One-up-womanship

Women can be very odd creatures.

I noticed whilst growing up that there are many injustices committed against women in various parts of the world. Amongst them are the social customs in the parts of the world where women are treated as second-class citizens (or worse, not citizens at all). Y'know, the places where women can't drive, can't own property, can't hold down a career… can't even leave the house without a male relative as a chaperone.

Those are extremes, but things haven't always been that great here in the West either. I'm old enough to remember the 1970s: a decade in which few women worked (and those who did tended to go for supportive roles like a secretary or a nurse; they were never the boss or doctor); few women drove; and the word 'man' was synonymous with 'human' or 'people' and everyone was perfectly OK with this. The (male) boss could expect to pat his pretty little secretary on her pert little behind and that was just A-OK with everybody. So we aren't entitled to be smug, but we've come along way since the 1970s. Unlike some cultures.

To me, the subjugation of women is a grave injustice against humanity. I find it hard to fathom how half of a country's population can be treated with such contempt. Why don't these women, having seen how women in the West have demanded equal rights, join forces to demand their rights? The reason, I discovered to my surprise, is that the largest group of people promoting the subjugation of women in these cultures is… the women themselves.

The 'sisterhood' gets VERY offended if some other woman gets all uppity and decides she wants to be free from male control and to have equal rights. The 'sisters' want other women to be in the same situation they're in; no other woman may dare to want a better deal than they have!

I had to ask myself: why? Why do these women apparently hate each other so much? Well, I have a theory.

Having been forced my entire life to conform to female gender norms (which I simply can't do), I've practically been a 'secret agent', watching female behaviour from the inside whilst in disguise as one of them. I've noticed first-hand how women interact with one another. They seem to have two oddly conflicting drives that are at odds with each other:

1. Women seem to have a sense of 'sisterhood'; of a shared, collective female experience; of all being in this together. They behave as if every other woman should automatically form part of this collective and conform to the rules of this sisterhood, which in my opinion also includes an element of victimhood - some of which is deserved. Even here in the West, women do have a history of being downtrodden and mistreated by society and I remember how different society was just a few decades ago, before the wider acceptance of feminism in the 1980s. Feminists are, in my opinion, at the extreme edge of this brand of sisterhood… and are most likely to be dismissive of FtMs because some of them see us as abandoning or betraying the collective. So if the women of a society collectively believe that they're downtrodden and discriminated against, they seem to believe that other women in the same society must be equally downtrodden to validate their own sense of victimhood. Hence the situation outlined above.
   
2. However, women are fiercely, brutally competitive with each other. You can see this in all aspects of their lives, but I'll use a simple example of the women's restroom. Here, women constantly check each other out, to validate their own opinions of themselves and their place in society. They're judging other women around them by comparing their own characteristics to the characteristics these other women present. They'll judge another woman's haircut, her figure, the behaviour of her children, the quality of her clothing, the application of her make-up etc. etc. to attempt to validate their belief that they are in some way superior to those women. It seems like they're saying "I'm a better woman than her because my thighs aren't as flabby as hers." Or "I'm a better mother because my children are better behaved than hers." They do this sort of thing constantly, and feeling everyone's eyes on you (whilst guessing the sort of things that must be going through their heads) can be very uncomfortable for those of us who do not identify as women and do not wish to play their games. I'd imagine this also presents difficulties for MtFs who desperately want to join the 'sisterhood' but find it difficult to feel included if they don't pass well and they haven't grown up learning the rules of this game that women play amongst themselves.  

So… women are hugely contradictory. They are a collective group that believes they are downtrodden by 'society' / 'men' / 'whatever', but they're the first to stomp all over other women in order to keep them equally downtrodden, so they can perpetuate their own victimhood. I call it 'one-up-womanship'.

I've always believed that Feminism should be about the equality of women to men. In that regard, I would consider myself a Feminist. What I am not is someone who believes that men need to pay for centuries of keeping women down. Especially since the women themselves have done their fair share of keeping each other down.

WTF, women?!?!?!