Islands at war: Strong women in a sea of patriarchy

Behind every community organization there is a strong woman… but usually only one.

I started noticing this uncomfortable reality once I got to be about thirty-five. When I was younger, I saw strong women as my mentors and leaders. I looked up to them, especially those who led groups, almost worshipfully and they usually responded with a bit of motherly advice and a job for me to do. But once I became clearly middle-aged, I started running up against their hard edges.

I was probably a bit oblivious in the beginning. It didn’t occur to me that we should be in competition. I had my plans and didn’t have any designs on their jobs or positions, but let’s face it. I’m opinionated, loud-mouthed and energetic. Wherever I got involved a hot friction quickly ignited between me and any strong women in leadership roles.

Creative Commons image by Tee Cee

For awhile, I thought there must be something about me that simply irritates capable, educated and professional women, who I viewed as my natural peers and potential friends. But gradually I realized that if I was in an organizational role of authority above another strong woman, we were fine and often friends, and if I wasn’t part of their organization or social group, we were also usually fine. It’s only when I encounter strong women on a similar level or as a superior in an organization or social hierarchy that we run into trouble. And frankly, there aren’t any meek women in these roles.

I observe other women interacting. There are often smiles and hugs that quickly turn to vicious jockeying and betrayal that usually ends with all but one woman out the door and gone.

After I recently joined a group and quickly rose through the men to lead my city’s branch, the head of the national office (also a hard-working woman) called me to say we would be working together closely. But the close cooperation never materialized. A few weeks later, another woman started making waves in my branch with my support and the national head was telling her that she was the new “go to person.” And within a few days, the new girl was in tears and supposedly leaving the organization. I watched the same cycle happen with several others.

So many women leaders say they want to support other women, but they will only extend that support if the women near them have no opinions or gumption. Can we so quickly forget that you don’t get to be in leadership roles if you’re female and NOT strong, opinionated and feisty?

It is possible that we strong women rub one another the wrong way precisely because of the fact that we are pre-selected by the patriarchal system to be the competitive, enduring and assertive individuals of our gender. If we didn’t have these qualities, we wouldn’t be successful in a world run by men. And it is also these qualities that make us difficult to get along with.

But I doubt that is all there is to the antagonism between strong women. I see a lot of evidence that women in leadership tolerate opinions and challenge from male coworkers much more than they do from female coworkers. And apparently I’m not alone. When I finally decided to write about this, I googled “women leaders hostile to female coworkers” out of curiosity as to whether or not I’d come up with any random anecdotal hits. Instead, I got a flood of articles, studies and surveys including:

“Why do women bully each other at work?” a massively researched investigation from The Atlantic

“Female coworkers: Allies or Enemies” from Forbes

“The dark side of female rivalry in the workplace and what to do about it”

And even from the Yale Law Journal, “Hostility to the presence of women: Why women undermine each other in the workplace and the consequences for Title IV”

So, apparently this is “a thing” and not just my experience. Strong women fight one another, compete, undermine and bully one another and presumably also women who are not quite as tough.

Our feminist mothers didn’t tell us about this when they told us we could be anything and we were as good as any man. When I was a girl, going through a rare rite of passage with a supportive circle of older women I felt that i had been given a promise: “We will stand by you. The world may be made for men and men may still hold most of the economic and social power but you are the generation that will push beyond the barriers and we older women will be here urging you on.”

I went out into the professional world completely unprepared for the backlash from women. I saw women as allies and supports and some early experiences seemed to confirm it, possibly because I was nerdy and not sexually attractive to most men and as a younger, disabled woman I didn’t seem like much of a threat.

A male colleague recently told me that at least one woman higher than me in professional authority expressed feeling terribly threatened by me.

Threatened? By me? I am not only almost blind, I have a disabled child and I am socially awkward. I not only couldn’t be a threat to anyone if I wanted to, I don’t have any competitive designs on anything. I’m happy to be barely hanging on to my little bits of work and social engagement and have no intention of expanding anywhere.

And yet, the fact is that some feel threatened. That feeling isn’t nothing.

My first reaction is to think it is a byproduct of patriarchy. The over-competitive world of men has taught us to be this way. Or maybe it is that the tokenism of a lot of disingenuous affirmative action has forced us to operate in a world where most organizations would accept one high-ranking woman and one high-ranking person of color and that’s it. Maybe it is simply that the Old Boys Network lets only those women with very hard edges through.

I don’t know exactly what the reason is or even whether or not I am part of the problem. I don’t feel like I am competitive with other women. I generally feel safer and happier when I’m working with a lot of women… until the fighting starts, that is. I don’t tend to have conflicts with women who are below me in any formal or informal hierarchy. I am known as a good mentor. But then again I do have some hard edges and I can’t say that I didn’t get them the same way other women did.

What I do know is that only strong women can solve this. If we can look at ourselves and see what we are doing to one another and how it feeds into a system that is still keeping women underpaid and disempowered, we should be able to find a way to change it.

Let’s look for healing—for ourselves and for other women.

The kind of rite of passage to womanhood that I had as a young teen is crucial and it is sad that it is still rare. Let us openly express support for younger women, tell them we support them and then do so, even when feelings of insecurity creep in. Yes, sometimes they will be “too much.” They will be louder, more entitled, less self-sacrificing than we were at their age. It’s a good thing that they don’t have to work three times as hard and juggle both work and family without a hair out of place, as our generation did. When they look like a million bucks, let’s not forget that we support them.

And just as crucially, the next time we feel threatened, criticized or bossed by an older women, let’s stop and really think out whether or not the same behaviors and words would seem threatening, critical or bossy if they came from a man. Let’s slow down our judgement of older women and err on the side of compassion. When they look hard-edged or overdressed or frumpy or bitter, take a moment to recall that we are culturally conditioned by every Disney cartoon about evil queens and by all the social expectations of women to see their exhaustion, stress and capability as negative. And let us remember how and why they got to where they are. These older women who made it from generations past had to be tough and even ruthless at times to fit in a male-dominated world. Their gentler sisters often had to sacrifice their dreams and their very selves to have a family or a basic non-career job. And the patriarchal world taught all of us to be harsher than we would have naturally tended.

I don’t know how to heal it, not exactly, but I’m trying.

Strong women, you are sisters and you are needed—without perfection, without being goddesses, without winning—you are enough.

Do we still need feminism?

It took me a very long time to say "me too." on Facebook.

I have to explain this because many of my readers are old-school email junkies and don't frequent Facebook or Twitter much. So in case you were doing valuable non-screen-related things this week, this will get you up to speed. There is currently a movement on social media where women, and some men, post "me too," as their status if they are a survivor of sexual assault or harassment. 

It's a good idea. It comes as a response to revelations of celebrity rape and sexual harassment in the past few weeks, and it is meant to show that these are far from isolated incidents. Many, many women experience sexual harassment on a regular basis and far too many have been subjected to rape or assault. 

Creative Commons image by Sodanie Chea

Why didn't I quickly jump on the bandwagon then? 

First, I'm always skeptical of these social media campaigns, where you must change your profile picture to this or that or else be branded as a supporter of terrorism or some such. I decided long ago not to participate in those campaigns. It takes several minutes for me to change my profile picture, and being a working class mother of very demanding kids, I can't always guarantee that I'll be able to be on-line long enough to discover and abide by all such trends. I don't want my lack of response to some particular campaign to be taken as a statement. I also know many people with limited internet access for whom keeping up with these things is entirely impossible. If I refrain from all of them, we are all less likely to be blamed and labeled for neglecting one.

But posting "me too" is much easier and less permanent. It also isn't showing support for something but demonstrating a statistic in real-time. So, after some thought, I decided that this is a different situation.

But still I was hesitant. Most of the sexual harassment I've experienced is so mundane that it barely merits a mention and if one hundred percent of all women haven't experienced the same, it is only due to specific and fairly isolated social surroundings. I have been called fat in several inappropriate situations or had the same implied among professional colleagues. it has been many years since random men blocked my path and tried to force me into sexual conversation or made catcalls at me, which apparently means that I am no longer attractive. Either being catcalled or not is a sexual/social signal in a society where a woman's appearance and sexual allure is considered to be a large part of her worth.

I have been asked to clean up the kitchenette in an office where everyone else was a man and been GLAD to have a role because I felt otherwise left out, even though I had a specific professional job to do that had nothing to do with cleaning. Sometimes I don't know what is worse--that men buy into this culture that demeans women or that we do ourselves. 

And that made me hesitate to post "me too" because I do know that so many other women have suffered so much more and I have not been exactly exemplary in my resistance to the male dominated culture. Mostly I have been glad to stand on my mother's and grandmothers' shoulders and accept those benefits of feminism that my generation was lucky enough to inherit without doing much to free my own mind from the treadmill. 

And then there is the fact that I did face actual sexual assault twice and managed to escape, using specific techniques from self-defense classes. This made me perhaps most uncomfortable posting "me too." I did not want to imply by telling my story that women who did not have the good fortune to have the training or who did have the training and either couldn't fight back or simply failed to overpower an attacker are somehow to blame. There is far too much of that blame-the-victim going around as it is. 

I do want women and girls to know that self-defense training can work though. Let's just be clear. I was mostly just lucky.

In one case, I was at a large outdoor festival at night. I was sixteen and had never been on a real date. A man at the party treated me nicely and acted like he wanted to be my friend. I was attracted to him and excited by the prospect of a romantic involvement. But then he very quickly pulled me away from others into a dark field. He squeezed my breast and kissed me forcefully. I tried to back away but he gripped harder. I said "no" and he ignored me.

I had grown up in a culture that said that if I was attracted to him and initially went with him someplace, that I had given my consent. The fact that I was sixteen and quickly decided that the pace of things had gone way beyond what I wanted was irrelevant. Not only my friends, the media and society in general would have judged me to be an impulsive girl who got what she deserved, I thought so too.

I told myself, "That was really stupid. No one would or should help you." As a result, it didn't actually occur to me to scream for help. But I had recently had one of those one-day crash courses in self-defense that parents sometimes put their teenage daughters in, and one of the techniques we practiced was startling an attacker by yelling right next to his ear. I did not want to continue with the encounter and "no" wasn't working. So, I leaned in a bit, got right next to his ear and let loose a wild yell, that went unnoticed by the partiers all around. I have quite a loud voice and it no doubt hurt. His grip loosened and I ran, easily evading him once I reached a more crowded area. 

That night I crawled into my sleeping bag in a pup tent on the edge of the festival, still shivering and alone. As I was settling down one of the older teenage boys I had traveled to the festival with brushed his fingers along my tent and said out loud, "Such a shame. A pretty girl going to sleep alone." His friends laughed and they walked away, not knowing that I had just had to use a self-defense technique to escape a non-consensual encounter. And yet as I lay there I knew those guys weren't dangerous and that they meant the comment in fun. I was even somewhat glad they would call me a pretty girl, even in jest. I had been heavily ostracized and bullied at school for having a disability and being called "pretty" was a strong lure. 

Three years later, I had gained and lost my first serious boyfriend, had lack-luster sex and was started on a life of feeling uncomfortable about--and generally disinterested in--sexuality. I was still occasionally called pretty, but even at 19 that was fading. My first boyfriend and others had called me "fat" many times, though I was actually well within the most limited version of the "healthy" range and I'd love to be that physically fit again. Still I took them at their word. I never felt happy with my looks. I just wasn't that interested. I had more important things to do and I spent my time writing, studying at college and wriggling my way into as many foreign exchange programs as possible. 

One of these was in Siberia. My second brush with sexual assault occurred on that trip. I was studying in a mid-sized city in Siberia called Kurgan. This was 1995 and it was a lawless period. The streets were largely unlit and there were many abandoned buildings and open sewer holes. Organized crime ruled and gangs roamed the streets. Night also fell extremely early, because we were so far north. One evening, I was returning to the place I was staying around ten pm from a small party. Mostly people did not go out alone at night, but I was never particularly popular in social settings and I had not managed to form any close friendships during my stay. I either stayed in my room alone or I walked alone. Those were my choices. Being an adventurous risk-taker who loved learning about other cultures, I just did what I had to. 

So just as with my previous encounter, there are a great many people who might say I deserved to be assaulted. I was after all taking extreme risks. This was not a safe place and I knew it. But that is part of the problem that we are trying to address with the "me too" campaign. Neither iinitial interest nor risk-taking is a justification for assault.

I was walking under one of the few streetlights in town when a man came at me fast from the side. He stepped up and took my arm in a way that could have seemed friendly except that he gripped quite hard. He asked me in a falsely friendly tone how I was doing and where I was going. He told me I shouldn't be out alone at night. He then started to talk to me in a sexual manner that was apparently supposed to entice me. 

I was a naive risk-taker but still smart enough to know this was a very dangerous situation. There was no help anywhere nearby and I knew I couldn't best this larger man in a direct physical confrontation. So instead I used another technique learned in self-defense classes. I pretended (this time entirely falsely) to be interested in him. I joked and laughed and told him I was meeting my friends and my brother. I kept him talking for two blocks, until I was near enough to the building where I lived. The doorways of the apartment blocks were entirely dark as was most of the street. At that time desperate people stole everything, including any unguarded light bulb. Finally, the man's grip relaxed a little as he became more confident of my cooperation. Then I called out cheerfully as if greeting my brother in a dark doorway. His grip loosened further and I judged the second, kicked him hard and ran. Being visually impaired helped in this case. The stairwell I bolted up was pitch black and I could hear him stumbling around as he tried to catch me but I knew every crack in the uneven concrete steps and I reached a door I could lock behind me by memory and by feel. 

I was taught to be prey. Many men are taught that women will flee and the only way they can catch one is by force. I was simply taught to be smart prey, but even so the assumption I held and the assumption of my self-defense instructors was that I would be prey. 

This is why, even though I escaped, even though I am far luckier than many women, I want to support the "me too" campaign. We should not be prey. Sexuality should not be about fear and force and conquest. Being a woman should not be considered grounds for any particular assumptions. 

This is one reason why we still need feminism today. 

We needed it before we had a president who openly declares that a woman's worth is primarily in her sexual attractiveness and appearance. And we certainly need it now that we have such a president. A few months ago The Daily Beast reported that Republican Rep. Robert Fisher (R-NH) wrote under the username FredFredrickson,  “I’m going to say it—Rape isn’t an absolute bad, because the rapist I think probably likes it a lot. I think he’d say it’s quite good, really.”

This kind of attitude still exists today, even in places of power. Rape culture has not been successfully relegated to some small criminal element. Both women and men need to be on guard against it. Both women and men can be legitimate feminists. 

My generation has perhaps been living partly off of the achievements of past generations of women and there are so many other terrible problems in the world to fight against. It is hard to focus on the small, mundane assumptions or the hideous comments of politicians. The "me too" campaign shows how alive and well the scourge of assault and harassment is.

We still need feminism and we still need self-defense classes for our daughters.