The Sisters Are Doing it To Themselves

Simon the 17 year old boy walks proudly to his bench one Monday lunchtime. He’s just had a pretty good weekend. 19 bundies, 3 tequila shots, 2 burn-outs, 1 party, 3 visits to the bottle-o, 27 conversations about rugby, 32 conversations about Halo, 243 jokes about the male genitalia, and 10 Ya Mum calls later, Simon has now become a man. He ‘scored’ with five, ahem, ‘chicks’, over the weekend, and is about to engage in a highly exaggerated blow by blow account of his conquests. To the boys on the bench, Simon is now a God. 

Jane wanders into the school ground, having also had a rather good weekend. She went to a couple of parties, met a few interesting chaps, and may or may not have kissed one or three of them. The reception Jane gets from the girls at the table is a little different.

It runs something like this: 

“OMG. Did you hear? Jane got with like, three guys…in the same night. She is such a skank.” 

“I know! That’s like…so cheap. What a raging hussy.” 

Then of course, comes Victoria, with additional information she heard from Claire who heard from Amy who heard from Francesca who talked to Ben who asked Nick who vaguely remembers Saturday night.  

“I heard it was like, SEVEN guys wasn’t it? Oh, and just quietly, have you SEEN Jane lately? I bet you she’s anorexic.” 

Next door, Simon and his friends are now reliving the final scenes of Die Hard 4.0. 

So what’s everyone thinking now? The inequality! The injustice! What happened to feminism? Those evil, evil, oppressive men repressing us with their patriarchal values, imposing double standards, subjugating the fairer sex , and halting our progress! 

But wait, what’s this? Who are the people calling Jane names and judging her body? It’s not the men; it’s us girls. 

And why do we do this to ourselves? Well, it all comes down to one very simple thing. History. Since the Stone Age, when lady Neanderthals were covertly sabotaging each other’s berry gathering reputations in order to appear more attractive to the men Neanderthals, and men Neanderthals were seeing who could bash each other over the head the hardest with their clubs and claim the title of Alpha Male, genders have been competing amongst themselves for the attention of the opposite sex.  

But it doesn’t just end there, because, many many centuries later, came the advent of feminism, and years after that, the Age of the Perfect Woman.  Now, not only do we judge each other, but also ourselves. Our generation lies at an interesting point in history. Our feminist mothers have spent so much time telling us we could do anything that we now try to do everything. No longer is it okay to be a house wife OR a career woman, a brain OR a looker; we have now put the expectation on ourselves that we must be the Every Woman – the drop dead gorgeous high achiever who sponsors children and sings in the community choir in between finding a cure for cancer and picking up her 2.1 children from soccer practice. 

We put endless pressure on ourselves to make the most of every opportunity, when, at the end of the day, what our mothers really fought for was not the obligation to choose everything, but the chance to choose SOMETHING. 

How much time each day do we spend worrying about what we SHOULD be doing, or how we SHOULD be looking? 3 minutes each morning grimacing at the bags under our eyes, 1 minute contemplating whether to take the salad or left-over pasta for lunch, 3 minutes feeling guilty about choosing the pasta… 4 minutes in front of the mirror trying to fit that fringe that just won’t sit right, 7 minutes in the library contemplating whether to borrow out that Nick Earls book you’ve been wanting to read or the Virginia Woolf novel you know you SHOULD read, 2 minutes feeling embarrassed about changing keys 8 times in 4 minutes during an in car sing-a-long even though you barely know the song… 

And because we feel the need to restrain and judge ourselves so strictly like this, it’s instinctive to turn around and judge others who don’t do the same – such as our friend Jane here. Because, after all, if we have to watch our weight, do our hair, read the right books, sing in that choir, play those sports, do well at school, act coy around boys…well, if we have to do all that, how dare they not? 

The answer is, we don’t have to do any of those things either. There’s no point judging each other or judging ourselves or judging others for imposing the judgements, because no one’s asking us to do any of that. The only criteria we must measure up to is the criteria we put on ourselves. And there’s no way we’re ever going to be able to get very far as a gender if we spend our time creating criteria and putting each other down, instead of looking after each other and working together. In the astute words of Mean Girl’s Ms Norbury: “You’ve all got to stop calling each other skanks and whores because it only makes it okay for guys to call you skanks and whores.” 

And yet, how many times do we find it easy to, as I did at the beginning , to blame it on the men? We must work so hard to prove that we’re equal to them, we must look good because they’re always judging us, it’s so unfair that they can get away with so much when we get judged so harshly for doing the same… But is that really the case? Looking around at the mass media around the world, I can honestly say I haven’t seen a single article in a guy’s magazine about the perfect weight, the ideal woman, or the terrible consequences of not meeting some amazing criteria.  In fact, according to the ever reliable source of Hamish Blake from Hamish and Andy, “Guys don’t care what you look like. They’re just grateful you’re there at all.” 

What I see however, in Women’s Weekly, is What to Eat, How to Dress, What’s In, What’s Out, What’s Even Out of the Out Pile, and OH MY GOD it’s Minnie Driver the Human Meringue at this year’s Academy Awards. Women judging each other, and pitting themselves against photo-shopped models and Ikea lifestyles. Ironic really, that we seem to be fighting the big war of feminism when we’re slowly sabotaging ourselves with the little things. We’re all so busy judging ourselves by elevated standards and holding others to the same that often we forget that, for the most part, it’s not the men holding women back and breaking up the ‘sisterhood’ – it’s the sisters doing it to themselves. 

In the end, ladies and gentlemen, my argument is something so crazy and zany it just might be true: The only way women are ever going to get anywhere is to stop putting each other down and start helping each other out. The guys aren’t judging us, no one’s judging us, and it’s about time we stopped judging ourselves. 

So I’d like to leave you now with a thought. There’s not much point us all going out there and burning bras under the banner of feminism, if we’re all just going to turn around and criticise each other’s taste in lingerie.