Tripping the Prom Queen: The Truth About Women and Rivalry

by Susan Shapiro Barash

I’ve been the subject of gossip, betrayals, backstabbing, catfight-ing. I’ve found myself enmeshed in relationships marked by unexpected competition, envy, and jealousy.

have seen how female friendship can be both empowering and disabling, a source of rock-solid strength as well as a mire of treachery, deceit, and misunderstanding.

an early lesson in how competing for items in short supply often brings out the worst in women.

I always had friends and colleagues with whom I could have trusted my life—but I also found women who seemed to view not only me but all other female academics as their rivals.

Many of the friends I depended on for comfort and support suddenly began to view me as a threat.

think they found it disturbing that I had left my unhappy marriage while they were still committed to theirs.

For other women, the threat seemed more immediate—twice I was told in no uncertain terms that I had better st...

Reluctantly I began to admit that I, too, had felt competitive, envious, even jealous of my fellow females. I, too, had walked into a dinner party and done a quick tally of how I stacked up. Was I as talented as the other women? As pretty? As prestigiously employed?

hints of a dark secret, a problem that everyone seemed to sense but no one was willing to talk about: women’s rivalry.

Although male friendships in the media abound—from buddy movies to the warm, collegial relationships among the guys on cop shows—I saw precious few portraits of female relationships.

Her youth, beauty, and romantic success make her the envy of the other women, who clearly would rather bond over their common misery than help each other to find individual versions of happiness.

I didn’t want to focus on such a dismal view. I didn’t like feeling that I might be playing into the sexist stereotypes that had portrayed women as conniving little man-hunters;

heard from women whose colleagues, best friends, and sisters had stolen their boyfriends and husbands. I talked with women whose fear of female rivalry was so strong that they chose to live in small towns, “so there would be less competition”; women who avoided certain parties “because I don’t want my husband to meet too many single, beautiful women.” I heard about girlfriends dropping a woman when she snagged a promotion at work, or finally found a great guy, or even when she became pregnant.

Many women confessed that they had spent their lives trying to steer between two painful courses: reaching for the advantages that other women seemed to have and struggling to defend themselves from other women’s envy.

1. Despite all the efforts of the women’s movement to change this troubling pattern, we’re still willing to cut each other’s throats over what we value most—jobs, men, and social approval.

we tend to ignore men when it comes to competing, focusing our rivalry almost entirely upon each other.

2. We’ll do anything rather than face up to female envy and jealousy

in these postfeminist times, women are often rewarded for romanticizing female friendship and punished for telling the truth about female rivalry.

3. Even though my focus is on female rivalry, I have also found some wonderful examples of female bonding—within families, between friends, among colleagues. In these positive instances, I found that the key was for women to have realistic expectations, of themselves and each other.

this female rivalry begins: in women’s insufficient options. In a world where there simply isn’t enough to go around, women compete. In a world that limits women to narrowly defined roles, women compete with each other.

Ironically, as women’s options have grown, so has our rivalry,

“If there is a pretense of getting along, it only exists at a superficial level. Underneath, there is the urge to outdo one another.”

We can’t understand female rivalry without understanding the pressure to conceal it.

I shuddered at the apparent freedom so many women felt simply to take what they wanted without regard for other women’s feelings. It was as though we were all crazed customers at some kind of year-end shoe sale, shoving our fellow females out of the way as we clutched desperately at the few remaining pieces of merchandise. I had the discouraging sense that our culture had created female monsters, dooming us to play out these intense and bitter rivalries almost against our will.

More than 90 percent of women of different social strata claim that envy and jealousy toward other women colors their lives 80 percent of women say they have encountered jealousy in other females since they were in grade school 90 percent of women in diverse jobs report that competition in the workplace is primarily between women, rather than between women and men More than 65 percent of interviewees said that they were jealous of their best friend or sister More than 70 percent of interviewees were familiar with the concept of women stealing a friend’s husband, lover, boyfriend, or job 40 percent of interviewees reported themselves the victims of another woman’s theft of a husband, lover, boyfriend, or job 25 percent of interviewees reported that they themselves had stolen a friend’s husband, lover, boyfriend, or job

facing up to this gloomy picture is the first step toward a better future of more authentic, loving bonds among women.

Competition is probably the most benign form of female rivalry. When we compete with one another, we’re saying, I’m willing to fight you for what 1 want, This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, particularly when we’re competing for limited resources.

In some cases, competition can even be a powerful force for good, motivating us to perform better, to be more honest about what we want, and to marshal our resources on our own behalf.

First, despite the efforts of the women’s movement to open every type of job to women, we still tend to compete only with each other.

The miniskirted apprentices were not competing on the basis of competence and knowledge alone; they were also battling each other on the basis of looks and sexual allure.

The beauty myth

the very popularity of the show’s catfights reveals the pressure women feel to size each other up while leaving the men alone.

Second, sometimes healthy competition for what we want turns into a problematic desire to have something merely...

Suddenly we’ve created a contest based less on our own authentic wishes than on rivalry with a competitor. At this point competition shades into envy, which might be expressed as 1 want what you have, Now,

Although the envy may be uncomfortable, it’s helped us understand ourselves better, and to take positive action on our own behalf.

Hey! If she can do it, why can’t 1?

Everybody else is doing it. So why can't we?

focus all of our discomfort upon our rival. This is the stage of female rivalry that I call jealousy, which might be expressed as You’ve got something 1 want—and 1 want you dead,

Instead of figuring out what we want and how to get it, we focus on what they have and why we hate them for it.

Reason behind any hatred based in ignorance

the more powerless we feel, especially when competing for “scarce goods,” the more prone we are to turn healthy competition into a corrosive jealousy

Being safe matters

Once I married Roy I expected to be satisfied, but a weird thing happened. I became jealous of other women’s lifestyles…. Those with families seemed to be the most enviable of all…. Suddenly, I had to have a baby. I hadn’t even considered it a possibility, and now I was consumed. I ended up in a support group for infertile women and when two of the members became pregnant, I went nuts…. Once Roy and I adopted a baby, I settled down, and today I feel blessed. But I find myself competitive now over my daughter and other mothers and their children. I think this jealousy is just a big part of who I am.

every show demonstrated that, in fact, women’s competition is total, including professional competence, looks, fashion sense, and sex appeal, all indiscriminately considered as elements within a single competition without boundaries.

The ads pointed as well to female rivalry with their succinct slogan: “Be envied.”

What was the appeal of watching powerful women fail? Why not just cheer them on, viewing them as inspirational role models who offered us hope rather than icons whom we needed, obsessively, repeatedly, to tear down?

our fascination with female rivalry had three sources.

First, there was our own sense of despair at the ways in which modern society, apparently so open to female success, still makes it so difficult for women to get ahead.

the glass ceiling and the unrealistic standards for female beauty still hold us back. In such a context, looking at women who seem to have succeeded where we have failed can become almost unbearable. We

we worry that a lust for success makes us somehow less feminine or desirable, how can we help savoring the hardships of high-achieving women such as Hillary Clinton and Martha Stewart? Their success seems to mock our failure even as it tempts us to take steps that we fear may make us less feminine and alluring.

Success is unfeminine

Second, even healthy competition for women is still largely taboo. It’s very difficult for most of us to admit that we want to win, to snag the promotion at the expense of our coworkers, to rise to the top of our profession.

Rage becomes her

excoriated for their ambition,

women may rise to the top, but they must seem as though they don’t care whether they win or lose. Nice girls care only about being nice. They win only by accident or by someone else’s efforts.

Rage becomes her

Rather than hate her for her success, they could empathize with her failure.