The relationships and interactions that women have with one another can either be one of the most fruitful experiences of your life or have you crying inside the 3rd stall in the Jack Astors bathroom during your lunch break. Throughout the past few years, we have seen another surge in the feminist movement, the fourth-wave, based around things such as the Me Too movement, workplace discrimiation, sexual harassment, body shaming, rape culture, and so forth. Remarkable strides have been made and will undoubtedly continue to in the future. However, what seems to have fallen through the cracks is the way that women themselves treat one another.

Let me speak candidly for a moment. The most hurtful things I have heard about myself, relating to my appearance or personality have come from other women. Now that’s not saying that they have only been said by other women, but undeniably the vast majority. What’s interesting, is that they have come from women that have had the same done to them by other women. This cyclical pattern is one that continues to keep pushing the narrative that women compete with one another in order to maintain or improve their “status”, whatever that might be. In an ideal world, you do not want to subject anyone to terrible things that have been done to you, since you are aware of the adverse effects it has on your well-being and self-esteem. So then, why do women do it to one another? Why do we point out the fact that “she doesn’t look like that in person”, “she’s gained a lot of weight”, “she’s not that pretty”? Pulling others down to make yourself seem taller is a narrative that has been around for years. But specifically, why is it so prominent in women? How can we be advocating for change and equality on the grand scale, while body shaming the girl we went to highschool with to our friends? 

A restaurant I used to work at a few years ago was home to some of the worst experiences I have ever had when it came to my interactions and relationships with women. I pride myself in being a friendly and approachable person, traits which I’d like to believe are evident to everyone and anyone. However, I found that no matter how hard I tried, how many conversations I tried to start, the vast majority of women would not only not give me the time of day, but would go behind my back to mock my enthusiasm, my looks and my overall demeanor. Women that barely knew me outside of my name were tearing me to shreds to one another, only to turn around and tear those other women to shreds as well. It seemed the only topic of conversation they were able to maintain with me was how much of a bitch so-and-so is, how this girl didn’t do her makeup today and how terrible she looks, anything and everything you could think to pick on, they did. Now I’m not saying this was specific to this workplace, it simply had a majority of women staff and it was far easier to see these patterns and behaviours. I’m also not implying that every woman there was waiting to pounce on one another at any given moment. I have met some of my closest girlfriends there, and it is not my intention to rewrite the past to demonize every female co-worker I had. That being said, even the women I became friends with, our first source of common ground was how cruel the others were to us. The friendliest and most approachable women seemed to be the ones that would be dragged through the mud the most by her fellow women co-workers. How does that make sense? How do you go through life experiencing, in some form or another, sexism, gender bias, bullying, and body shaming, only to turn around and do the exact same thing to another woman? Do we not remember the pain that those experiences have brought us? Do we feel the need to subject other women to it solely because we ourselves have experienced it, and so it’s “only fair”? Is there not enough external factors affecting women that we also have to contribute to them?

There have been many women I have reached out to while writing this piece. This topic is one that I have struggled with my whole life, wondering if I truly am the way that these women have painted me, how I can change my personality to be lesser in some way, in order to appeal to these types of women. To find out that basically every single woman around me has experienced this in one way or another was sadly relieving, and devastating. How can this be the same across the board? How can you take women with different nationalities, creeds, physical features, races, sexual orientations, upbringings, personalities, and yet have them all be able to identify and relate to this problem? When I posed the question, “do you think women are cruel to other women, and if so, how have you experienced this in your life?”, there seemed to be a pattern in the answers that I received. The common denominator in the experiences that were shared with me was that women act in such ways because they are threatened by you in some capacity. Threatened by the way you carry yourself, the way you look, the way you act, and what you have that they “lack”. I’ve spoken to women that I know from many different environments. From restaurants I’ve worked in, from school, from sports teams, from social situations I’ve met them in, from professional workplaces. More or less, the stories were copies of one another. How they were bullied or belittled by women around them, typically older, or with some sort of seniority attached to their name. As I mentioned before, my initial feeling was a wave of relief. It wasn’t just me! The remarkable, strong, beautiful women in my life, women I look up to, have not only gone through this as well, but in similar ways that I have. Then the feeling passes, reality sets in, and questions start permeating my brain. This is the norm? Why have we all experienced this? What do we all have in common to be subjected to this? How could this have happened to women that I know don’t act in a similar fashion? Where does this get taught? Is it rooted in our upbringing, in societal expectations and pressures, in us? How can you do this to fellow women who struggle alongside you? 

I wish there was a eureka moment that I could share with you. That along the way I figured out a way to end this forever, that women will always appreciate and love one another and we can work together to tackle the greater issues that are facing us. Unfortunately, that is not the case. However, this is not the note I shall leave on. There are hundreds of women I have met that have changed my life, accepted me for who I am, encouraged me to grow, and fixed my hair in bathrooms at clubs. I am proud to know women like this, and I am happy that I continue to meet many women like this. Throughout writing this, I was also thinking about the women that display complete opposite behaviours. When I meet a new group of women and they gush over my hair, when a woman compliments my tattoos in line at a grocery store, when they message me to tell me they thought the last thing I posted made them laugh. I do not want the lasting impression this makes to be a sour one, centred around negative women and negative experiences. There is so much work to be done together, to empower and shine a light on the voices of women that have been getting drowned out for so many years. Use your voices to speak up for BIPOC womxn, LGBTQ2SIA+ womxn, disabled womxn, immigrant womxn, working class womxn; any and all womxn that exist on this planet. This begins and continues together.  The women you work with, the women you went to highschool with, the women you meet in line for coat check. Making things difficult for one another on the ground level, the basic human kindness level, prolongs any changes we hope to make in the grand scheme. You will meet a million kind women in your life and if you can’t find one, be one.