is a disgusting pop-culture term. Sadly, it is also an appropriate one. The truth is that women don’t seem to know how to be friends with eachother without some sort of undercurrent of hostility and competitiveness. It is a phenomenon that I have always found disturbing.
It used to make me wonder why, when we already have so much to deal with in the male-dominated world, we are each others’ worst enemies. And then I found an explanation somewhere (and I am unable to locate that somewhere right now, so I’m afraid there will be a referencing problem).
Women are brought up to hate themselves and their own kind. It is a manifestation of our self-loathing that we inflict harm on our own kind. The harm varies with the degree of self-loathing and the sphere in which a woman operates. But that’s where it all comes from: the brutalising of daughters-in-law, the picking on the pretty intern, the stealing of other women’s partners and sabotaging of their relationships, the disproportionate aggression with female domestic help, the fake smugness that women love to project at eachother, the hurry to pass judgment on other women, the eagerness to bring them down…all of it.
So the next time you smile to yourself smugly because another women’s marriage broke down, or because you elbowed the only other woman in the office out of a meeting, odds are the you are smiling like a wrist-slasher at something that you did to hurt yourself.
And this is why all feminists are so passionate about the sisterhood. It isn’t just about being supportive of other women, or of combating boys-clubs..it is about standing up for ourselves, and learning to respect, support and care for ourselves. Because all these women – the friends, the daughters, daughters-in-law, bosses, employees, bus-conductors, saleswomen, stewardesses..they are all a part of who we are.
Of Cabbages and Kings 