Please Stop Praising Women For Not Being Competitive

Earlier this week Ariana Grande and Lizzo made headlines for the ‘heartwarming’ fact that apparently neither of them wanted to win the awards that they were nominated for. Eilish was even spotted mouthing ‘please don’t let it be me’ just before she got her fourth trophy. Lizzo was seen mouthing ‘Beyonce, Beyonce, Beyonce’ during the announcement for best pop solo.

Buzzfeed titled their piece about the awards as ‘Billie Eilish and Lizzo both wanted other women to win their Grammys and people are loving The Sisterhood.’

But that does rather prompt the question: since when did The Sisterhood require women to give up on their desire to win? No-one is saying that they needed to have a cat fight over the trophies backstage, but what would have been wrong with these women backing themselves to win?

Being competitive is not a negative trait or a character flaw. Wanting to win is normal. Good. Important. It means that you want to be the best, that you want to win, that you don’t want to accept being second best. All things that we, at least in theory, encourage in women. So why is it that with one breath we encourage women to try to compete, and with another we praise them for not being competitive?

I’ve reached the point in my twenties where a fun Sunday night is playing Scrabble over a bottle of wine, with friends. During a recent round, as I placed a Q on a triple word, a friend smiled and said, ‘I've only just realised that you're actually really competitive’.

It was a throwaway comment, and certainly not meant as a character assasination. It was also far from the first time that I’ve heard myself described thus.

I’ve been accused of being competitive since I was a child – told to stop taking the most lines in a playground play, to let someone else have a chance, to stop pushing myself to the front. Just like being called bossy, ‘competitive’ takes on a different undertone when it's applied to women.

Surely everyone who was nominated for a Grammy wanted to win it? Why else do you attend the award ceremony wearing millions of dollars of diamonds and couture? So despite probably wanting to win these awards, the 'done' thing is to pretend that you're not bothered, to adopt an air of modesty (a complicated, problematic concept within itself).

Women aren’t really supposed to want things, or if we do want things we’re supposed to do it prettily, with restraint. Unbridled lust for anything - food, sex, winning – is unbecoming. Indelicate. To be discouraged. Even if you're one of the ballsiest, most boundary-breaking women in all of music. So why can't they admit that they want to be on top, rather than perpetuating the myth that nice girls 'don't mind who wins because it's just such an honour to be nominated!'

You can still be a nice girl and want to win. You can still be a feminist and wish to get an award instead of another woman. It does not damage the sisterhood when we compete. In fact, in enriches it, and moves us all further and further away from a time where to be a woman meant smiling sweetly on the sidelines while the men fought for dominance.

Oh look, it's Ariana Grande wearing Crocs