When her daughter came crying about the comments, she overheard, Aniki Somerville was devastated – and she thought about why women run through women so often.
I went to see the West End production Average girl Recently with my daughter. It was a splendid cast and has returned to my middle school days and the super popular girl clergy that every girl wanted to be friends with.
When it was murdered or killed, it reminded me of how difficult it is to navigate those early female friendships. Sadly, I would like to think that those times are gone, but I realized that too. Average girl It still has full effect in my life. Only this time – it's the same with my mother.
The other day, I was in my local park when my 11-year-old daughter came to me, crying. “One of my friends said you wrote something on paper and his mother said it was very inclusive and you're a complete wierdo!”
I put my arms around her and we went home together. I could see several mothers staring at me across the park. I asked her which friend said this, but she wouldn't have told me (Tweens has strict code for “Snitches Get Stitches” regardless of the crime).
I found it scary to have done anything to put her in this situation.
There is no denying that I have no filters in my personal and professional life. I write about things that some people might call taboos, such as my finances and my sex life. And I am just as open in real life. One day I might talk to another mother about pasta recipes, but the next day I might tell them I rarely have sex.
Could this have made me the target of other women? I might be considered “strange.” Or not polite. I previously fell with a small group of mothers, and although it wasn't dramatic, they simply stopped inviting me to the things.
But it's one of those things about dealing with it myself, but when it's affecting my child, it's a whole other thing.
That night I woke up wondering which mommy had said this. Did that make her feel better about her life? Did she want my daughter to be bullied? Anyway, why can women be so frightening about other women?
I thought I was a lonely man who had no most fearsome friends in response to the controversial article I was writing. Sadly, this is not the case. Often, they are the most meanest women.
They quickly dig into the most hurtful – about my physical appearance, which usually intuitively makes me feel the most hurtful (and I'm sad to say they're right).
I wish I was better than anything else – but I am not. The truth is that we all have feelings that are sometimes constant, frightening, and dark. It simply feels like it's not fair. Someone else is “too much” and that it has to stop and not succeed enough to run.
Jennifer Cox is a psychotherapist and author Women are angry: Why is your anger hidden and how to do it. She believes there is a fundamental reason why women can sometimes be so mean to each other.
“Women compete because they lack resources and feel like they're running around for scrap,” she says. “We are taught (by the patriarchy we internalized) that we are enemies of each other and that we should act that way on any occasion. It is the goal of an internalized misogynist genius, and we can begin to easily dismantle it.”
This tendency to view other women as competition means that we do not celebrate successful women. This was especially true in the corporate environment where I worked in my previous life.
According to the Institute for Bullying at Work, when a woman is being bullied at work, it is the other women behind it, about 80% of the time. Women reporting to female bosses are more likely to face bullying, backstabs and job interference. There is also a name: Queen Bee syndrome.
The feeling that women were waiting for me to fail when I began to write more books, more attention, and more successful in my new life as a columnist and journalist. You can hear other women saying, “Who do you think she is? Why is she so public about her life? About her struggle?”
When I realized this was spreading to mothers at other schools, it made me doubt and made me consider changing how I was. But it sends my daughter the message that shrinking is the solution and that the only way to be liked is to conform and follow the rules. I don't want that for myself or her.
Instead, I agreed to run my daughter articles past her that has nothing to do with parenting. When she gets older, she says she might be proud of her mother, who is trying to try a whole new life. I want her to be authentic, tell her the truth and not be bullied. I also told her that unhappy women tend to be the most despicable. I'm certainly the most frightening to others when I don't feel where I want to be in life.
In the meantime, Cox is being advised to women who try to demolish other women with harmful gossip. “Whenever you want to project your own insecurities and vulnerabilities onto other women, check yourself out.
I have not yet found which mother encouraged her child to bully me. But I told my daughter that the kids were teasing her again and using Caddy Heron. Average girl“To call someone else fat won't make you skinny. To call someone stupid won't make you smarter.”
The averageness we target with other women is the despicableness we really feel about ourselves.
