Internalized misogyny is very real and very insidious. Have you recognized yours yet or are you still waiting for that to happen? How do you challenge misogyny where you see it?
Internalized misogyny is very real and very insidious. Have you recognized yours yet or are you still waiting for that to happen? How do you challenge misogyny where you see it?
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Whenever I instantly think some girl is a bitch, I compare them to a guy reacting the same way and see if id be as offended. It helps a lot to not take things personally especially with people who have rbf.
Yes, I consider it a lifelong endeavor but I’ve made a ton of progress. I don’t compete with other women for men for one, no more pick-me-itis.
It’s very hard for me to tease out the difference between misogyny and discomfort from having a lot of “feminine” things forced on me by being born female.
I really enjoy women being able to be feminine, have female centric spaces, ideas and culture. I just don’t want to have it forced on me or be assumed to like/be a part of it. I need it to exist for the betterment of the world, but it isn’t me, if that makes sense.
I can’t relate to a lot of women because a lot of that gendered experience is alien to me. But I see many men as being fully complicit with patriarchy and therefore not people I generally want to deeply associate with either.
So it’s hard. Sometimes when I open up about this in feminist spaces, it gets seen as misogyny so i find that I end up in trans spaces because I think my experience is just really hard to talk to cis people about.
I want women to thrive, to be able to communicate freely, to have their experiences seen as part of a human experience, not just perspectives that are limited by their gender. Patriarchy is real and the burden on women specifically really needs to be one of the things we focus on for social change. However, I don’t fully feel that I personally am a woman, just female bodied so it’s hard for me to lock into where my internalized misogyny is vs personal issues from having been raised as a gender I don’t identify with.
I don’t think it’s something that one should wait around for to happen. You really have to take the time to listen, learn, read, and reflect. I definitely had a “I’m not like other girls” phase when I was younger. I was a “tomboy”, and thought that made me better than other girls. The reality is, were just different. Also the older I get the more I embrace my femininity.
I try to call even mild “slut shaming” out. That is honestly one of the things I was the worst about when I was younger.
Another thing for me is making sure that I am fighting for all women to be able to choose their paths in life, not just women who make the same choices as me. It is a slippery slope for me to think I have a right to define other women. The line for me is when anyone implies there is one right way to live.
I would rather live the live I have now, even with money being tight, than never have money concerns again but being told how I have to live. But other people feel differently. They have lived a life that has given them their views and so have I.
lol deeeeeeeep psychological damage on this end
Mostly to do with objectifying myself and seeking male approval constantly.
Yeah this was a really key step in the (longer than you’d think) process of realizing that I’m a lesbian.
I spent my 20’s knowing I was very attracted to women but not actually liking women. I had my first girlfriend at 18. She was kind of a “not like other girls” type like I was at the time. We met in the Army, which is a very misogynistic environment. We both ended up married to men and insisting we were actually bi.
Narrator: “Neither of these people was bi.”
I realized in therapy after my divorce at 31 that my mother had instilled a lot of misogyny in me because she hated any woman who was conventionally attractive, smaller than her, athletic, good at math, and a bunch of other stuff I was, but I received this message not only as “mom hates me” but also as “women are pretty dumb in general”.
This was only magnified by the fact that I’m an engineer so I’ve never really been around a lot of women in my day to day life. Nearly every brilliant and successful person I knew was a man. It took having multiple excellent women bosses to begin to really shed a lot of my own internal bias. Like, undeniably my career went better while working for them. Hmmm… maybe mom was wrong about stuff.
This touched off a few years when I questioned everything, and realized that for all the years I hated other women, what I really hated was straight culture, which I felt awful trying to perform. The women who laughed at me every time I tried to see if I was the only one who realized we were in a cage, and who judged me for looking for the exit, weren’t bad, or stupid, or any of the other things I thought they were back then. They were just heterosexual and thought I sounded insane for seeing the life they loved as something monstrous.
Once I realized that I’m not at all into men, and stopped trying to fit in with straight culture, I started to meet other women like me, and realized that women are actually awesome, that I’m not smarter, tougher, or cooler than other girls, I’m just gay. Once I started interacting with the world as an out lesbian, I realized I love all women, even the ones who are way different for me. I want the best for them, will fight for their rights, will hire them every chance I get and become the awesome woman boss who helps their careers go to the next level. It literally just took finding me under the mountain of internalized misogyny my upbringing instilled to learn to love other women exactly as they are.
I feel like internalized misogyny is a term that softens shitty behavior.
I don’t really think about it much. If a woman is mean to me then I avoid her at all costs or am friendly if I have to be around her. If there’s an influencer I don’t like then I just don’t watch them or hang around those platforms.
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