Everywhere I look lately on social media I am inundated with women tearing one another down. Whether it's an article on the Kardashians, the newest Victoria's Secret campaign, or the hottest Instagram sexy selfie seductress--we women are downright vicious in the comments sections.
Sure, I'm aware people can get out of hand hiding behind their computer or mobile screen. That it's easy to just let whatever fly off the keyboard, because we don't know these women personally.
It's really been getting to me lately, though, because I understand the why behind all of this hate-spewing behavior.
Let's be real. Whether or not we like these women personally, many of them have the lives we wish we had. They've got the money. The perfect bodies. They're living it up, smiling, shopping. They can do whatever they want, whenever they want.
And that pisses a lot of us women off.
It's called jealousy, and getting emotionally mature about it forces us to look at our own lives, and all the ways we're not fulfilling our desires. Like by losing weight, creating work we love, pursuing our passions, or generating wealth (if that's what we aspire to).
What's more, our culture maintains negative beliefs about the female body in general. I'm busty, and for years I was ashamed of my breasts and would intentionally try flattening and masking them beneath my clothing. Felt disgusting, too curvy. Hated the negative attention that it brought about when interacting with other women, for their judgments and assumptions, and men, for their advances that I wasn't emotionally equipped yet to deal with at that young age.
Why are we so fearful of the female anatomy? The naked body? Sex and beauty?
This is a deeply embedded cultural issue based off the idea that a woman's body can't be trusted and is sinful, and stems from outdated religious and patriarchal roots that we still live beneath in many ways.
When we judge our sisters, it reveals our insecurities. We're projecting the unconscious judgments we harbor for our own feminine bodies onto her. Psychological projection refers to a tendency to cast our unwanted emotions onto others, reflexively transferring the thoughts or feelings that we can't deal with as our own.
We fat shame, we slut shame, we makeup shame, we thigh gap shame. We shame people for not being down-to-earth enough, and then we shame them for not being done up enough to appear acceptable in the corporate world. We shame sexually abused women for "bringing it on themselves" with their outfit, behavior, or tone.
Too thin. Too fat. Too articulate. Too dumb. When will we cut one another a break?
We are an emotionally and sexually repressed culture, and people who show vulnerabilities or sexuality of any kind scare the shit out of us, collectively. We're terrified of the femininity (and softness and sensitivity) that lives within our bodies and we are unleashing the resultant fear fumes all over our fellow women.
The only way for us to overcome this oppression of our femininity is to awaken to the reality of our lack of self-expression and self-acceptance, to radically embrace our sexual nature. Rouse our pleasure centers, our creativity, and the natural abundance that is inherent there that most of us currently do not have access to because of our disowned emotions and sexuality.
We must learn to celebrate our sisters' triumphs, to grieve their losses as our own. To come together and uplift one another, vowing never again to tear each other down. We must fiercely come to the defense of our fallen women, embrace them, compassionately offer our hands and our hearts and help them heal their deeply-entrenched wounds as we tend to our own.
Until we face this reality, we will be unable to collectively heal. It's time we stop judging and wake up to the truth.