Facebook about how a girl should never be judged by what she wears or what path she chooses to take. Yet, we have called girls attention seeking and used much more horrible words while looking at the lengths of their skirts. We have judged girls in our classes who got married "young", who chose to have babies ‘early’ and girls who lost their virginity ‘too young’. We, as girls, frown upon them. We, as women, tell our daughters about the fragile egos of men and how it is our responsibility to nurture them. We, as girls, tell our sisters to put on more make up or buy a new dress to impress the new guy in class.
We, as girls, pride ourselves on having more friends who are boys. We think it somehow makes us cooler. It makes us become people who don’t like drama because that’s the only thing us girls do right. When someone says, “You’re not like the other girls”, we consider it a compliment and blush. We don’t for a minute wonder why we feel happy when we are dissociated from this group. We simply smile. Are we that ashamed of our gender?
We as girls, report our biggest fear of marriage as having to deal with our mothers-in-law, not our partners themselves. We, as women, get emotionally and often physically abused by our mothers-in-law and then repeat the same behavior with the girls our sons get married to. And why? Because we validate our worth by our importance in our men’s lives. And to establish this importance, we, as women, hurt our own kind. We, as girls, call the girl in an affair a ‘home wrecker’ and the guy ‘a victim to her charms’.
In my last psychology class, my professor told us about a recent psychological study. Professors in the field of science were asked to hire a new lab assistant. Two candidates of identical qualifications were interviewed- one male and one female. The male candidate was rated as more competent and given a higher starting salary by almost every one of the professors. There is no surprise there. We have seen this for generations. However, the thing that truly stung me was that this effect was shown both my male and female professors. Because again, we as women, don’t find it necessary to help each other climb the ladder of success. We, as the relatively successful women, enjoy being the only ones up here.
So we as women, might as well give up this huge fight we claim to be fighting. We, as women, might as well bow down to the patriarchy. At least until we, as women, figure out that we can’t win this if half of us are fighting for the other goddamn side.
