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"Lying is done with words and also with silence."- Adrienne Rich
chres·tom·a·thy (kr-stm-th) n. pl. chres·tom·a·thies 1. A selection of literary passages, usually by one author. 2. An anthology used in studying a language. 3. Another damn stupid liberal blog
Third-wave Feminist thinker, political consultant, and author Naomi Wolf published a recent column in Harper’s Bazaar regarding the subject of female rivalry. I assume this was drafted in response to Susan Faludi's inflammatory piece about intergenerational conflict within the movement itself. The underlying issue here is how the mainstream media gets lazy, referring to the same few designated "experts", who are believed to represent any minority or identity group in totality. It's insulting, but also far too commonplace. No single voice can speak for everyone and closer examination would reveal that no movement needs or desires a designated spokesperson.
Returning to Wolf's post, to make her argument she uses the example of an upcoming movie, Black Swan, that tells the story of two competing ballerinas, played by Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis. I found the column fascinating, particularly in how it asserts that the onset of preteen cruelty is just the beginning of destructive behaviors waged between women based on competition. While reading this piece, I was thinking of most of my Female friends who manage life as best they can within the incredibly competitive DC young professionals scene. Additionally, the recent tragedy of LGBT suicides among young adults has made me realize that the same basic elements for violence are present in older adults, only that they are expressed and channeled differently based on age. These are, of course, no less cruel or sadistic, just found in a slightly different formulation.
Wolf states that,
Women tend to mix up love and longing with hostility, to be attracted to what they wish to condemn or destroy.
As a man, I know I can’t completely relate to that statement, though I am quite familiar with the concept of sour grapes. If I were much less self-aware and Feminist, I’m fairly certain that women I couldn’t attain could be easily dismissed and slandered as bitches or whores. How often do we see those same words spewed forth between women in the middle of having a knock-down, drag-out fight when not having so quickly turns to all-out hate and resentment. I certainly have seen anger and jealousy flash across the face of the man who sees a woman he wants with someone else, but I’ve seen this same phenomenon present with women, albeit magnified, with more participants, and on a much larger playing field. On the subject of personal grievances, men usually fight their wars alone, but women often engage the enemy in packs.
Having discussed the visual evidence, Wolf then takes a stab at the cause. The passage below is one of the most thought-provoking of the entire article.
In any vividly felt female rivalry, there can be an element of identification and attraction within the overall sense of hostility between women. It may be part of why close female friendships can become so risky emotionally that aggression or betrayal is the only “safe” redirection of energies. In Black Swan, the lesbian subtext of this relationship between the battling dancers surfaces directly. The element of attraction in same-sex rivalry is worth exploring. Data from the front lines of psychology shows that while straight men respond to straight stimuli and gay men to gay stimuli, women of whatever orientation tend to the bisexual in their physiological responses, though this arousal does not always register on the level of conscious awareness. How many times in the tensions between ostensibly straight women has an untenable attraction been redirected into a safe resentment?
So, is this internecine conflict merely a colossal case of love/hate? Do women get so emotionally invested in fighting each other because of a repressed sense of pure desire? Wolf certainly seems to think so. A former girlfriend of mine was fond of telling me that all women were bisexual, regardless of whether or not said fact was consciously acknowledged. Perhaps she was right, at least on some level. In between a biological imperative and cultural mores is the truth, and in this situation, it's difficult to know where one begins and one ends. But even more radical would be positing whether this same degree of animosity is true for everyone, regardless of gender. The concept of the man crush has found popularity recently, and I myself know the disappointment of being emotionally invested in a hero who has greatly disappointed since taking the Oath of Office.
Wolf states that women ought to strive to be introspective enough to discern the difference between true friends and snakes in the grass. The emotional intimacy and sharing commonly present between female friends proves to be particularly problematic when storm clouds appears on the horizon. What she is saying for certain is that radical self-awareness solves a variety of problems.
Women can repress the knowledge of the solution that lies within them, or they can risk the discomfort of close examination, which almost always lends itself to exponential growth once adopted. The enemy, then, is ignorance, not any other external scapegoat. Scapegoating and projecting both seem to be the tactic of choice for many women when engaged in conflict, but Wolf emphasizes that it needn’t be this way. We expect those in the world around us to look inside beyond the easy answers or the way things have always been done, but we have to be just as willing to change for the sake of health, too.
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn out tools.
Well, son, I'll tell you: Life for me ain't been no crystal stair.
It's had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor—
Bare.
But all the time
I'se been a-climbin' on,
And reachin' landin's,
And turnin' corners,
And sometimes goin' in the dark
Where there ain't been no light.
So, boy, don't you turn back.
Don't you set down on the steps.
'Cause you finds it's kinder hard.
Don't you fall now—
For I'se still goin', honey,
I'se still climbin',
And life for me ain't been no crystal stair.
http://www.harpersbazaar.com/magazine/feature-articles/black-swan-female-rivalry
What was your earliest heartbreak? Was your first experience of emotional devastation caused by a guy? Unlikely. If you are a woman, chances are your first experience of emotional treachery was at the hands of another girl.
I recall being bothered by the fact that the adorable Mark C., the mop-headed sixth grader who resembled Speed Racer, was blithely uninterested in me when I was 11. But that discomfort was nothing compared with the devastation I felt when I slowly began to realize, as if I were in a horror film populated by preteen girls, that the cheerful board-game-playing trio I had helped create—of Claire F., Sarah D., and me—had somehow metamorphosed into a lip-gloss-wearing, cigarette-smoking, boy-kissing duo. It was I who was suddenly defined as being outside this charmed emotional space. It was not just the newly intimate friendship of my former two best friends that hurt so much, it was realizing how deliciously my exclusion, and their awareness of how I felt about my exclusion, added to the cachet of their new configuration.
I've seen this dynamic again and again. When there is a female rivalry, it is not done with dispatch; blood gets left on the floor. Men form rivalries or alliances with other men in order to achieve a goal: to take a battlefield or playing field. They don't need to do it in a way that leaves an emotional mess, tears, and recriminations. But when women are aggressive toward one another, the methods are stealthier and the fallout more bitter. Women tend to mix up love and longing with hostility, to be attracted to what they wish to condemn or destroy. It was for female friendships, not male, that the term frenemy was popularized.
And when women are in groups, often the jockeying for position, the alliance forming, the exclusion, and the power politics can be so savage that one starts looking around desperately for a whiff of testosterone just to calm things down.
Recently, a friend told me about her 15-year-old daughter, a bright, beautiful young woman who was savagely bullied by the alpha girls in her posh British prep school. They went after her clothes, her body shape, and her sexual behavior. The child changed schools—and a new group of alpha girls bullied her again. It was almost as if the new group had some unconscious primate ability to sniff out the injury and punish her all over again for her vulnerability.
I have witnessed this same dynamic repeated among adult women. They create intimate bonds that they then are appalled to find are betrayed or turned against them. I have often seen women's groups come to grief because a rivalry between two leaders and their followers becomes so rancorous that it shatters the group. I have seen the exclusion of one woman or group accompanied by so much glee from the others that it seems almost like a visceral behavior. I have even wondered if this reflex is evolutionary. Perhaps on the savannah, females had to form close, trusted groups to successfully gather food and rear children; perhaps they also needed to be able to brutally exclude a female outsider and her offspring—or a female perceived as threatening the group's survival—without regret, or recourse, when times were tough. If you look at when female alliances go bad, or when female rivalries become bloody, it is not usually about simple status, it is about a perception of scarce resources.
We rarely see this dark side of women's rivalry portrayed in the media; female friendships are often sentimentalized. In ads for Internet services or fashion or cosmetics, young women—usually in trios—dress up in miniskirts, laugh uproariously, and show one another images on their iPhones. We absorb narratives such as those surrounding the friendships in Sex and the City—in which the four female friends, though they may sometimes get on one another's nerves, are stalwart and loyal surrogate families.
Most scenarios of female rivalry in pop culture, where they do exist, are aimed at very young female audiences. In books and onscreen, the most elaborate dramas of female betrayal are aimed at preadolescents—the Gossip Girl series—and reality-TV audiences populated by young twenty-somethings. It is almost as if once you hit your mid-20s, you can't bear to look too directly at this kind of interaction anymore.
The upcoming movie Black Swan, with Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis, follows the rivalry of two young ballerinas in the heated context of the New York City dance world. Portman's character is virginal and shallow; her challenger, Lily, played by Kunis, is seductive, "darker" emotionally, and more sexually experienced, and Portman's Nina must absorb some of those qualities in order to achieve the coveted lead status in the ballet hierarchy. Coscreenwriter Mark Heyman drew on his memories of having been friends with a group of teenage girls who formed intimate alliances but also jockeyed for position and betrayed one another. "It was not as if they were not friends when there were these intense rivalries," he explains, intriguingly casting a male narrative eye on the hothouse nature of this kind of girl-on-girl combat. Heyman also notes that he was drawn to the material because there are so few treatments onscreen of major female rivalry (direct rivalry rather than a love triangle). Indeed, I could think of only one since The Women in 1939: Single White Female. He was also interested in the way the strict hierarchy of the ballet world threw this kind of power play into sharp relief, and he found it compelling that female dancers express their cutthroat rivalry in a context that is very indirect—that intense aggression is expressed in a way that is very polite and very restrained.
But adult women's rivalries can have tremendous power and fascination. Mary, Queen of Scots, was a thorn in the side of her quasi-sibling Queen Elizabeth I throughout both of their lives, until Elizabeth took the ultimate irritated-sister step and had Mary beheaded. Coco Chanel spent much of her career resisting the challenge posed by Elsa Schiaparelli. Joan Crawford and Bette Davis vied for the role of premier diva of their generation, and Jayne Mansfield famously tried to wrest attention away from rival sex siren Sophia Loren by using her impressive décolletage. We can recall the lurid drama of skater Tonya Harding, whose ex-husband attempted to disable her rival, the more aristocratic-looking, more privileged skater Nancy Kerrigan. And once when Christina Aguilera was asked about Lady Gaga, she slammed her: "Oh, the newcomer? I think she's really fun to look at."
Maybe, as women, we are finally becoming secure and self-aware enough to be willing to look at the real darkness behind this dynamic.
In any vividly felt female rivalry, there can be an element of identification and attraction within the overall sense of hostility between women. It may be part of why close female friendships can become so risky emotionally that aggression or betrayal is the only "safe" redirection of energies. In Black Swan, the lesbian subtext of this relationship between the battling dancers surfaces directly. The element of attraction in same-sex rivalry is worth exploring. Data from the front lines of psychology shows that while straight men respond to straight stimuli and gay men to gay stimuli, women of whatever orientation tend to the bisexual in their physiological responses, though this arousal does not always register on the level of conscious awareness. How many times in the tensions between ostensibly straight women has an untenable attraction been redirected into a safe resentment?
Do we become better people—better women—when we draw back the curtain on this painful, unflattering subject? Do we risk confirming what an antifeminist world wants to say of us—that we can't create workable teams, we can't lead effectively, and we are indeed treacherous and bitchy? Do we risk losing the victories of feminism in every previous generation because we can't for the life of us seem to be able to sustain a common cause without inevitably taking out the long knives?
I trust that in looking closely at this darker side of our own psyche, we will learn enough about ourselves to stop being held at the mercy of it. I trust that if you repress the dark side, it comes back to bite you, but if you drag it, protesting, into the light, that is the first step toward integration and perhaps a more real empowerment. Perhaps we should better learn which women around us are true friends and true allies and which women we should recognize for their alluring, socially cruel edge. And having recognized it, turn our backs on it and flee.
Successfully functioning in society with its diverse values, traditions, and lifestyles requires us to have a relationship with our own reactions, rather than be captive of them.
At the foot of the mountain, a large crowd was waiting for [Jesus and his disciples]. A man came and knelt before Jesus and said, "Lord, have mercy on my son. He has seizures and suffers terribly. He often falls into the fire or into the water. So I brought him to your disciples, but they couldn't heal him."
Jesus said, "You faithless and corrupt people! How long must I be with you? How long must I put up with you? Bring the boy here to me." Then Jesus rebuked the demon in the boy, and it left him. From that moment the boy was well.
Afterward the disciples asked Jesus privately, "Why couldn't we cast out that demon?" "You don't have enough faith," Jesus told them. "I tell you the truth, if you had faith even as small as a mustard seed, you could say to this mountain, 'Move from here to there,' and it would move. Nothing would be impossible."
"I was to bring people off from all the world's religions, which are in vain."
Last week, I spoke at some length to a friend who has expressed interest in Quakerism. I directed her to the usual channels and, some days later, she summarized to me what she had read. “Let me get this right,” she said, “Your founder was a wandering, searching, seeking, independent, strongly opinionated, often frustrated young man who believed that a person’s connection with God requires no intermediary”. She laughed.
Though we readily acknowledge that there is that of God within each of us, we should also note that there is that of George Fox within us, too. We possess both the majesty of the Divine and the coarseness of the human. I don’t always agree with everything Fox said, just as I frequently have issue with specific biblical interpretation. The Bible is a book of such density that it can accommodate a thousand specific meanings. In those days, Fox made the case for his faith strongly, believing its merits to be superior to those of other religious movements of the time, particularly competing Separatist sects.
In an era where the Religious Society of Friends had lots of rivals, this might seem a necessary choice to make, but nowadays, believing that one religion is better than another is a serious threat to pluralism. One might even hear it from a Republican politician.
An equally problematic passage of scripture proclaims,
"Don't imagine that I came to bring peace to the earth! I came not to bring peace, but a sword. I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. Your enemies will be right in your own household!'”
“Jesus did not come to bring the kind of peace that glosses over deep differences for the sake of superficial harmony. Conflict and disagreement will arise between those who choose to follow Him and those who don’t. Yet we can look forward to the day when all conflict will be resolved.”
But you know what? People in their 20s and early 30s don't usually get to run big established national organizations – groups with large budgets, and lots of staffers, and donors who need care and feeding, and certain set ways of doing things. In 2001, when Anthony Romero became executive director of the ACLU at 36, its first Latino and first gay leader, he was replacing Ira Glasser, who at 63 had been running the show since 1978! The changeover was a very big deal and rocked the organisation for several years.
So now I am giving you a new commandment: Love each other. Just as I have loved you, you should love each other. Your love for one another will prove to the world that you are my disciples.
[The film is] a merciless look at a world that cannot be saved...that of [a] young woman’s attempt to rescue a small portion of the world’s unfortunates... the overall effect is more spirited than that sounds—because of the endless, irreverent life in the filmmaking itself, and because of Buñuel’s commitment to the possibility of change, even when it seems impossible.
But the blasphemy is not against Christ and the Father. It is against the belief in progress—or at least the conventional sense of it...[for example] Viridiana’s project for improving the beggars’ lives. The beggars are not evil or the dark side of virtue. They are the unruliness of life itself, a reminder that pleasure and curiosity and appetite can always turn to destruction and violence. This is not an argument against pleasure and curiosity and appetite, or an appeal for law and order. It is a picture of a society that doesn’t understand its own needs. Buñuel’s skepticism and his sense of outrage concern the smallness of our vision of progress, our narrow attempts to achieve it through rational or moralistic planning, and our anxious disregard of the disruptive forces without which no society would be human.
Goddard's other major contribution was his study of feeble-mindedness. Goddard's field-based research resulted in many publications, with the best known being The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness. Although Goddard and his assistants studied hundreds of families, the Kallikak family remains the most famous. The family was that of a Vineland student, Deborah. The name Kallikak is actually a pseudonym created from the Greek words kallos (beauty) and kakos (bad). The Kallikak family was divided into two branches–one "good" and one "bad,"–both of which originated from Deborah's great-great-great grandfather, Martin Kallikak. When Kallikak was a young soldier, he had a liaison with an "unnamed, feeble-minded tavern girl." This tryst resulted in the birth of an illegitimate son, Martin Kallikak Jr., from whom the bad branch of the family descended. Later in his life, Martin Kallikak Sr. married a Quaker woman from a good family. The good branch descended from this marriage.
Goddard's genealogical research revealed that the union with the feeble-minded girl resulted in generations plagued by feeble-mindedness, illegitimacy, prostitution, alcoholism, and lechery. The marriage of Martin Kallikak Sr. to the Quaker woman yielded generations of normal, accomplished offspring. Goddard believed that the remarkable difference separating the two branches of the family was due entirely to the different hereditary influences from the two women involved with the senior Kallikak.
Goddard's work had a powerful effect. Scholars were generally impressed by the magnitude of the study, and The Kallikak Family became very popular. Critical reaction in the popular press was positive, with more muted reaction within the scientific community. For example, James McKeen Cattell praised the contribution and conclusions but criticized the research design. The Kallikak study was a powerful ally to eugenicist movements, including that of the Nazi party, and contributed to the atmosphere in which compulsory sterilization laws were passed in many states.