Women vs. Women

We are all fighting for women's rights, women's equal pay, and ultimately women's happiness. We band together, make protests, form communities. It seems that it is our common goal for all women to feel loved, beautiful, and happy.

Women are supposed to be a sex based on community, togetherness. Weddings, slumber parties, even group trips to the bathroom are all something girls do together, and there seems to be this sense of sisterhood, but 'sadly, these delightful bonds too often dissolve when the women reenter public space and resume their isolated, unequal, mutually threatening, jealously guarded "beauty" status' (Wolf 76).

Why are we all against each other?

What I am talking about is how it seems to me that sometimes our biggest bullies are other women themselves. We care about which girls we hang out with. We dress a certain way to impress our friends. We feel the need to one up each other with boyfriends and relationships. Women judge each other because we feel threatened. If that one women is pretty, that must mean that I am not, right?

Wrong.

Somehow, over the years we have developed this very black-and-white point of view that acts as a wooden shudder through which we look at people, and ourselves. If one girl is good at something, we are not. If I am the only single one out of my friends, it must mean that there is something wrong with me. And for some reason, we always lose in the comparison. Further and further we batter ourselves until our self-esteem is left to nothingness. Even those who seem confident, even the ones who put others down, have deep insecurities. They simply learned to take their anger out on other people. 'Women can tend to resent each other if they look too "good" and dismiss one another if they look too "bad"' (Wolf 75). We can't win with one another. So why do we assume that the media is the only issue that we battle?

While we always want to look good for men, in reality most of the time we feel more self-concious around other woman. 'What are other women really thinking, feeling, experiencing when they slip away from the gaze and culture of men?' (Wolf 76). It seems to me that first we need to fix the way we perceive and treat each other before we can expect any kind of reform in the media and society. The public, the viewers, the masses, we control what the media decides to focus on. They give us what we want to see. So if they see a mass beauty revolution promoting self-value and worth and wholesome self-adoration, isn't that eventually what they will have to sell us? It's all up to us, ladies.