One of my textbooks for my Social Movements class is "The World Split Open" by Rosen and while it's VERY encouraging and positive as a whole, it does devote a chapter to the in-fighting and struggles that many of the top women leaders faced.  Gloria Steinem was bashed for being too "mainstream," too glamorous, too conventionally attractive in terms of dress and make-up, and too much of a media darling.  Leader after leader quickly gained prominence because of a certain article or book they wrote but then were just as quickly abandoned, discredited, and criticized for wholly unrelated reasons as soon as they made a single statement that their fan club disagreed with.  Lesbians were told they were hurting the movement by being too extreme and out there.  Betty Friedan of all people, to whom so many women owe so much, was the one who coined the term lavender menace.  Many women bashed their more "out there" compatriots for driving away support and sympathy for the cause as a whole through their adoption of radical stances.  Women who despaired of the possibility that marriage could ever be an egalitarian institution were blasted for making all feminists seem like man-hating home wreckers who thought all women should abandon their spouses and children.

And as a good student, I know I'm supposed to ask "WHY?" but I just don't have a good answer.  I refuse to believe that women naturally destroy other women.  I could make a lot of convincing arguments over how ANYONE who's part of a group that's not empowered, disenfranchised, looked down upon, disrespected, etc, will have some members who are obsessive over destroying anyone they can whom they see as having too much, anyone who's too successful, or causes too much envy/jealousy/controversy.  In this, as in many other things, I think women are serving as the canary in the mine but nearly everyone else wants to dismiss it as a girl problem and yes, that's a reference to the studies done that when schools and companies go out of their way to make things family-friendly and female-compatible (or whatever the term's called), suddenly the men start doing much better, too.  IMSA's style of teaching and its experiments with temporary girls-only classrooms came up as well so that's yet another thing I'm absolutely itching to hear yuri93's thoughts on. 

The idea reminds me a lot of a research study I found for my presentation on homosexuality, where men who were told they were viewed as having some effeminate traits were incredibly negative and hostile toward images of homosexual men.  Men who were told they were seen as having masculine traits tended to be much more mild, moderate, welcoming, and opening.  I.E. their male egos could handle tolerance as their own masculinity wasn't being threatened.

Attributing it to a lack of power explains why the kids who were "out there" had trouble making friends, no matter how kind and trustworthy they were.  It explains why a professor worried about getting replaced may not tout the credentials of their grad or post-grad protege quite as much as they should and I think it happens in management as well. 

I could even make the dubious claim that my strong mind, outspoken opinion, and rampant feminism meant that only a man who was either quite secure and/or utterly indifferent on the subject (possibly a side effect of the security and therefore lack of worry/concern) of his masculinity could fall in love with me.  Pathetic thing of me to say?  Perhaps.  But in the rare occasion of a guy having a crush on me, they all wanted to engage in some variant of taming me, toning me down, softening my rhetoric, proving their superiority over me, giving me an alternative "outlet" for my feminist energies (seriously dude, no).  Oh geez, there was this one guy (brassdollfin and silveriris, I think you know who I'm referring to) who constantly picked arguments with me just so he could try and prove me wrong and prove himself as my intellectual superior and somehow gain the upper hand- as if besting me would have led to me developing an attraction for him- personally, I thought he'd seen too many romantic comedies where the man and woman are rivals and she starts feeling a strange attraction to him as soon as bests her somehow or wins some witty little banter or whatever.  Also that after the first few months and months and months of it, the continued skepticism from people who refused to believe that Fred gave me lots of hugs for non-sexual reasons went from entertaining to aggravating to simply ludicrous.  And  please don't get me started on the people who expressed surprise that I would date someone who had a reputation for being "macho" because I was "like, into girl power and all that stuff" with the frequent implication that all my views were nothing but bitterness over being single.  Height, broad shoulders, a trench coat, and no record of saying a girl's attractive or he's got a crush on anyone, even a celebrity, seems insufficient to explain the image Fred had in high school, but there it was.  We still giggle about it.  Anywho.....

But making this argument specifically for women.... no.  I would much rather believe that all the stupid petty cattyness of middle and high school was a result on inbred, in-grown insecurities, deficiencies, obsessions over the media and cultural standards of beauty, attractiveness, popularity, acceptable behavior, etc, etc that women as a whole seem to suffer from more than any other large-scale demographic rather than some sort of unavoidable "girl thing."  Ruining your friend's relationships or trying to steal her man or compete for the same one is not a "girl thing"- it's an expression of underlying insecurity.  And yes, I will agree a lot of the reasons for this underlying insecurity is because of society's dictates on what a woman should be (attractive, popular, sexy, able to get a man whenever she wishes, the most successful of her friends, etc).  And I think that being vulnerable to these stereotypes and prejudices in turn results in more women fitting them- how long can anyone be bombarded with images and ads telling them to worry about all the trouble areas they didn't even know they had before they do start worrying about them?

And because I've been ranting, I'll leave you with one of my brand new sources on the presentation I'm doing Monday.  This would be an interview with Monsieur Dan Savage of the infamous Savage Love advice column, in a recent interview with Ms. magazine:

"I think one of the reasons straight guys are so violent and crazy is that sex is hard to find when you're a straight guy. It really is. Women are less willing to have chance, random encounters with men, because sex is riskier--physically and emotionally--for women. Letting someone into your body is always going to be more taxing than sticking it into someone's body. And so long as straight people regard sex as just vaginal intercourse, women are going to be less likely to engage in casual sex.

When two men consent to go to bed together, that's the beginning of the negotiations about what's going to happen. When a man and a woman consent to going to bed together, that's--in almost every case--the end of the negotiation. What's gonna happen is, he's gonna f*** her. Women know that, and so women are less likely to consent. My boyfriend and I don't f*** each other in the ass every time we have sex, my god! We wouldn't want to! So long as straight people have such an idiotic and narrow definition of sex, straight guys are gonna have a hard time finding it. And it's their own fault, to a great extent. Because they assume that sex means vaginal intercourse, and when they don't get it, they don't think it's sex, and they're mad. That's crazy."