Catfight: Women and Competition

by Leora Tanenbaum

it’s no accident that women may be more “relational” and men more “autonomous”: These characteristics are borne from inequitable work arrangements. Most women need to rely on a wage earner so that they can survive, leading them to be more deferential and therefore empathetic, while most men need someone to care of their children and manage their emotional life so that they can do the work, leading them to be more independent and therefore less attached to others.30

Women's relations and men's achievements / independence

As a result of the “kinder, gentler” myth, many men come to believe that they don’t have to be sensitive and caring to be considered good and decent people. Women, meanwhile, have been encouraged to develop themselves in relation to others, making their rivalries intensely personal.

INDIRECT AGG...

the double standard in competition. Girls and women internalize the idea that being aggressive is acceptable only for men, so we direct our aggression underground. Rather than confront the people whom we feel have wronged or unfairly bettered us, we express our aggression indirectly, through social sabotage, gossip, or vague double entendres. Indirect aggression is aggression that appears unintentional,

Sly

Indirect aggression is slippery, impossible to nail down; it is disguised beneath a veneer of politeness or gentleness. If confronted, the aggressor has an accessible backdoor: “I didn’t mean it the way it sounded” or “Of course I’m not angry with you” or “You’re too sensitive” or even “You’re paranoid.” The recipient is left paralyzed. She has no proof, just her suspicions. If she confronts the aggressor with her doubts, she may very well be blamed for causing conflict herself.

Queen bees

the factors that lead women to mask their aggression. First, there is women’s unequal amount of power.

Second, there is women’s socialization. While boys are given permission to punch and kick to express negative feelings, girls are taught to avoid direct conflict.

third cause is cultural expectations. Women told Jack that they masked their aggression in order to give the appearance of being nonaggressive, so that they can conform to the myth of the kinder, gentler female and not come across as bitchy.

As adults, women are supposed to be sisterly, to “relate” to one another. Feeling angry or hostile toward another can be scary for anyone, but especially for a woman: Since the female role is to prize and nurture relationships, she doesn’t want to be regarded as hampering those relationships. She does not feel entitled to express her anger. So what does she do with it? She either suppresses it or she reroutes it.

Sublimation of anger

To be included, you must accentuate similarities and wipe away differences. You have to be accommodating, willing to please. And you can’t always express what you really think. The desire to be liked, then, leads to self-effacement.

You’d think that the desire to be liked would make girls and women bloom beneath the rays of another woman’s admiration. Yet the opposite is often true: We worry that admiration could lead to envy and resentment. When a female friend or colleague tells us how much she respects our work, we’re inclined to say, “Oh, it’s not as important as what you do.”

We have to put ourselves down because we cannot show we want praise

The words “thank you” don’t occur to us. God forbid we come across as complacent or proud.

The ironic thing about being included is that it necessarily entails exclusion. What’s so great about being accepted if everyone is? A gatekeeper is necessary to ensure the sanctity of the friendship or group.

Exclusion is one of the most sinister forms of aggression and one of the most popular among young girls. Boys roughhouse with each other to vent their aggression. Girls, who aren’t supposed to get into rough-and-tumble fights, instead form hate clubs, shunning some poor girl for being different or weird.

Queen bee

When you have the ability to exclude, you hold enormous power, and that means that, like it or not, you have a responsibility to make those excluded maintain a sense of dignity.

sometimes we all need an outlet in which we are allowed to compete. Sports, if not taken too seriously, can provide the perfect vehicle for channeling aggression in an aboveboard way.

Tripping the prom queen

We’re like on different tracks. It’s like, ‘My lifestyle is better.’ ‘No, my lifestyle is better.’ ” When Maria and Carmen felt that they were on the same team, they supported each other and created a powerful connection unlike any other. But once they felt threatened and vulnerable, they began to reevaluate each other, even turn on each other.

The twinning syndrome - tripping the prom queen

Unresolved competition, not competition per se, is what destroys relationships between women.

If a woman tells her friend that she resents her because the friend has a great job and a wonderful family and a beautiful home, the friend should thank her. She has handed the friend the opportunity to explore the different ways that each has achieved success, and the different paths that are available to, and restricted from, women today.

Competition as exploration of possibility: shed dping ot maybe so can I

she has also opened the door to think about the societal consequences of inequality. And now that the two women are having a conversation about inequality, they can choose to take actions in response. They can refuse to play along with the rules that foster competitiveness in the first place—

“I am jealous of those who think more deeply, who write better, who draw better, who ski better, who look better, who live better, who love better than I.”

not one better or more-published than me. I have the quiet righteous malice of one with better poems than other women’s reputations have been made by.”41

Jealous one I am, green-eyed, spite-seething. Read the six women poets in the “new poets of England and America.” Dull, turgid…. I have the quiet righteous malice of one with better poems than other women’s reputations have been made by…. What is my voice? Woolfish, also but tough…. I must get philosophy in. Until I do I shall lag behind [Adrienne Rich].51

Of course Plath wasn’t even allowed to compete with men, and we don’t know how she would have felt toward other women if she had been allowed into the larger arena with men. I can’t help but wonder what

wish I could just focus on how I feel about my looks, but I always end up scrutinizing myself in relation to other women.

My urge to compare and contrast my looks springs from our culture’s narrow conception of beauty.

For women, it is equated with certain privileged characteristics: being young, white, blond, fashionable, thin—as well as intangibles such as being virginal, innocent, and nurturing. In our hierarchical, competitive culture, only a small minority of women are deemed beautiful. Only a few are privileged to possess the seemingly magical ingredients of beauty, as it is narrowly defined. If everyone were considered beautiful, beauty would lose its power to control. By definition, then, beauty is regarded as if it were a scarce commodity. As

Disagree with beauty as scarce

Women’s self-image was damaged during the test, which consumed their mental resources and disrupted their cognitive performance.

The point of the study, Fredrickson explains, was to induce a state of self-objectification—when a person evaluates her body from a third-person perspective (How do I look?), as opposed to a first-person perspective (How do I feel?). To

Self-objectification “coaxes girls and women to adopt a peculiar view of self.…[T]he cultural milieu of objectification functions to socialize girls and women to, at some level, treat themselves as objects to be looked at and evaluated.”

woman is categorized by her looks in a way that a man is not. A man is evaluated mainly by his achievements in the workplace, while a woman is judged primarily by her success in maintaining an ornamental appearance.

If a woman is unattractive, she can be dismissed as unfeminine and undesirable. Even if she demonstrates without a shadow of a doubt that she is a capable person,

If she is unattractive and disliked, then she deserves to be mistreated.

In fairy tales, an ugly woman is an evil witch and a beautiful woman is a kind fairy. In real life, an ugly woman is an evil bitch and a beautiful woman is kind of scary.

It can be difficult for an attractive woman to befriend women: She is seen more as a threat than a comrade.

“I frequently felt stabbing looks from women because I represented a threat,” she recalls. “In mixed social situations where there were both men and women, I frequently ended up hanging out with the men because they were the only ones who would engage in conversation with me.

If a woman is young, thin, white, with Western facial features, she has the chance to pass muster as attractive in this country. Of course, millions of women—the majority of women—do not fit these criteria. Yet, we ludicrously internalize this narrow ideal and believe that if we work hard enough, we can look this way.

“Being pregnant is not an excuse to go around looking like a slob.”

after a woman gives birth, she is expected to bounce right back into shape as if her body were made of rubber.

we internalize their standard of beauty because, unlike men who get to see a variety of male images in the news and other media, we don’t have a broad range of feminine images available to us.

engage in futile attempts to achieve a stick silhouette. They believe that thin equals feminine, that thin equals success, that thin equals power and control.

Fat

a color caste system remains strong among American women of color, and that this system can have damaging consequences.

Colorism

light-skinned black women tend to be awarded privileges denied their dark-skinned sisters because they more closely conform to the narrow American beauty ideal, which continues to treasure whiteness.

Colorism

“When you have the lightest skin and the best hair, you are desirable. It doesn’t matter if you’re a bitch.” Desirable to men, that is. To other women, you are competition. It’s another case of the beauty double bind: Being light-skinned awards you cultural advantages (people think you’re prettier, smarter, better because you appear “white”), but it also makes others resent you and presume that you haven’t had to work your way up.

Colorism

Women want evidence that beautiful women put some sweat and tears into looking great.

The consumerist message to buy, buy, buy has now become tinged with the feminist goal of liberation: Buying cool things makes you a liberated woman. Conversely, in order to be a liberated woman you must buy cool things. Materialism has become an end in itself.

other women size us up based on the cut of our jacket and the heel of our boot.

How we feel about our clothes reveals much about how we feel about ourselves in general.

If you feel like everything in your life is going wrong, at least you can exert some control by buying a new item of clothing.

When marriage is the primary form of mobility, women often use how they look to compete for husbands.

“more beautiful” because they needed a well-heeled husband for their own economic survival. However, these same women were also urged to stifle signs of beauty or fashion because a “proper” woman was not supposed to pursue beauty and fashion in the first place. The Puritans