What, I hear you ask? How can a girl be a misogynist?
The answer is: pretty easily.
Women still don’t generally earn the same wage as their male peers. Granted, most women take career breaks to have and raise children, and this sets their careers back. Women who do take a career break to start a family are often looked down upon by other women as “betraying the achievements of feminism.” Women who choose career over having children, however unsuited to motherhood they know themselves to be, are looked down upon by both women and some men, as “not fulfilling their God-given or biological purpose.”
Men who choose career over marriage and kids are respected as focussed and driven business leaders.
Women are under a lot of pressure physically, to look like the air-brushed Photo-shopped and surgically enhanced models of the magazines and page 3Girls are told almost from birth that men are visual, more visual than women, and finding love is going to be all about how they look.
When this kind of pressure is so constant, it has a water torture effect of insinuating itself into the brain. It’s no surprise girls start to believe what they’re repeatedly told how they should look. And what they’re told about how they should act.
Boys are told that while bad girls are fun, you marry a good girl.
So: the misogynist society is the one in which we all live, in the democratic liberal west, every day. (This is not to say that other cultures aren’t also or even more misogynist, but they are often a lot more upfront about it)
Humans are a social species, a herd animal; and we still have a very strong pack instinct. It is this pack instinct, this innate desire to belong, that truly makes women so dangerous to women.
As children, we want to be part of the cool crowd. With girls, this is where the misogyny inherent in society really starts to show. The good girls, the bullies and the cowards are so busy desperately fitting in, so they won’t lose their status in the group’s hierarchy, they don’t stop to think that maybe different isn’t always a bad thing.
These girls see difference as a threat, and they respond by attacking – generally by bitching, and back-biting. And they’re careful to keep the tenor as only teasing, so their targets have no comeback that doesn’t leave them wide open to the accusation that they just can’t take a joke.
The victims of these whisper campaigns of bullying generally react in one of two directions. They either chop even more pieces off themselves in order to try to correct the perceived faults that make them targets, or they decide it costs them less to be different than to try to fit in, and will often deliberately emphasise their difference – this is where bad girls come from, with their devil-may-care attitude to gossip.
Those who morph are aware of the price they’ve paid to fit in, and they resent those who refuse to. Why should they be allowed to succeed without paying the price these now “good” girls paid? The girls who refuse to change their identities for the sake of belonging to the tribe are the ones who react by becoming even more different… it’s a vicious cycle. It would be nice if good girls ever grew up and left the schoolyard behind.
The trouble with girls buying into the misogynist paradigm – about which they are given very little choice in such an insidiously misogynist culture as ours - is the mess it makes of their own psyches. To be human is to have appetites. To be a good girl is to have no appetites. So good girls have to play mind-games with themselves just to deal with being girls in a social context that devalues that and dehumanises it.
All of which is why Dame Helen Mirren is right when she says female jurors are harsher to rape victims than male jurors. Female jurors want to be thought of as good girls, and therefore arrange themselves on the misogynist party line, to throw stones and vilify the victim as “asking for it.”
Of course, no good girl wants to admit to her own misogyny, so those who speak out are greeted with outrage.
Early feminism, with its bra bonfires, unshaved legs and lack of make-up or fashionable skirts, was expressing itself in very misogynist terms. In a misogynist society, misogynist symbolism is readily understood. But the burning bras and refusal to shave or be a domestic drudge were a way of making women more like men. Thus, feminism became a dirty word. And Laura Doyle was able to be taken seriously, when she should have been laughed out of court. Misogyny, like schoolgirl bullies, is disturbingly good at insidious.
Girls need to stop treating each other based on sexual competition and misogynist constructs of female identity. We all need to treat each other as human first and sexual only when the context demands it.
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