Internalized Misogyny Made Me Do It

The first time I heard this said aloud I was in a pivotal conversation with a woman I mentored in 12-step recovery. She was trying to get sober and had been unable to stay that way. I had just asked her reasons for physically assaulting her female partner. It was critical that she take accountability for her actions. Each time we got close to the part in the process of taking a hard look at herself and her character, without fail, she would ghost me. I would hear from her finally, months later, asking to start over after another relapse. The desire to try again always stemmed from a fight with the girlfriend. This time, she had admitted to me that she violently pushed the girlfriend to the ground during an argument, so the girlfriend ended the relationship.

It was the horror of this incident that made her ready and willing to do the hard work of honest self-reflection and cleaning up her past. The excuse she used for her violent outburst though stuck with me, and I found it both poignant and heartbreaking. I thought of how more than half of the white women in the US who voted in 2016 voted against Hillary and for a blatantly misogynistic pussy grabber. Collectively we were reminded that misogyny is a system; one women can participate in as well as men. I had started to wonder if women were, in fact, the biggest misogynists.

When a woman harms herself, perhaps this is internalized misogyny, but when she harms another woman? In Myriam Gurba’s recent award-winning essay collection, Creep, Accusations and Confessions, she writes about femicide and how, on average, four women per day in the US are murdered by their male partners. In another essay, Gurba writes about a female ex-partner named Sam who coerces her into moving in together too soon by telling her she will be to blame if Sam ends up homeless again. This and other examples of manipulation and control, mixed with demeaning behavior on the part of Sam, were like scenes I myself have lived through. Reflecting, I wonder if internalized misogyny played a role in my decisions to enter and then stay in certain relationships.

Why do those of us born and socialized as female aim, as Natalie Angier put it, "our strongest aggressions and our most frightening hostilities" at other women? In her brilliant book, Woman, an Intimate Geography, Angier writes that patriarchy is a phenomenon exclusive to human animals, and is a product of male alliance: “The real innovation in the evolution of patriarchy was the perfection of male alliances… the reason for male collaboration has been to extend and refine what chimpanzee males attempt in crude fashion, which is to control the means of reproduction, which of necessity involves the control of women. We think of male domination as the corollary of male superiority in size and strength, but most male monkeys are larger and stronger than female monkeys and still they cannot subdue females. Female alliances keep females free. When men learned the value of befriending other men, when they saw their interests converged more often than they conflicted, whoops, there went female freedom.”

Personally, in my professional, corporate career in the sciences, women have often made the worst bosses. Where most men have approached mentoring me with a supportive and helpful attitude, believing that they only succeed in their role when I’ve succeeded in mine, women have conversely approached the same role with an uncharitable, punitive attitude; a prove yourself kind of management style where helpful information is deliberately withheld in favor of obstacles I must overcome in a futile effort to show my own resourcefulness. Perhaps, unconsciously, these women senior to me have understood that there is little room there at the top for us women, and so they must keep me down lest I displace them. Whereas the men senior to me have not perceived me as a threat in any way, and so have been happy to help and assist. Or, perhaps my experience has been affected by my androgynous appearance, and so in more progressive, liberal places I have been granted honorary straight, white male status and treated as such.

Hannah Gatsby in one of her famous monologues, Douglas, relays an experience where she was mistaken for a man while boarding an airplane. A flight attendant had called her sir and when she turned to face him, seeing her feminine facial features, he apologized and blushed. “Don’t be sorry,” she responded, “for a moment there I was a straight white male. I was king of the humans!” I laughed because I could relate. I, too, often get called sir and then promptly apologized to when the person sees my face, or catches the curves of my torso, or both.

And yet, for as many experiences I’ve had being held down or otherwise condescended to by other women, I’ve had at least as many encounters where I was helped and uplifted by women. There is a slowly rising tide of female solidarity and human solidarity making its way into civilizations globally to disrupt and subvert male supremacy. From Binders full of Women, which formed after Mitt Romney claimed to have solicited women’s groups for “binders full of women” to hire as staff for his Massachusetts Governor office, to the Pantsuit Nation group that organized spontaneously to help elect Hillary Clinton into the White House, to the Me Too movement that went viral after the women’s march on Washington, and now, with millions of people voicing their support for Kamala Harris to be the first Madam President of the United States — there is a shift underway. And it gives me such hope.

What if we can choose to develop the emotional intelligence and independent thinking necessary to override our programming and interrupt the unconscious instinct to shove our fellow women to the ground? What if instead, we can pull our fellow women up and show each other that we are mightier together than any of us can ever be alone? And what if those of us who are moms raise our boys to believe they are equal to girls and raise our girls to understand their inherent worthiness as no different from her brother’s?

But this is easier said than done; progress is incremental. It is indeed a marathon, not a sprint. Each of us must do the work that I have been trying to lead my friend in recovery to do for as long as I’ve known her. Having an insight into the why of her harmful behavior—by saying that internalized misogyny made her do it—simply isn’t enough. These realizations must be followed up immediately with action, with deep reflection as well as forward momentum, and this includes making it right wherever possible.