Kindle Notes & Highlights
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May 13 - May 18, 2022
this need to be identical contains the seeds of envy: if Sarah and her mother are so similar, any deviation threatens to reveal Sarah’s superiority, making her the victor in a contest she didn’t even know she was
I was struck by how she repeatedly invoked her mother’s authority when describing her own envy. It seemed that Adrienne and her mother had bonded over their shared envy of other women, reinforcing both women’s sense of inferiority even as they found a kind of mutual comfort in their common misery.
I look at everyone else and try to size it all up. I’ve been like this for so long, it won’t be changing now.
without reason?
three primary ways in which mother-daughter bonds can set us up for lifelong rivalry with other women:
1. The Competitor
She trusts neither other women nor her own daughter. As a result Annie and other competitors’ daughters must grow up with no images of positive female bonding. The only way they know how to relate to other women is by competing with them.
2. The Merging Mother
her mother wanted not a daughter but a clone:
Merging mothers often give their daughters mixed messages like these. On the one hand, they invite their daughters to be like them—a clear affirmation of their own worth. On the other hand, they convey to their daughters that if they compete with their mother, they’ll always lose. “Be just like me, but not as good” is the motto of these merging mothers.
3. Queen Lear
Mothers, too, often set up competitions among their daughters, suggesting that they will give their “largest bounty” to the prettiest, smartest, most successful, or most loving.
Many of the women I spoke to described their mothers as envying other women, and then encouraging their daughters to follow suit.
hew
My mother prefers my three brothers to me and always has. She is male identified, which she claims is on a moral basis. She has no trust in women. She has been divorced twice and widowed once, so she has had this life based on men, as they come and go. If men are wealthy, that matters to her…
would suspect either that she has few female friends or that she joins with her friends in a “superiority bond” at the expense of other women.
My mother taught me what not to be. I watched her, an early baby boomer, as she raised us. She acted like a martyr and a victim. She
mother-daughter rivalry sends the daughter out into the world without self-confidence. Instead of relying on a strong sense of self-esteem, the daughter has learned that competition will always be part of a relationship between women, so that mother, mother figures, and mentors are always to be feared, as are friends, colleagues, and peers. In such a case, the daughter will find it extremely difficult to tap into the positive aspects of relationships with women.
Such conflicted relationships make it doubly difficult for older women to offer mentorship and advice to younger women, either in the workplace or as friends, while setting up younger women to fear and resent women whose wisdom and life experience might be of real use.
when we engage in rivalry with our sisters, whether biological or symbolic, we are reminding ourselves that no woman is ever to be trusted.
most of them remembered their adolescence as a training ground for the never-ending female competition that was to mark their adult lives as well.
we kept getting jealous of our good friends, and we were never satisfied until we’d done some damage to someone else.
I’m not competitive with my friends, but I also choose friends who are not beautiful. This has always been a problem for me, and I know it, but I can’t seem to fix it.
Regardless of teenage girls often expressing their rivalry in covert ways, it is no less destructive—and probably more so—than the overt competition that prevails among teenage boys.
the world of teenage girls may be the one place in our society where female competition, envy, and jealousy are readily acknowledged, both by the culture as a whole and by teenage girls themselves.
Bullying is another way that teenage girls mistreat one another—again, more common among girls than boys because it is a nonphysical form of harming a peer.
It took me years to figure out that I should work on myself and stop worrying about the next woman, the sexier woman…
become more interested in pleasing their friends, parents, and teachers than in discovering their own thoughts, feelings, and abilities. In a memorable phrase, Gilligan suggested that young girls become anthropologists, seeking to understand and then adapt to the rules of the culture within which they find themselves, a culture that calls on them to value relationships more than either accomplishments or authenticity.
Relationship over authenticity
We would diet, and whoever lost more weight won that one.
Everything we did had to be the same, or one of us felt cheated and like a loser.
So long as they compete, they are prevented from asking whether the game is worth the candle. Egging each other on to continue the competition, they lose both the chance to support each other and the opportunity to question the terms of the fight.
Patriarchy keeps us busy
girl-poisoning culture,
The pressures on teenage girls go far beyond whatever messages they receive at home, extending into the larger world of media, school, politics, and the economy. But if our culture deserves to be called girl poisoning, it is often girls themselves who pass on the tainted cup,
“I dress better than you, I’m better connected than you, I’m richer than you, and I’m younger than you,” was the blown-up quote used to illustrate La Ferla’s article,
Journalist Rachel Simmons published Odd Girl Out in 2002,
precisely because girls form such intimate friendships, they have special access to the emotional areas where their friends are the most vulnerable.
Whenever we disagreed, whenever I didn’t want to go along with what she wanted—and, yeah, whenever I screwed up—she’d convey that she was so hurt and upset, our friendship was in jeopardy. I was so terrified of losing her, I’d panic and agree to whatever she wanted.
And that is how I continue to think: Who is ahead, who is the winner, who is prettier.
Female rivalry, mixing intimacy with hostility,
women’s intimate knowledge of each other serves as a weapon that each woman always knows the other might use. Their very closeness makes their relationship that much more competitive, and that much more dangerous. If intimacy is the grounds for betrayal, it doesn’t really matter who wins—you’re always vulnerable to attack from the people you should be able to trust.
It’s like she’s just handed over all of the stuff that made her special just to be a wife and a mother. I don’t want to be like that. I want to be who I always was, the prettiest and the most popular. We live in a small town, and I work hard to make sure I am in demand. I befriend all the mothers in my son’s grade and I make sure that I am head of the PTA and all of that. That way, I am remembered.
I doubt I can win, whatever I do. So I just work on what seems best for me, even though it’s sort of lonely because few women like me, because I’m still pretty. Maybe they never liked me.
teenage girls compete over fashion, weight, looks, boys, and general popularity—all the superficial values of what Pipher calls our girl-poisoning culture.
I think she secretly hated my intelligence, whereas I saw it as the two of us having separate strengths. She was better at bringing in the business, and I was better at strategizing. In the end, we went our separate ways.
she has simply come to accept that she can’t trust either women in general or her friends in particular:
am wary of women at work, and I am wary of my friends. In order to have less competition, I say very little to women coworkers about my work, and I try not to act too smart.
she had simply given up. Exhausted from a lifetime of dealing with female rivalry, she had merely decided to keep all women at arm’s length. Perhaps she would be attacked, but she would never again be betrayed.
Her supposed friends, she says, will stop at nothing to get what they want, regardless of whether another woman is hurt:
I was also confused at the role of class and money. There was a clear implication that Veronica was more desirable, even more beautiful, because she was rich; yet the comic also seemed to criticize her as spoiled and unpleasant (the perfect match for rich-guy Reggie), while Betty’s middle-class income made her both plainer and nicer (just like Archie).
I realize that important messages about female rivalry (among other things) were inscribed in those innocent-seeming Archie comics. Underneath the placid small-town exterior, the lessons came through loud and clear: Beauty is the most important factor in winning a man’s heart—except sometimes it’s better to be nice. Women must depend on each other for friendship—except when they’re competing, as they always do. Having more money doesn’t necessarily make you better than someone else (in fact, it might even make you worse)—but it does make you more desirable. In other words, the comics summed up
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media imagery to teach girls that they both need girlfriends and must learn to fear them.
