‘We all breathe in misogyny. So we all have to make the decision to unbreathe it.’ Wise words from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - and she’s right.
We talk a lot about misogyny. We know what it looks like when it’s coming from men and directed at women. Bu the idea that women are somehow inferior isn’t only held by men, it can be held by women too. It’s called internalised misogyny, it’s just as insidious as the misogyny that comes from men, and if you try to pin it down so that you can isolate it, analyse it and call it out, it often seems to evaporate into thin air as though it was never really there at all.
But once you start looking, it’s everywhere. It’s yourmate slagging Taylor Swift off in a WhatsApp group for not good reason, it’s the subject of Pink’s 2006 classic Stupid Girls and it’s certain people sneering uncritically at the rise of popular books with the word feminist in the title. Some people say it’s why Margaret Thatcher – our first woman Prime Minister - didn’t have any women in her cabinet and others argue it’s what led so many (white) women to vote for Donald Trump instead of Hillary Clinton because we are taught from a very young age to view other women as either competition, a threat or lesser and inadequate. As former first lady Michelle Obama put it ‘any woman who voted against Hillary Clinton voted against their own voice’.
A friend of mine recently encountered some misogyny at work and it left her second guessing herself. The scenario was a familiar one: one of her male colleagues was being given preferential treatment. He would ignore instructions, deliver work after allotted deadlines and leave holes in it. Their shared boss did not pull him up on this, instead they praised his work, cut him slack and gave him exciting new opportunities. All the while, she felt more and more work was being piled on her plate and when she flagged that it wasn’t possible to complete all of it, she was met with a harsh critique of her abilities. Her male colleague, meanwhile, was being rewarded for his shortcomings.
My friend’s boss was a woman. I had, wrongly, assumed she was a he – and maybe you did too. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised, ‘women’ as Ngozi Adichie puts it ‘judge other women harshly’. In fact, my friend’s situation made me think of a young woman I recently interviewed. She was sexually harassed at work and when she confided in a woman superior, she was told that speaking about it again would be ‘detrimental to her career progression’, in other words she was denigrated not once, but twice.
I’ve been fortunate to work in all women teams which are supportive and nurturing. But, clearly, internalised misogyny is real and perhaps better explained by none other than Tina Fey’s character in Mean Girls: ‘'you all have got to stop calling each other sluts and whores. It just makes it okay for guys to call you sluts and whores.'
I wanted to know more about the causes of internalised misogyny and how we can combat it so I spoke to author and psychoanalyst Susie Orbach, who has written about this phenomenon at length. She explained that the problem occurs when women act out the sexism they themselves have experienced or witnessed on the women around them.
The problem, she explains, stems from the fact that ‘we grow up in a society where we are mostly raised by mothers’. Our mothers, Susie says ‘have to teach us how to be which means they they convey to us an entire set of values wordlessly – in the way they treat us’. But, she adds, we also observe how they themselves our treated and we absorb that. ‘All of this is how our sense of ourselves is created’ she says.
Think of it like this: at a young age you will (probably) have observed your mother experiencing sexism. And, you may even have heard her being sexist about other women and, on some level, you will have taken this on board. ‘We don’t grow up outside of societal norms’ Susie explains ‘even if they’re changing – women are still encouraged to be a certain way. We still socialised girls to be caring and to comfort others – it’s structured into our psyches’.
More than this, because our mother is the person in the world that we are most dependent on in our early lives we fear being cut off from her as much as we fear her disapproval, so we repress our feelings. We internalise them.
Straight up misogyny and the internalised misogyny we may observe in women are similar but fundamentally different. ‘If you are a woman’ Susie tells me ‘you not only view yourself in terms of being a second-class citizen because that’s how society sees you, you might also project this onto other women. If you’re a man, you project it onto women but you don’t experience it yourself.’
If you go on to become a woman in a position of power your relationship with other women might shift. Of course, this doesn’t always happen and Queen Bee syndrome (the idea that women deliberately hinder the progress of other women) has been largely debunked. But, Susie explains ‘a woman boss might separate herself out and think right “I’ve escaped all of that discrimination” or she might be very fearful and think “there but for the grace of god go I”, perhaps treating the women around her unfairly or harshly’. This, Susie explains, is a way of ‘putting the behaviour she fears happening to her onto someone else’ and separating herself from other women as a way of protecting herself.
I tell Susie about the situation my friend has found herself in. ‘Her boss might be viewing other women as she’s been taught to view herself’ she says ‘she may be viewing other women as a threat, or as the piece of her that is less than who she imagines herself to be’. All of these, Susie adds ‘could be interpreted as expressions of internalised misogyny.’
A woman in a position of power, Susie says, who ‘feels threatened’ might ‘take it out on the people around who are most like her’. It is partly self-preservation and part protectionism but, Susie says, today more than ever, we should challenge it when we see it if we want to overcome it.
It’s not the 1990s, Susie points out, when ‘feminism wasn’t in ascendancy and there was no social support for it’. Today women’s struggles are being shared and dealt with collectively through international movements like #MeToo and #WhyIDidn’tReport.
Her advice for dealing with internalised misogyny then? Simply, call it out. ‘Say ouch – why are we attacking her?? Is it a case of envy? Is it that the person attacking another woman because she wants what they have?’.
At work, Susie acknowledges that this might not always be straightforward. ‘Perhaps women who are in such a situation could ally with each other and say to their woman boss “we’ve noticed that you behave in this way…we really love having you in a leadership position but you’re treating us differently to the men and give examples’.
In calling out internalised misogyny, as with misogyny, we can undo it because we expose it. ‘I think it’s important to say when you think women are caught up in envying other women rather than moving forward themselves’ Suzy says.
Whenever we judge other women harshly it is important to remember that the impulse to do so is a result of patriarchy and sexism. This is not to say that we should all sit around on fluffy pink cushions knitting, congratulating one another for simply existing and being endlessly, sickeningly kind. But we should always ask who benefits when we criticise other women? Is it a constructive criticism? That is the question because, so often, when women judge other women harshly it’s men who are benefitting