Exploring “Bad” Feminism – Cattiness, Competition and A Call for Change

A SYTYCB entry

As much as I want feminism to bring women together, there are definitely some women who still use catty, covert methods to bring other women down because of their own insecurities and flaws. Add the patriarchal bullshit girls are fed from day one and you’re living in a society entrenched in stereotypes about women that, well, to be frank, manifest in startlingly hideous ways, and where many of the perpetrators are women themselves.  Rachel Simmons’ Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls speaks to this phenomena of bullying among girls who channel their aggression through gossip and exclusion, waging psychological warfare against their own sex.  I’ve been forced to explore that deep down within my own feminist soul, I too have been guilty of being competitive, driven and aggressive, and the very qualities that have served to make me a “good feminist” (although I am against promoting such a such label) have also been used counter productively to make me a “bad” one.

Don’t get me wrong. I try my hardest to practice what I preach. When I see a beautiful woman, my automatic thoughts are, “she’s beautiful,” and I try to leave it at that and not enter the vicious cycle of  I try not to feel threatened or insecure. I smile and go about my business as I should (and always would I had never ever been fed by rampant media garbage about ideal notions of beauty).  However, I won’t deny that at times something stops me and makes me play the comparison game once more. It could be the fact that the woman is smug about her looks and quite obvious that she thinks she rules the world; it could be that I assume things about her unconsciously and unfairly based on her looks;or it could be because I don’t feel quite in peace with myself and my own looks. Let’s not forget the most obvious obstacle standing in my way – there are a lot of women who play the comparison game themselves and their behavior unfortunately is triggering for me as well. Regardless of how hard I attempt to distance myself and depersonalize these troubling behaviors from other women and analyze it in the context of patriarchy, I cannot help but react at times.

I’ve been forced to explore these reactions in a deeper way recently. Jessica Valenti’s The Upside of Ugly made me realize how shallow I had become ever since I became “conventionally attractive” according to patriarchy’s standards. In my teenage years, I had always felt like the ugly duckling with my glasses, shaggy eyebrows and darker skin; being vigorously bullied in middle school and called ugly on a daily basis didn’t help either. I was discriminated against based on my skin colorand made to believe I wasn’t as beautiful as someone with white skin–this discrimination was also constantly reinforced by my own culture’s norms which glorified lighter shades over darker ones.

Once I hit my twenties, however, things changed. I shed the aggressive tomboy look and made a conscious effort to fit society’s standards of beauty. In college, I gotcontact lenses, began threading my eyebrows, began wearing cuter outfits, and had reached my skinniest weight. This was a huge change for me because I had struggled with eating issues—overeating,undereating you name it, most of my life.  I was becoming more confident in my own sense of beauty as perceived by others, even while I was feeling miserable and insecure on the inside.

My weight shifted, however, and this period of conventional beauty didn’t last too long. I became a bit heavier due to the medication I was taking. When I finally lost weight after getting off my  medication, I shed the pounds almost immediately and everyone began commenting how “skinny” I had become and how good I looked despite the fact that I told them I had lost weight due to stress rather than careful deliberation and exertion. I hadn’t been aware of such a difference until people began commenting on how much weight I had lost. I figured there
wasn’t much of a difference – I had gone from a size eight to a size six, but I had felt somewhat beautiful at size eight regardless of the rude comments I received from boyfriends and boys I dated who scrutinized me (these men also had severe issues with their own weight, including their own eating disorders but that’s another topic for another post).

It was in this period of exterior reconstruction (if you can call it that) that I realized my internal architecture was becoming shady and unbalanced; the foundations of my self esteem were crumbling and I was clinging to the walls with claws I appeared to have grown overnight. The
jealous girls whom I once ignored (from the strangers who gave me dirty looks on the sidewalk or giggled behind their hands to the more personal, backhanded compliments from girls I hung out with or worked with) got to me. I began scrutinizing them when I realized they were attacking me. Instead of rising above all the petty cattiness I had looked down upon, I was suddenly becoming a part of it, part of the entire competitive game that I hated the most. I didn’t act on this jealousy, but I did constantly talk about it—with other women I trusted–all of whom told me to ignore it all and not to fall into the trap of becoming a monster while attempting to thwart monsters.

To simplify it, I was happiest when I felt happiest for women and unhappiest when I became internally ugly if I reacted negatively to their external beauty. And I knew this “simple” feminist formula would work in procuring the peace I once had, but it wasn’t so simple to put it into
practice when not all women were supportive or nice, when a lot ofwomen were also competing and took out their jealousy in malicious, covert ways, hiding their questionable behavior with sweet facades.

When I recognized what I was becoming—that I was mirroring the same behavior from women that I abhorred—I realized I was being a “bad” feminist even though that’s not a label I truly believe in. I wasn’t living up to my own expectations of feminism, I wasn’t supporting the women who like me had been to an extent brainwashed by expectations of beauty and competing for male attention. I was being too human, too insecure, too stereotypical. I was fitting the mold of what society expected of me — not just fulfilling the ideal standards of beauty but feeding into the myths of competitive women.

That’s when I began to strategize. I began humanizing these competitive women more and recognizing that like me, they were flawed, insecure, jealous, and victimized even while they remained the perpetrators of an age-old stereotype of cattiness.  I stopped competing with them for male attention when I recognized it wasn’t worth the sense of dignity I felt I lost every time I did so.

Why are we so afraid, as feminists, of calling women out on being perpetrators of their own misogyny? Are we afraid that we dismiss the accountability of sexism? But then, aren’t we also held accountable for our own behavior? Shouldn’t women, if treated equally, also be subject to similar standards of respect, dignity and integrity? Cultivating that peace inside of myself—although there have been many struggles in this journey—was the best thing I had ever done for myself as a feminist because I understood that it wasn’t about avoiding being a “bad” feminist, but about becoming a better me. I would hope that all the badass women out there whether they say they’re feminists or not – recognize that it’s not just about living up to a label but about living up to your own self-respect. We’ve all been there–jealous, insecure, catty, competitive at some point or another. The point is that we not only criticize patriarchy, sexism and the media but also subject ourselves to the same level of scrutiny to pave the path to substantial change.