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*