Ironically enough, I was originally introduced to riot grrrl
through a male friend that loved and still loves Sleater Kinney. I had heard of
Sleater Kinney before because they had performed with Pearl Jam, a band that
another friend loved, but never really looked into them until half of their
discography was shoved into my face (and I mean that in the best way possible).
Through the powers of Google I soon discovered Bikini Kill and got enchanted
with the movement as much as with Kathleen Hanna’s raw shrieks of anger. To
quite an extent, riot grrrl is all about girl love and inclusion. The third and
fourth waves of feminism were all about inclusion and girl love and the
question of girls and women sticking together and being sisters instead of
competitors or enemies is still a relevant one. The emphasis on friendships
between girls has spilled into popular culture and we are more often than not
subjected to shows, movies and even pop music centered around cliques, groups,
duos, trios and whatever have you composed exclusively of girls. At the same
time, the trope of a girl that only hangs out with boys, a girl that does not
get along with other girls or even hates other girls has become a somewhat
established inhabitant of the world wide web as much as the dreaded “real
life”. Sometimes I think I am a border line case, declaring myself a “bro” as a
joke as much as a choice and keeping mostly male company with the excuse of
being committed to a heavily male dominated field. Despite definitely being
some sort of a girly girl with my penchant for Polyvore, nail polish, cupcakes
and all the pretty pictures one can dig up on Tumblr and, more importantly, a
self proclaimed feminist looking up to that one girl that “holds
her head up so high”, I have definitely heard myself state that it is
hard to be friends with girls because they are catty or clingy or take
everything too emotionally and so on. And even though I have one girlfriend that
shares the strange list of interests ranging form condensed matter physics to holographic
shoes, I often feel ashamed for more or less consciously participating in
culture that bashed girls friendships. It is something of a fact that the worst
kind of misogyny comes from the ranks of women themselves and I have always
been mystified as to what has happened to those women to make them such. The
idea of being that one girl that is implicitly better than the others by solely
finding their company inadequate is equally bad.
The standard argument for why girls hate each other generally
revolves around the idea of competition. Girls compete with each other to be
the prettiest, the most popular, the most successful, the most desirable as an
object of desire. Competitions tend to bring out the worst in people and since
this idea of being better then the other girls is somehow ingrained in us from
a very young age we seem to embrace it wholeheartedly. And while this is not an
unreasonable argument it does not explain why hating your own gender is almost
exclusively a female phenomenon. In fact, the idea of competition seems to
significantly more prominent in the upbringing of boys who are often directly
encouraged to be more aggressive than the other boys and always focus on
winning. As has often been pointed out to me by male interlocutors, the culture
that society forces upon men are mostly a culture of shame and disappointment
over not being the most masculine or the strongest and therefore a loser in
comparison to other men. As in the animal kingdom, the male of the species is
supposed to beat his peers in order to be granted mating rights of some sorts.
Competition is relevant to boys as much as it is relevant to girls and one will
rarely come across a man claiming all other men to be inferior to women and in
no way suitable for companionship or teamwork of any sort.
Lately, I have started to wonder how much of an influence on
this phenomenon comes from popular culture. By asking that question I
definitely do not want to deny that the aforementioned idea of competition or
jealousy or even just personal insecurities highly play into the process of
judging other girls as subjects of hate but the fact that our behavior is so
telling of our environment and cultural influences is definitely a relevant
one. Growing up in the world of Spice Girls, Sex and the City, Mean Girls and
teenage magazines preparing the way for a Cosmopolitan subscription, it is
definitely true that girls my age have been presented with a very particular
idea of what female friendships are all about. The idea of women being clingy,
catty or even bitchy is of course not something that was invented in the
nineties and most likely a restatement of old, old gender stereotypes but what
the TV shows and magazines of our youth have added to it is a sense of fun and
glamour. The same way one was supposed to spend time with her girlfriends
shopping at the mall, obsessing after shaving every sign of hair off of their
body and idolizing boys, she was also supposed to have enemies or at least
someone to dislike enough to make it a constant topic of conversation. Being
friends with some girls has always been portrayed as not being friends with
some other girls with no neutral or peaceful interpretation. The Mean Girls
plot serves as a great caricature of this sentiment, so great that it served as
an observation and a self-fulfilling prophecy at the same time. (Not to be mistaken, there are lessons to be learned from Mean Girls and as fun the movie is it does point in the right direction as far as all girl related things go)
The other thing we
have all learned from TV and movies is that girl friendships are always
centered on objects, whether it be clothes or the prince charming that was
often more of a cardboard cutout than anything else. As much as Sex and the
City celebrated independent women confident in their sexuality that primarily
cared about each other and always chose to find refuge among their fellow women
rather than lovers or husbands, it made all of the women in question seem
somewhat shallow in their chase after shoes and endless cocktail parties. It
was conspicuous consumption feminism and it applied to a selected group. A self-vetting
clique of rich white women Samantha, Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte were the
grown up versions of the cliques Tina Fey had created in Mean Girls. The Spice
Girls thought us similar things. Even though their friendship took priority
over men, it was still mostly based on glitter and sunshine. The expectation
was therefore to always be like all of these women and girls and any teen
magazine that you could have picked up (and I remember feeling inadequate
because my mother refused to buy them for me) could advise you on behavior
appropriate for you and your BFF. Having a BFF in itself meant adopting a
certain stereotype and internalizing a certain code of conduct. Implicitly, you
were promising to be a godmother to her children and get botox injections
together once you hit sixty. Kristen Wiig’s character in Bridesmaids
experienced this to some extent and bounced back like the real BFF should.
Smart girls, grungy girls, quirky girls and such were not
included in the girl friendship stereotype for the longest time and one could
at best hope for a girl underdog that will undergo a magical transformation into
one of the pretty, popular girls and get the guy that we were all supposed to
be lusting for. In that context, it is no wonder that it is relatively easy to
find girls that claim to be to good to be friends with other girls. It is a
remarkable ego boost to tell oneself they are genuinely better than the
female-to-female interactions shown on popular culture and the ideas of how
girls should feel about each other that are always pushed down our throats. It
is sad that one can upgrade their self worth by denying a behavior supposedly
characteristic to their gender but unfortunately popular culture has not
embraced all aspects of female friendships. Rebelling against a traditional
notion of BFFs and cliques therefore turns into girl hate in an ironic twist.
Girls don’t hate other girls, they mostly hate what they were told girls and
their friendships stand for.
