14 Comments
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Sarah’s Room's avatar

WoW, thank u for this!!! Beyond interesting!!!! 💗💗

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Ella's avatar

Thanks for reading Sarah!

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biglittlemia's avatar

This is great and needs to be talked about more.

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Ella's avatar

Thank you so much for reading!!!

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Mary McDermott's avatar

Yes to everything you said!! I thoroughly enjoyed reading your post, I especially like the way you said the labels of "girls girl" and "pick me girl" are just competition repackaged, I had never thought of it that way before and you explained everything so well! I have come to realize pitting women against each other is designed to keep us down, I think beautiful things can happen when we focus more on uplifting ourselves and uplifting other women at the same time 💖

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Ella's avatar

Thank you for leaving such a thoughtful comment Mary! I so appreciate you reading 🩷 I agree -- female support is like a superpower

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Freya's avatar

Oh Ella I loved this!!! <333

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Ella's avatar

Thank you so much Freya!! 🩵

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Soph's avatar

Oh I could talk about this FOREVER!!! I recently read a book called I Who Have Never Known Men which I think you'd really enjoy - it's quite clear what the author thinks a woman's world would look like without misogyny and the male gaze.

Women definitely still hate women and unfortunately it's something I still see quite often with older generations hating younger gens. I find my agemates far more celebratory of womanhood than others.

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Ella's avatar

I haven't heard of that!! I need to pick it up. Yes I agree!! I find it much more an issue with older women who have something against younger women. I think it's difficult with the world seemingly moving towards more right wing ideology, clearly it's not a problem that's going to go away anytime soon.

Thank you for reading Soph as usual!! 🩷🩷

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Petra Khashoggi's avatar

Sydney Sweeney is absolutely right - there is so much fakery and most women do not empower or support other women! It’s something I’ve experienced throughout my life and within my own family. I just came across your post as I wrote about this topic last week:

https://petrakhashoggi.substack.com/p/when-women-dont-support-each-other

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Alyssa's avatar

This is so well done & sadly think your line about women unlearning to hate other women is so true in all the worst ways. I work with elementary school girls and the cliques so young are so hard to maneuver as a mentor & try my best to use my words wisely when we talk about the successes within the group. Thank you for this wonderful piece & loved the comments too 🫶

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Ciara ★'s avatar

I'm currently trying to read 'The Beauty Myth' by Naomi Wolf (as it sits there gathering dust on my bedside table), which encapsulates a lot surrounding the topic of female competition. It's quite a shock to the system really. Female-on-female hate is soo tiring. Especially putting up with it for so long at an all-girls school. I remember hearing the advice "It's because they're jealous" a lot in school and honestly... what am I meant to do with that information? If somebody is being rude, mean, or nasty it's, quite frankly, not okay and hurts. This was a great piece Ella, well done! <3

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Ella's avatar

Ooh noting down that book! I went to an all girls school too and though I didn't have a bad experience, when there were fall outs they were vicious. Why we blame it all on jealousy I don't know, but it seems to be programmed into us. Thank you so much for reading Ciara and your comment!!

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