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Catfight
Rivalries Among Women-from Diets to Dating, from the Boardroom to the Delivery Room
By Leora Tanenbaum Harper Collins Publishers
Copyright © 2003 Leora Tanenbaum All right reserved. ISBN: 0060528389
Chapter One
The Roots of the Problem
The more complicated a woman's life becomes, the more likely she is to take stock of her life and compare it with that of other women. And women's lives are complicated indeed. Women born and raised in the wake of modern feminism live in a contradictory cultural climate. We have been taught clashing messages about what it means to be a woman. We are caught in a threshold between two paradigms, the old and the new.
⇒ Regarding beauty, we have learned from our parents, magazines, advertising, and other women: It's important to be thin and pretty and wear the latest fashions and always be well groomed. We have also learned (often from the very same sources): Such concerns are frivolous. Inner beauty, not superficial appearance, is what counts.
⇒ When it comes to romance, we've been told: We need to find a good man and get married. We've also been told: We don't need a man to be complete as a person - and with women's rise in the workplace, we don't need his money, either.
⇒ In the workplace: We need to compete like a man to get ahead. And yet: It's important for women to share, to be cooperative, andto be nice - otherwise we are seen as castrating bitches.
⇒ What about our source of identity? Becoming a full-time wife and mother is a woman's finest achievement, we have been taught. But at the same time we know: A woman needs a career to pay the bills and to feel fulfilled, regardless of marital and parental status.
With all these mixed messages, women are caught in perpetual vertigo. We face internal battles about the "right" way to live our lives. No matter which path we choose, we are going against something deeply ingrained in us, against a path that many other women we know are following, against a path our mothers may have followed, even against a path we may have followed ourselves in the past. As a result, we feel defensive. To defend ourselves, we go to great lengths to justify our decisions, to validate ourselves, to prove to ourselves and to others that our chosen path is the right one. Along the way, any ambivalence we might have about our life course hardens into certainty that our path is the only correct and appropriate one.
Of course, no one can live her life by checking off a series of boxes. Many women today strive to achieve a balance between the old rules and the new - by wearing lipstick and mascara but unapologetically eating lasagna and ice cream; by getting married but striving for an egalitarian partnership; by mentoring other women but strategically moving up the corporate ladder; by raising children but continuing to put in full-time hours at the office. If juggling all this sounds easy, you probably think that Linda Tripp tattled on Monica Lewinsky to protect her young friend from an unhealthy relationship. Living as a woman today is difficult, fraught with pressures, with many of us desperate for a sense of control and direction. An easy way to delude ourselves into thinking we've achieved mastery over our lives is to compete with other women. By competing, we place ourselves and others into neat little categories - "I'm a doting stay-at-home mom; she's a workaholic who neglects her kids" or "I work out four times a week; she's let herself get out of shape" - that serve to organize our lives and deliver them from chaos to complacency.
Women also, perversely, compete over who is worst off. We listen to a friend complain about her evil boss, her boyfriend's "commitment problem," and her fat thighs - and then we checkmate her by telling her that we've got all the same problems ourselves, plus our mother has broken her hip and our credit cards are maxed out, so of course our situation is truly worse and we deserve more sympathy. Many of us can't help but strive for the Biggest Martyr award. If we can't get the recognition we crave for our achievements, at the very least let us get some recognition for our burdens and sorrows.
Competition, of whatever form, is caused by feelings of inadequacy. When a person feels threatened, her instinct is often to go on the defensive. But the cause is more than psychological. A sense of inadequacy is fostered by a very real societal situation: women's restrictive roles.
Learning to Compete
Are competitive power struggles inevitable? We live, after all, in a world of finite resources and limited conceptions of status and beauty - don't these circumstances necessitate competition to weed out the losers and reward the victors, to determine how desirable resources will be distributed? A number of different thinkers have grappled with these questions and have come to different conclusions.
First and foremost, writer and former educator Alfie Kohn declares a loud and emphatic no: We don't need competition. In his brilliant critique of competition, No Contest: The Case Against Competition, Kohn skillfully and exhaustively debunks the widely held myth that competition is part of human nature. Competition - or, as Kohn terms it, "mutually exclusive goal attainment" (the concept that my success equals your failure) - is not necessary for evolution. Herbert Spencer's soundbite on Darwin's theory of evolution, "survival of the fittest," conjures up images of the kind of violent struggles between animal species portrayed on public television. But in fact, survival generally requires that individuals work together, not against each other.
Competition is learned behavior. No one is born with an ingrained motivation to compete with others, says Kohn. Drawing on his background in education, he poignantly cites example after example of schoolchildren encouraged by their teachers to compete over who has more gold stars, whose drawings made it to the bulletin board, who got higher grades.
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Excerpted from Catfight by Leora Tanenbaum
Copyright © 2003 by Leora Tanenbaum
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
