Kindle Notes & Highlights
As a result, we feel defensive. To defend ourselves, we go to great lengths to justify our decisions, to validate ourselves, to prove to ourselves and to others that our chosen path is the right one.
An easy way to delude ourselves into thinking we’ve achieved mastery over our lives is to compete with other women. By competing, we place ourselves and others into neat little categories—“I’m a doting stay-at-home mom; she’s a workaholic who neglects her kids” or “I work out four times a week; she’s let herself get out of shape”—that serve to organize our lives and deliver them from chaos to complacency.
Women also, perversely, compete over who is worst off.
Many of us can’t help but strive for the Biggest Martyr award. If we can’t get the recognition we crave for our achievements, at the very least let us get some recognition for our burdens and sorrows.
Competition, of whatever form, is caused by feelings of inadequacy. When a person feels threatened, her instinct is often to go on the defensive. But the cause is more than psychological. A sense of inadequacy is fostered by a very real societal situation: women’s restrictive roles.
Crucial- restrictive roles in society make us fight over less than the 50% of pie half of the population (women) should have. If there's one spot for woman then we have to fight each other to get it, not men.
Restrictive definition of good woman make us sublimate anger and competition in cattiness and backstabbing, because open competition is unfeminine, we need to lretend we dont want to win
Competition—or, as Kohn terms it, “mutually exclusive goal attainment” (the concept that my success equals your failure)—is not necessary for evolution.
Zero sum game
Competition is learned behavior. No one is born with an ingrained motivation to compete with others,
Success through competition is not necessary for one’s psychological health. A woman does not have to compare herself to another in order to gain a personal sense of competence.
All of us enjoy the sense of accomplishment that comes from being particularly good at something. Sometimes it is convenient to assess that performance by comparing it to those of other people. But the individual who feels good about herself and is simply interested in doing well does not go out of her way to outperform others. She does not seek out relative judgments. She is content with a sense of personal satisfaction, sometimes buttressed, depending on the activity, by a consideration of absolute standards.… The desire to be better than others feels quite different from this desire to do
...more
Solution
we do not perform better when we are trying to beat others as opposed to working with them or alone. It turns out that cooperation promotes higher achievement than competition. “Competition need never enter the picture in order for skills to be mastered and displayed, goals set and met,”
No matter how much some of us might happen to despise competition, our culture celebrates it everywhere,
the advantages of competition for women, defines competition as “seeking excellence together.”
sports can teach positive lessons about healthy ways of competing. But sports can also teach negative lessons about the importance of winning as often as possible, being ruthless, and the need to maintain a certain weight and physique.
See end of tripping the prom queen
“extremely high sense of solidarity” and a “limitless feeling of sisterhood.”
Oa solidarity the opposite of competition?
Getting your name in the paper was “personal publicity” that made you a “star,” guilty of the sin of personal ambition. Verbal fluency and confidence were defined as the “advantages of class privilege.” Writing for a mainstream publication, even putting your full name on your work in a countercultural paper, was castigated as “ripping off the movement’s ideas.”
This is not quite competition or rivalry but its the common criticism, sour grape, towards someone we might not even know, to try and lower the value of her achievements, why?
See the review of giulia casasole
Women will always have differences in income, education, ability to conceive, physical attractiveness, and health. We must do our best to minimize those inequalities that are fluid (such as education), and to accept those inequalities that are fixed (such as fertility).
Solution: But the only value put on those we know is the value the pateoarchy put on them, acxording to thay value we compete. Setting new values from the femibist perspective maybe would make it of a different kind where a good vs bad spectrum doesn't exist so we can judt be different things, not in direct competition
According to psychoanalysis, we learn to mistrust other women through our relationship with our mothers.
Psychoanalytic take on women's competition
girls envy not an actual penis but what a penis represents: power, status, and a sense of self-worth.
the daughter has identified with a parent who lacks real power in the larger society, regardless of the amount of power the mother may have seemed to have within the household. The daughter has rejected identifying with a “devalued, passive mother,” but in so doing she also has rejected and devalued herself.
today’s young daughters do not grow up devaluing themselves, as per Chodorow’s theory. Instead, they grow up brimming with self-confidence—which often deflates when they realize women are not allowed to be as strong as they had supposed.
No matter how a girl is raised, as she grows up, she finds that the power of gender stereotypes is enormous and incredibly difficult to escape. No matter how egalitarian-minded a woman is, chances are that she still behaves, at least in some aspects, according to the old stereotype of femininity,
Thus, we grow up longing for male approval because men are the ones with the power.
Many women compete over things they think men value, such as looking sexy.
Society still conditions girls and women to believe they are inferior to boys and men—
The most dangerous outcome of this is self-hatred: girls and women disparage themselves and disassociate from other females. Self-hatred is common among subordinated groups of people. When power is withheld, those with power are resented. Yet their values and norms are internalized.
Literally not like the pther girls to be acceptable. You tell me all about girls is negative and valid, if i have a personality I'll think I'm special and exceptional
“If the signals I get from the dominant culture are that I am a person deserving of disdain,” asks writer Jill Nelson, “is it any wonder I begin to hate myself?”
The archetypical woman is self-sacrificing, nonintellectual, soft and pretty, and derives utter contentment from taking care of others. I don’t identify with these traits, and yet I am not a man. How do I reconcile this paradox? By viewing myself as different from (read: better than) other women who do appear to live the stereotype.
Not like the other girls
“You’re the only funny woman I know,” he says. It’s a compliment to me but an insult to women. Despite myself, I eat it up every time.
Not like the other girls. better than
As women, we come to believe that male approval is more significant than female approval, and that a relationship with a man confers more status than a relationship with a woman. Thus, many women believe that supporting other women is suicidal if they want to achieve success in a male-dominated milieu. It’s one small step away to thinking that they should cut down other women who might stand in their way.
a deep divide among women who used to share the status of “housewife” and who performed “similar daily tasks—housecleaning, child care, shopping, cooking. Today, in contrast, the majority of women fan out every morning to face vastly different work experiences,
As a result, they may not recognize any common ground between them.
No matter how much money you have, it’s hard not to envy those around you with more money,
Movies routinely depict ordinary, middle-class people who just happen to live in multimillion-dollar homes, wear designer clothes, drive tony cars, and send their children to the best private colleges. It’s difficult to leave the theater without feeling inadequate.
Media foster unrealistic expectations (envy)
our culture of “commercialized feminism,” in which women’s independence “is the freedom to buy.” The ever-growing rise of consumer culture has infiltrated the ideals of the feminist movement, leading to the belief that “feminine happiness equals other women’s envy of your purchased glamour.
added wealth brings with it a concern about keeping up the appearance of being wealthy, particularly in relation to one’s neighbors.
Regardless of her economic circumstances, a white woman in this society always has advantages that a woman of color does not possess. Yet white women often feel threatened by women of color, particularly in school or at the office, where they may go head-to-head for a limited number of scholarships or promotions. It goes without saying that white women have the upper hand, since whites are the majority and in power.
Race and not enough pie
Only one person from my college would be offered the position, although five of us—all women—applied.
I looked her up in the “face book,” the student directory containing photographs of each undergraduate. She was black. Had she not been black, I remember thinking, I would have been the victor.
Part of me recognized that it would be nice and friendly to look her up and congratulate her; since we both sought professional futures in the world of words, we might have had a lot in common. But I never did. The situation made me too uncomfortable. I felt uneasy about my assumption that she possessed an unfair advantage over me and chastened by my inability to crack the number-one spot. In short, I felt unworthy.
It’s easy to feel resentful toward someone who appears to have an unfair advantage. It can be difficult to be happy for another woman when she succeeds, because the question nags us: What’s stopping me from achieving the same thing? It’s not a big leap from resentment to believing she doesn’t deserve this success, that she deserves to fail.
Why can't it be inspiration instead of pettiness?
According to Nietzsche, resentment occurs when one lacks some value, yearns to be the person who possesses it, and then seeks to undermine that person. It is part of a “slave morality” of the weak, who don’t like themselves and attempt to bring down the strong.
Resentment is not what i want for myself but is my need to see you be put down
The essence of resentment is a real or imagined powerlessness, which can lead to the denigration of everything you are not. If you are weak and financially struggling, you malign the strong and the prosperous as evil and immoral.
There is a sense of satisfaction when someone you resent is put in her place.
Carolyn was raped. And from the way her friends reacted, it was almost as if they were glad that someone had finally taught her a lesson for looking so damn good.
“I overheard one of them say, ‘Look at what she’s wearing. She was asking for it.’ I was horrified because these women were competing with me over a rapist!
Carolyn, after all, has the audacity to want to look attractive—a quality that, no doubt in the backs of their minds, they wished they could pull off. And so they distanced themselves from her—She’s not one of us. “Slave ethics,” wrote Nietzsche, “begins by saying no to an ‘outside,’ an ‘other,’ a non-self, and that no is its creative act. This reversal of direction of the evaluating look, this invariable looking outward instead of inward, is a fundamental feature of resentment.”24
Othering
Women are commonly believed to operate on a higher moral plane and to be more attuned to others’ feelings.
Andrea Dworkin makes a point this is a patriarchal lie to,.elevate women in the The woman-superior model of antifeminism In the spiritual realm, just to justify the treatment of all those women who are not recognised as "the Virgin"
women’s relational character propels them to be, among other considerate things, caring citizens who are active in community affairs and who better circumstances for others.
Women identify and justhe themselves by their relations, boys by achievements
women, on average, are better able to intuitively interpret male behavior than men are female behavior, “this is not a female skill,” writes Tavris. “It is a self-protective skill,
the result of a power imbalance and social conditioning, not hormones. Empathy, in other words, is about power, not gender.
Empathy
