Here’s the thing about internalized misogyny in women.
When you have it? The thought process goes like this becaue you’re terrified of other women who are trying to are trying to effect change.
“Oh shit. Fuck this bitch because hoshit what if she upsets the status quo and what little freedoms we DO have get lost because of her shit stirring?! I better shut that cunt DOWN but belittling and silencing her by imposing more strict rules on her than even the menfolk do.”
And ya know what? That shit is typically WORSE than the patriarchy because its easy to get mad at men. Men are outsiders. Others. Women? It’s like “why arent you with us!” If you can’t recognize what you’re doing, well then shit, you cant fix it or stop it and often they’re your friends and allies in everything else.
Thats why its the MOST DANGEROUS.
Thats why internalized ANYTHING is the most pernicious. Thats why you gotta watch your shit yall. Because it’ll jump up on you and you wont even know you’ve become your own worst enemy.
- Britney for making fun of her when she had her breakdown
- Monica Lewinski for judging her when she was a 22year old temp sexually assaulted by the most powerful man in the world
- Ke$ha for ever thinking she was trashy when all she wanted to do was make party music
- Kristen Stewart for ever thinking she was dumb when she’s actually one of the coolest people ever
- Megan Fox for ever thinking she was just a slut when actually she was an actress being harassed by her employer.
- Hating all the women who made a career out of having a hot body. Being is shape is hard, beauty is a weapon and auto promotion is hard work.
- All the Mary-Sues, who exist because young girls everywhere want to be part of a story they love so much
- All the female characters I ever snobbed because they got in the way of my ship.
- Hating the color pink during my teenage years, when it’s actually a lovely color and what I resented was society’s pressure to perform femininity.
This is what sexism does. The media runs a smear campaign against women. And when we were younger we knew no better and trusted them. Now we know better.
Internalized Misogyny: “I’m Not Like Most Girls!” by Bleeding Feminism Now please stop claiming that you don’t act like a woman. It doesn’t make you a special fucking snowflake. It makes you a perpetrator of misogyny.
I grew up and I started actually thinking about this all-too-common phenomenon: girl-hate. It’s so rampant that it’s contributed to the stereotype that all girls are catty and horrible and some of us have started insisting that we’re “not like other girls” to separate ourselves from all these generalizations, saying that we’d rather hang out with boys, because “boys have less drama”. Here’s the thing, though: homogenizing the entire female gender down to one or two negative stereotypes is sexist. When girls perpetuate it, it’s called “internalized misogyny”. And sadly, I’ve found that girls are guilty of perpetuating misogyny almost as often as men are.
If we, as a society, would stop conditioning girls and women to feel like we have to constantly compete with each other, girl-hate would pretty much stop. If we, as a society, would stop trying to tell girls and women that the most important thing is male attention, we’d stop feeling threatened by other girls and how they look and we’d stop ripping our fellow ladies to shreds over their appearances. Society has told us that male attention is the ultimate prize and that every other girl in the room is competing for it. It’s made us feel that we’ve “won” if a man thinks we’re attractive, so we get angry if another girl in the room might take that away from us. This is about the time we start sizing other ladies up: deciding that she has the better body, but your face is nicer and hopefully that makes up for it. This is about the time you start comparing your hair and your clothes to hers, start looking for every flaw you can possibly find in this human being just because she’s there.
We feel that we’ve “won” if a man thinks we’re special. This is part of what contributes to that god-awful “special snowflake” complex that leads many girls to attempt to separate themselves from the rest because they have to be better: if unique and special is what gets attention, then I have to be the most unique and special! Cue loads of posts online by girls who think they’re better than other girls because they like staying at home and using the internet more than they like going out and partying.
This is behavior that’s been programmed into women by society our entire lives, so it won’t be easy to un-learn. I’ve internalized much of this myself. Us girls, we’re victims – victims of a society that constantly tells us we’re too fat (but we can’t be too skinny, either), too ugly (but don’t wear too much make-up or you’ll look “fake”), that your clothes have to be amazing (but caring about fashion is petty and shallow), that you can’t be a doormat (but if you’re too assertive, you’re a total bitch); a society that screams at us from every billboard and magazine cover: YOU ARE NOT GOOD ENOUGH. And because we perceive each other as threats, we rip each other to shreds.
This reminds me of the Cracked podcast episode on harmful Disney tropes that I listened to a few days ago. There was a particularly salient point on the portrayal of friendships in Disney movies: “Pocahontas has an entire tribe of humans to hang out with – all the other humans in her tribe hang out with humans – but what Pocahontas does is hang out with a raccoon, and a hummingbird, and a talking tree. And Ariel hangs out with fish under the sea, even though she has all these other mermaid friends she could hang out with, and they hang out with each other, and I think it makes a lot of movies have best friend characters for the main character who are kind of subordinate”. Disney princesses, whom girls are supposed to relate to and aspire to be, don’t have many human friends, let alone girl friends. They’re always the “other” in some way, and in the end, they’re vindicated by being the object of pursuit for a man. Disney princesses are the epitome of special snowflake syndrome.
A related article is Cara Ellison’s S.EXE: Gone Home. She writes about her internalized misogyny and how it was exposed in Gone Home:
I never had a sister, and there never was a feeling, when I was a teenager, that any other girl could have moved me or made me sympathetic towards them. Girls didn’t like games, and I liked games. Therefore I was not like other girls. I was a better sort of girl. I was special to the nerd boys. I liked cool stuff. I liked Street Fighter II and I could beat everyone with Chun Li and boys whooped and cheered when I did it. They admired me. That’s who I was. That was my identity.
But Katie and Sam in Gone Home like each other. They are young women who like each other. […] And the thing about the young women that inhabit this house: they are just like I used to be, only they aren’t alone.
Women’s voices are the only voices you hear in the Gone Home house. Isn’t that unusual? I mean yes, for a video game. But when is the last time you watched a film or saw a TV show where the only voices in it are women’s?
When I was growing up I never knew women could be in punk rock bands. I thought women were uncool. And I didn’t know about ‘sisterhood’. I disliked other girls. I didn’t trust them. But the Gone Home house feels safe. A space that exists in which women love and appreciate each other.
In a way this is the fantasy house I always wanted to inhabit. The Gone Home house is a place where it’s okay, maybe even normal, even cool, to be a girl.
Gone Home offers me a girlhood I never had, and it recognises I am an adult woman who needs that fantasy too.
There are barely any TV shows or movies centered around only women, least of all a show that centers around happily single women. There’s The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and…what else? Even music videos by so-called feminists promote misogyny. Music videos are one of my most abhorred mediums because, for some reason, most of the videos with mainstream singers default to sexualization, cultural appropriation, exoticization, or using animals as props. I’ve talked about Taylor Swift’s Wildest Dreams music video before, but her Bad Blood video (which won the VMA Video of the Year award) is also terrible. Sexualized female bodies under the guise of female empowerment? Check. A celebration of thin, white bodies? Check. Pitting women against each other? Check. Let’s not even get into the sexual politics of wearing leather (to be sexy) and glorifying the consumption of animals (to enforce that these women aren’t on diets).
Yes, I have thing against Taylor Swift. Amy Zimmerman put it well:
We’re living in the heyday of the Swift wave of feminism—go girls, no boys allowed, etc. It’s the kind of wave you ride in a highwaisted retro bikini next to your 10 most flawless, expertly cast model friends, before taking a series of artful Instagrams on your private beach. Taylor Swift’s brand of feminism is like that time your friend told you that One Direction was going on hiatus and you pretended that you were only tearing up because something was stuck in your eye. In other words, unbelievable and contrived.
Swift’s feminism is like a malfunctioning Pokémon—somehow managing to simultaneously evolve and get worse. When not damning beloved female comedians for doing their literal jobs, Swift’s feminism can be seen taking the form of white solipsism. When Nicki Minaj called out the VMAs for failing to give her “Anaconda” a Video of the Year nod, Swift chastised Minaj for complaining about the success of other women. Seriously, Taylor, why did you do that? While Minaj was making a substantive point about how the music industry undermines black female greatness, Swift essentially blew up the constructive conversation by insisting that Nicki’s tweets were a personal attack. Swift, who’s never met a white size zero model she didn’t Instagram with, didn’t need any help confirming that her specific brand of femininity isn’t exactly inclusive. The problem here isn’t that Swift is whiter than Ed Sheeran—it’s that, despite her stated boner for feminism, she couldn’t even bother to finish reading a black feminist sentiment without tweet-shouting “me, me, me!” like a middle child on a sugar high. […] Swift’s brand of feminism is less “an intersectional approach to structural systems of gendered inequality” and more “look at my friends, they’re hot and they like me.”
Let’s strive for the type of intersectional feminism as defined by Kimberle Crenshaw instead of the white, consumerist “feminism” portrayed in mainstream media.
“Couch guy” tiktok and how we as people are losing touch every day more and more…
The “couch guy” ordeal happening lately is a wild case-not on her or her boyfriend though but on the people constantly engaging, harassing, making joke tiktoks and supposed relationship “experts” analyzing the video on the daily and giving their unsolicited advice.
This should definitely be a case study on human behavior and how the line between our personal lives and our internet persona has not disappeared, but merged instead.
It’s interesting how this whole thing developed in the first place. At first there was a large amount of people who felt “sympathetic”. That sympathy was conditional though, because as soon as she rejected the truth the audience was trying to impose and project onto her relationship, the script flipped quickly and she became essentially public enemy number one- she became the butt of the joke despite the people originally being worried about her alleged cheating boyfriend.
(Me thinks misogyny)
I’m not here to analyze her relationship because at the end of the day that’s not my problem or my place since I’m not the one participating in it. What’s insane is that over 40 million people projected their life experiences onto a teenage college kid and unfortunately she can’t escape them; neither her or her friends and family. And it’s even crazier people trying to shut down folks like me defending her; saying she’s probably enjoying the attention when really shewasn’t given a choice. She either tries to enjoy it and be part of the joke or she breaks down as the realization hits her that the whole internet is psychoanalyzing her life (which will happen sooner or later).
She’s in a pickle because even if she does erase the video she’ll either have people saying that they are “proving their point” or it’ll be null because it’s already plastered all over the internet.
It’s unfair for this unfortunate situation to be a consequence of using the internet; instead of looking at ourselves participating in such an unsympathetic manner, we victim blame…as usual.
Over 40 million people; all the attention on these white kids who genuinely made the video to be some cute reunion. Imagine if we had this type of attention to actual matters that are ruining people’s lives. It’s really telling this became infamously viral.
And now people who are calling this behavior rightfully out, are being clowned and called “party pooper”.
Much like Facebook manipulating the algorithm and promote posts that will cause commotion and therefore more engagement on their app (with the recent whistleblower information), it’s very obvious that Tiktok does it as well and dare I say on a larger scale that doesn’t really have consequences.
Sad part is that there really isn’t much to do; we are at a point that we can’t fix this.
It’s sad that she unwillingly became a scapegoat but I’m sure her situation will be used or has been used to analyze this stage we are in of people who use social media; how people are losing basic communication skills and empathy as a community due to the “safe” space and false sense of anonymity that social media provides.
it will always be insane to me how the gen-z “kill your rapist ” “kill all men” “woody allen die” girlies are the ones screaming at amber heard supporters on the internet like “how can you support her when there’s so much evidence against her?? there’s literally tapes of her insulting him and admitting to hitting him!!” like oh I’m sorry i didn’t realize it was cool to ~*kill*~ your rapist and abuser but not to hit him back or tell him to go fuck himself
This post is going to be a mess, because I’m just …untidily angry right now. It began with a series of tweets I made today about my ever-broken Datsun. The mechanic had told my husband that he was “working on that Datsun just as fast as I can because now that I’ve met her I can’t wait to get that little girl behind the wheel again.“
Little girl.
As I tweeted that I was 33 and had earned each of those years and thus preferred to be referred to as “Danger Smog-Dragon” or “Rage-Mistress” or “Ephemeral Time Lady” or “Maggie Stiefvater, #1 NYT Bestselling Author of the Raven Cycle,” a well-meaning fellow replied that perhaps I should “use [my] words, politely but firmly, to his face…” He further observed that he’d told his wife that “you know, Honey, unless you’re willing to SAY THAT to (those people), NOTHING is going to change”.
(note:pleasedo not go search for this fellow on twitter to rage at him; this is not about him. He is set dressing, made more appropriate to the conversation at hand by the fact that he probably is a perfectly nice guy who really didn’t mean disrespect).
I told TwitterMan that I was tired of have to use my words.It’s been 33 years of using my words. Why is it my job to continuously ask to be treated equivalent to a male customer? Why is that when I arrive at a shop, I’m reminded that I have to push the clutch in if I want to start my own car? It’s 2015. Why is it still all sexism all the time?
I discovered that I was actually furious. I thought I was over being furious, but it turns out, the rage was merely dormant. I’m furious that it’s been over a decade and nothing has changed. I’m furious that sexism was everywhere in the world of college-Maggie and it remains thus, even if I out-learn, out-earn, out-drive, and out-perform my male counterparts. At the end of the day, I’m still “little girl.”
Possibly this is the point where some people are asking why this tiny gesture of all gestures should be the one to break me.
Here is the anatomy of my rage.
Step one: It is 1999 or 2000. I am 16. I go to college. A professor tells me I’m pretty. A married man in the bagpipe band I’m in tells me he just can’t control himself around me: he stays up nights thinking of my skin. Another man tells me he can’t believe that ‘a little bitch’ like me got into the competition group after a year of playing when he’s been at it for twenty years. After becoming friends with a professor’s daughter, I’m at her house sleeping on the couch, and I wake up to find the professor running his hand from my ankle bone to my thigh. I pretend I’m still asleep. I’m 17. “If something happened to my wife,” he tells me later, “I could be with you.” At my next visit to her house, I see the wife’s left a book on the kitchen table: how to rekindle your husband’s love.
Step two: It’s 2008. I finally buy the car of my dreams, a 1973 Camaro, and make it my official business vehicle. The first time I take it to put gas in it, a man tells me, “if I were your husband, I wouldn’t want you out driving my car.” I tell him, “if you were my husband, I’d be a widow.” The car requires a lot of gas. I get cat-called every other time I’m at a gas station. Once, I go into the gas station to get a drink, and when I come out, a bunch of guys have parked me in. They want, they say, to have a word with me, little lady. We play automotive chicken which I win because I would rather smash the back of my ’73 Camaro into their IROC than have to stab one of them with the knife on my keychain.
Step three: It’s 2011. I’m on tour in a European country, on my own, escorted only by my foreign publisher. I am at a business dinner, and say I’m going to my room. My female editor embraces me; my male publicist embraces me and then puts his tongue in my ear, covering it with his hand so that the crowd of twenty professionals does not see. My choices are to say nothing to avoid making a scene in front of my publisher’s people, or to say FUCK YOU. I apparently was never offered the choice of not having a tongue in my ear.
Step four: It’s 2012. I buy a race car. Well, a rally car. Someone asks my male co-driver if I’m good in bed. Someone asks me if I got sponsorship because someone was ‘trying to check the woman box.’ People ask me if I drive like a girl. Yeah, I do, actually. Let’s play a game called: who’s faster off the start?
Step five: It’s 2014. I’m driving my Camaro cross-country on book tour. It breaks down a lot. I’m under the hood and a pick up truck stops beside me. “Hey baby,” asks the driver, “do you need any help?” “Yeah,” I reply, “do you have a 5/8 wrench?” He did not.
Step six: It’s 2015. It’s sixteen years after I learned that I was a thing to be touched and kissed and hooted at unless I took it upon myself to say no, and no again, and no some more, and no no no. My friend Tessa Gratton points out that a male author used casually sexist language in a brief interview. She is dragged through the muck for pointing out how deeply-rooted our systemic sexism is. The publishing industry rises to the defense of the male author as if he has been deeply wronged. I tweet that the language was indeed sexist, though I didn’t think it was useful to condemn said male author. A male editor emails me privately to ask me if maybe I wasn’t being a little problematic by engaging in the discussion?
Step seven. Still 2015. Someone very close to me confesses that her college boyfriend keeps trying to push her past kissing, and she doesn’t want to. I tell her to set boundaries, and leave him if he doesn’t. A month passes. This week I find out she just had sex for the first time after he urged her to have several glasses of wine. She doesn’t drink. She was crying. She says, “I didn’t say no, though.”
It’s been sixteen damn years. I’m tired of having to say no. I’m tired of the media telling me that it’s mouth breathing bros and rednecks perpetuating the sexism. No: I can tell you that the most insidious form is the nice guy. Who isa nice guy, don’t get me wrong. I carry my own prejudices that I work through, and I don’t believe in demonizing people who aren’t perfect yet — none of us are. But the nice guy who says something sexist gets away with it. The nice guy who says something sexist sounds right and reasonable. The nice guy’s not helping, though. It’s been sixteen years, and the nice guys are nice, but we’re still things to be acquired. We are still creatures to be asked on dates. We are still saying no, still shouting NO, still having to always again and again say “no, please treat me with respect.”
I was just invited to a car show; the well-meaning guy who asked wanted me to bring my souped up Mitsubishi. I clicked on the event page. It’s catered by Hooters. I’m not going. Yeah, it’s a little thing, but I have a lifetime of them. I’m taking my toys and going home.
“I can’t wait to get that little girl behind the wheel again.“
When I was younger and more abled, I was so fucking on board with the fantasy genre’s subversion of traditional femininity. We weren’t just fainting maidens locked up in towers; we could do anything men could do, be as strong or as physical or as violent. I got into western martial arts and learned to fight with a rapier, fell in love with the longsword.
But since I’ve gotten too disabled to fight anymore, I… find myself coming back to that maiden in a tower. It’s that funny thing, where subverting femininity is powerful for the people who have always been forced into it… but for the people who have always been excluded, the powerful thing can be embracing it.
As I’m disabled, as I say to groups of friends, “I can’t walk that far,” as I’m in too much pain to keep partying, I find myself worrying: I’m boring, too quiet, too stationary, irrelevant. The message sent to the disabled is: You’re out of the narrative, you’re secondary, you’re a burden.
The remarkable thing about the maiden in her tower is not her immobility; it’s common for disabled people to be abandoned, set adrift, waiting at bus stops or watching out the windows, forgotten in institutions or stranded in our houses. The remarkable thing is that she’s like a beacon, turning her tower into a lighthouse; people want to come to her, she’s important, she inspires through her appearance and words and craftwork. In medieval romances she gives gifts, write letters, sends messengers, and summons lovers; she plays chess, commissions ballads, composes music, commands knights. She is her household’s moral centre in a castle under siege. She is a castle unto herself, and the integrity of her body matters.
That can be so revolutionary to those of us stuck in our towers who fall prey to thinking: Nobody would want to visit; nobody would want to listen; nobody would want to stay.
It’s been half a decade and I still haven’t found an articulation of the complexity of “representation” as concisely and precisely mindblowing as @hungrylikethewolfie’s here.
Stop worrying about your studies and your career and start looking for a husband! (Your life has no meaning unless you marry a man! And you can’t marry unless you marry NOW! NOW! YOU HEARD ME, NOW!)
Patton has since become a controversial public figure, written two books (Marry Smart: Advice for Finding THE ONE&Marry by Choice, Not by Chance: Advice for Finding the Right One at the Right Time) and become the poster girl of internalised misogyny.
Let’s take a look at some statements she’s made in interviews and in her writing:
On marriage and ‘finding Mr Right’:
“[U]ntil you find a spouse, I would advise you invest your effort and energy at least 75% in searching for a partner and 25% in professional development.”
“You’re in your twenties, you’re no longer a student, and you are hoping to find a husband in a nonacademic setting. Good luck! You’ll need it.”
“To avoid a life of unwanted spinsterhood — with cats! — you have to smarten up about what’s important to you, and keep your head in the game.”
“When I say, ‘Find a man,’ what I really mean is, ‘Find a man who will respect you.’ And when I say, ‘Find a husband in college,’ what I’m really saying is, ‘It’s never too early to start planning for your personal happiness and looking for a husband who will respect you.’ It’s never too early, and it’s never too late. (Well, that’s not really true, but we’ll discuss that later.)”
“Men regularly marry women who are younger, less intelligent, less educated.”
On rape:
“The definition of rape is no longer when a woman is violated at the point of a gun or a knife. We’re now identifying as rape what really is a clumsy hookup melodrama or a fumbled attempt at a kiss or caress." "Why don’t women get up and leave?”
“Sex can’t be unwanted after the fact. You can’t say it was unwanted after the fact. That is what is problematic. Sometimes when women find themselves in situation where again they have been overserved, they should have walked away, but they just didn’t. It’s easier not to. Then they wake up and say, ‘My God look at where I am. I didn’t mean to.’ It can’t be unwanted after the fact. That’s not assault. It’s bad, but it’s not assault. And I’ve said this many times, it’s the most horrific of all crimes, perhaps with the exception of child abduction. I don’t like the idea of diluting the horror, the true crime of rape with mistake sex. ‘I didn’t mean to. I didn’t want it and I didn’t mean to.’ Those are two very different things and then shouldn’t be convoluted. Again, I am advocating for women to take control of themselves, take responsibility for themselves, don’t put themselves in harms way, ever. It’s only your job to keep yourself safe, always.”
On feminism:
“Feminists 'have over-corrected’ for past inequalities. Women now have become so emboldened by these antagonistic feminists that they have lost sight of the fact that this is the man you married.”
Apparently marital dissatisfaction is caused by feminism….
On her books:
“There are very few statistics in this book, and my research has been limited to talking with people I know, like and trust.”
And watch this clip about the importance of having plastic surgery before you go of to university. (It will increase your chances of meeting Mr Right.)
Images of female celebrities without makeup is a popular feature in tabloid newspapers and gossip and fashion magazines. Who looks the best? Who looks the worst?Do you recognise these celebrities without makeup?(Yes, always. It’s not really a challenge.)
So, what’s happening here?
These articles, and many of their readers, are simultaneously shaming these women for wearing makeup and for not wearing makeup. By wearing it, they are deceitful about their true appearance, yet their natural faces are just too “shocking” for them not wear makeup. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
Occasionally, someone will try to defend these features. They claim these magazines are just presenting reality as it is and thus crushing beauty ideals.They claim these images are empowering women:
See, if even Beyoncé looks like crap, then you’re okay too! It’s all just makeup and Photoshop! No one is really that beautiful!
But if the headlines call these celebrities “shocking” and"unrecognisable“, are these articles really empowering women? Or are they just telling their female readers (and the concerned celebrities) that maybe they shouldn’t ever leave their house without their makeup on? Aren’t they really saying that the natural look just doesn’t work for anyone? And if the natural look doesn’t even work for Uma Thurman, you can’t possibly be fine just as you are, you regular woman reader you! No, they are not empowering at all, they are just encouraging further girl-on-girl-hate.
If you have to drag down one woman (famous or not) in order to empower another, you’re not really empowering her.
Students: “Wow, he’s so sad, he must have a rich intellectual life, he seems like he’s brooding, that’s amazing use of color to express his inner turmoil.”
Students: “Wow, what a narcissist, who does she think she is, that’s so superficial, I kind of hate her, she should shave that thing, ugh why would she paint herself, she’s so ugly.”
