Girl-On-Girl Violence

There’s an issue that needs to be addressed that I don’t think has gotten enough attention: girl-on-girl hate and violence. We often discuss the problems with men directing violence against women, but what about the increasing occurrences of females directing violence against other females?? I think this problem has always been around under the surface, but lately it’s becoming a wide-out-in-the-open problem. Ask anyone who has ever been a schoolteacher, and I’m sure they will tell you they have seen this firsthand. I saw it during the brief time when I was a schoolteacher, and I experienced it myself when I was in college. It seems that young girls are carrying more and more insecurity and anger these days, and they are all too eager to direct this insecurity and anger towards each other by calling each other “whores”, “sluts” “bitches”, and “ugly” instead of seeking out the roots of their feelings.

One example that comes to mind is the news stories that were on TV awhile back of girls in different schools across the country getting into nasty physical fights with each other over the pettiest of issues and then posting the videos of their beat-downs on the internet. Another good example comes from my own experiences. When I was in college, a girl whom I considered a friend suddenly turned on me with a vengeance. Out of nowhere, she suddenly began calling me an “anorexic UGLY whore with a loose cootch”, “a disgusting slut that doesn’t deserve to live”, and a “fat whore with cellulite thighs” (how one can be both anorexic and fat is a mystery to me). I received anonymous death threats from her, I received fake instant messages from her pretending to be boys telling me how I was “so ugly that the sight of me made them sick”, and she even went as far as to offer boys on campus sexual favors in exchange for having them send me emails telling me how ugly I was. (Doesn’t that count as prostitution???) She seemed to obsess over insisting how ugly I was and how no boy wanted me. No matter how much I ignored her or tried to reason with her, this hatred towards me went on for years. It culminated with her stealing my grandfather’s obituary photo from the newspaper a week after he died and using it to make a fake MySpace profile of him, using his full name AND including the names of a few of my other family members and posting slander all over it about how he was burning in hell for having had sex with all of his grandchildren, including his infant grandchild. She then used the imposter MySpace profile to send messages to my younger brother asking him, “Why did you move away to another state? Is it because your Grandpa *name omitted* touched you? Don’t you want the world to know that he was a sick child molester who was balls-deep in your whore sister’s ass?” Anyway, I’ll spare you the extra gruesome details. But my point is, what causes girls to be so hateful and violent towards one another? Here we are lamenting over the way that men treat us, and then we go and treat each other the exact same way if not worse!! I think there are some very troubled young girls and women in our society today, and we need to begin taking a close look at the underlying issues that are causing such competition among girls. (And I use the word competition, because I think that is quite possibly what is fueling this animosity. Why else would a girl go to such lengths to make another girl believe that she is “ugly” and that the boys don’t like her?) Men can be cruel, but women can definitely be A LOT crueler…to some scary extremes!! How can we expect the men to treat us with respect if we are already treating each other 10 times worse??