Amazing blog post.

[quinara]

I don't always agree with Sady over at Tiger Beatdown, but this post is one of those things where you read it and everything is so obvious, but you never thought it could be so lucidly explained:

Girl Culture and the Race to the Bottom

So, do you want to know how [girl bullies] pick their victims?

They pick the girl who seems the most confident.

Yes, that’s really it! In the particular seething cauldron of insecurity, unhappiness, and fear that is female adolescence, girls tend to feel shitty about themselves for about a million reasons, and to think that they need outside approval – from friends, from boys, from the culture at large – in order to be worthwhile. But if a girl seems not reliant enough on outside approval – if she doesn’t hate her body enough, if she’s too successful at getting guys to like her, if she’s not interested enough in getting guys to like her, if she thinks she’s smart or cool or worthwhile or pretty (or if she just is smart or cool or worthwhile or pretty, and it’s pronounced enough for the people around her to take notice) – then the wolves start circling. Because they’ve all been bullied, too; they’ve all been undermined; they’ve all made the mistake of standing out, at one point or another, and they’ve been punished for it. And now, because they feel like shit about themselves, you have to feel like shit, too. A girl who doesn’t feel like shit is a threat to the entire social order, the extensively complicated and crappy system whereby women have to earn their way into a pretense of self-esteem by getting enough approval from other girls or from other outside sources in general.

What girls learn to do, in order to survive in this particular dynamic, is to race each other to the bottom. It lasts for a lifetime. They maneuver, hiding the urge to matter and succeed under an appropriately self-loathing demeanor, so that they can get ahead and climb up without ever appearing to do it.

This is me. And even as I type this I'm fighting the urge to apologise for making my journal All About My Issues these last couple of days, which is possibly indicative of the problem. Fact is, I've been very successful in my life so far and I'm very ambitious, but you'd be damned to think that I haven't tried to downplay/hide/elide/reject that every step of the way. And have almost certainly made other people do it too. Sigh.

*gazes at navel*

Comments

[stultiloquentia]

God, I have so many thoughts about this.

One has to do with the obsession with food and dieting at my workplace, how all-pervading it is, how hard to keep myself distanced from it, and how it's gendered, but in some really surprising, unexpected ways.

Others are more personal, and I'm too sleepy to sort them out today. Bookmarking.

I listened to your diss ramble. I have thoughts about that, too. I thought it was cool. Your connection to fandom, frex, was pinging me like crazy; I'm going to have to sit on my hands to avoid throwing a big reading list at you. It also made me think of Falstaff. And your summary of Hippolytus was hilarious.

[quinara]

Others are more personal, and I'm too sleepy to sort them out today. Bookmarking.

That's been pretty much my response - stick it in my subconscious (/DW/LJ) and let all the various implications work themselves out in time. Though I'd love to hear your thoughts about your workplace if you ever feel like writing them down.

I listened to your diss ramble. I have thoughts about that, too. I thought it was cool.

Oh, goody! (*gives you cake*) Heh, there are more nuances (and indeed conclusions!) that I feel like I should have got into, since it seems all the people who listened to it are people with whom I could have moved on to advanced Theseus impersonations more focused ideas. Especially about fandom! Which I will one day work out more carefully (and that's practically a promise, since considering it is part of my preliminary PhD idea and my masters application is about the intersection between Homeric epic and the modern screen). Feel free to chuck me reading! I'll file it away somewhere safe. Also, did you see gillo's comments on the LJ version of the post, which are natch very interesting?