The Terrible Cost of Sister Hate

We need each other more now than ever

Warning. This is a rant. A loving one, but a rant all the same. Kindly before you take offense, please understand that this is not about blaming anyone but rather offering an invitation to be something magnificent, have a totally different kind of life, and rewrite your inner conversation. I hope you stay the journey with me- with us, in fact, as there are two other smart Medium women who clearly feel the same, whose stories I include here.

Sawubona, my sisters.

Yesterday I spent nearly the entire day on a story, finally got it written and published. It sat, dying a bad death.

I struggled with it the whole damned day. By this time I should know that struggling is a good sign it’s not coming from my best Self. So I killed it. However I found another story about something very similar from fellow Medium peep Karolína Fialka:

Karolina and I had both written the same things on the same days. Here they are side-by-side.

From Karolina:

So, social media feminists, listen up:

Someone else being beautiful doesn’t take away from your beauty. Someone else being successful doesn’t invalidate your success. Someone else being powerful doesn’t mean that you are not.

What I wrote:

I would posit that we are all subjected to and susceptible to messaging. It can take years, as it took me, to distance myself from comparisons, find delight and joy in other’s accomplishment, and understand these great and abiding universal truths:

The beauty in others speaks directly to the beauty in me.

Others’ accomplishments speak to the potential for courage inside me.

What is magnificent in others appeals to what is magnificent in me.

When you achieve you honor me. You lift me up.

What you achieve is an invitation for me to find my own definition of success.

Clearly, she and I are seeing a trend that needs addressing, not only because this is an age-old issue (women being pitted against women, which costs ALL of us, including our good men) but also because we are being called right now. There is a chance for a re-set but not if you and I and all our sisters continue to waste our amazingness on bickering.

Here’s yet another story I just picked up a minute ago about the same thing:

My struggle yesterday was about a woman fifteen years my junior who had come after me about articles I’d written on fitness after fifty. I won’t go into all her comments here, but suffice it to say she accused me of scolding people who were fat and out of shape.

Anyone who really reads my stuff knows that not only is that patently not true, you and I also know that we read other’s material through lenses which are often clouded by massive lies. To that I wrote this the other day:

Truth? that article, while it starts with a story about an 80+ lb weight loss, has nothing to do with weight loss and everything to do with how we are all manipulated to believe bullshit lies. That particular piece focused on how we are increasingly told that if we are not thin, young, wrinkle and cellulite-free, muscular, and of course either beautiful or handsome, we are worthless.

Who’s telling us that? Corporations who make money off our insecurities. Who runs those corporations? Mostly uber-rich white males. Just saying. Please see this. And this. And this. (Note, one woman made it to the top of Hershey. Hell, I’d want to head up a chocolate company myself. Side bennies must be pretty tasty.)

One of the side effects of this is of course, to Karolina’s piece, women (and men, but stay with me here, this is about us girls) are pitted against each other to hate someone for being prettier, or taller, or younger, or more athletic, or having gotten the Great Guy, or whatever we are told to believe that makes us feel less than worthy.

And in the process wither inside from the cancers of pregnant hate, bitter jealousy and vile self-revulsion. Men suffer this too. To wit: the other day I was looking up Henry Cavill, for I had no clue who he was (yes, please laugh at me). On one website there were literally hundreds of guys who were speculating about how he’d had his limbs surgically extended.

Dear Christ. This is how we spend our intellectual and emotional time?

Before you laugh, I would send you to any site where there’s a pop star, and read the catty comments that women write about her. None of this is new. Been going on since we began to stand upright. However, we humans are blessed (or cursed) with choices about what and how to believe what we are told.

I am not going to delve into my strongly held-beliefs here about patriarchy and or religious manipulation of women. Centuries of both have cost us. We allow it still. The two have cost civilization its progress and our Mother Earth much of her vitality.

Yet today in 2020, given the sometimes-lethal tools of social media (largely created by white males, just saying), millions of us simply magnify the insecurities, fears and jealousies that are fanned by the vicious twins of religion and patriarchy. Women- who, collectively have the power of life, rejuvenation, creation to completely and utterly overhaul this entire blue marble- waste endless time, energy and brain power pissing on each other over things like hair styles:

and other low-brow, insultingly stupid issues that waste their time, their essence and their potential. What does a hairstyle have to do with being one of the most supremely talented gymnasts of our time-who is Black, and female- and as such is subject to unbelievable abuse, very much like her sister-in-excellence Serena Williams?

Will you just please GROW UP ALREADY. Turn around and look at who is pulling your strings. Wake. Up. YOUR SISTER IS NOT YOUR ENEMY.

As the comic strip character Pogo once said: We have met the enemy and he is us. Interestingly, that line came from a strip wherein Pogo was referring to trash that had been dumped in his swamp. That was in 1975.

One of my Fearless She Wrote Medium Peeps, Gillian Sisley, experienced this very thing just recently and wrote very eloquently about it:

Then, after daring to point out Hollis’ dishonesty, plagiarism and misdeeds, she got body-slammed by her sisters:

What simply appalling behavior.

Karolina’s piece delves into similar behaviors: we attack clothing choices, or shoe choices, or choices to have or not have kids. Mind your own business, sister.

None of that is relevant to saving the world.

We attack fingernail shapes, leggings on fat girls, we body shame ourselves and then eviscerate others with the same scalpels with which we left our own entrails on the floor. Stitch yourselves up, sisters.

None of that is relevant to saving the world.

Our time is being wasted while we carve wrinkles of hate in our faces, carve canoes full of sewage in our souls, hurling insults at the very people whose powerful shoulders would bear us up. We need each other. NOW.

When I tear you down, I rip holes in my soul. When I lift you up, we rise together, far higher than alone. Universal Law. The Law of Synergy.

While we are all of us subject to the low emotions of jealously, envy, self hate and the rest of it, social media elevates all this to a fever pitch.

From Karolina’s article:

But if you are a grown-up woman who identifies with the idea of feminism as much as you signal to the world, you should recognize that this is yet another tool of the patriarchy to keep us in check and occupied by throwing shade at each other when we could be doing something productive and powerful instead.

The woman who came after me was angry with her own body. I’m not the author of that.

She was completely brainwashed that she HAD to be thin. I’m not the author of that.

She claimed that I was scolding her for being lazy. Not only is that utterly wrong, out of my thousands of articles that is the polar opposite of what I write. I recognize the pain that paints such comments. But I. AM. NOT. THE. AUTHOR. OF. THAT.

This is how brainwashed we are.

Sells a lotta stuff. Sells billions of products and programs, and books, and supplements, and Pelotons and all the rest. And it keeps us at each other’s throats. Again, men too, increasingly, but that’s for my very competent and capable brothers to write about.

It’s awfully fucking hard to have any kind of a so-called feminist movement when we are allowing ourselves to be so easily manipulated to hate ourselves, our bodies, and attack each other 24/7 over things that are meaningless, while our Great Mother is being raped.

When our sisters agree with the abuser that the victim had it coming, is there any question as to why our Mother Earth is in the shape she is in today?

How badly have we been brainwashed and manipulated? My favorite exhibit from just recently: Donna Rotunno, Harvey Weinstein’s Rottweiler lawyer. Talk. About. Brainwashed. Turned by lies against her own gender. Pretty impressive. The woman who speaks for the NRA isn’t much different: Dana Loesch appears to be a woman-hating piece of work, but she sure didn’t start out that way. Neither of them did. They had to be brainwashed. All of us are to one degree or another. Five thousand messages a day? Who wouldn’t be?

Do I hate them? No. I am deeply saddened, just as I am by every woman who sides against a rape victim. In legalese that makes her, emotionally, an accessory to the crime, in my book.

Being going on for a very long time.

Cost us two Presidential candidates, too. I didn’t like Hilary either. But she sure wouldn’t have gotten us into this mess. Sister hate in part cost us Elizabeth Warren. Brainwashed women believing only men can lead are part of the problem. Whether or not you LIKE someone doesn’t necessarily determine whether they’d have made a good leader. Sometimes leaders are right jerks. But they are damned good leaders, as these women leaders are teaching us right now through this Covid Crisis. Pay attention.

I would have bet anything that the terrifically unlikable Hilary Clinton, as flawed as she is, would have been just as good or better. Likeable leaders don’t always make good leaders, with Jimmy Carter as the prime case in point.

Whether or not some women wear a goddamned PANTSUIT has nothing to do with whether or not she has the balls and brains to lead a country.

I have spent plenty of time in national politics. While I don’t much care for most leaders, I also recognize that people who worry too much about being liked waste too much time avoiding making difficult decisions.

Sister hate costs us. All of us.

Above all it’s costing you and me. Our daughters. Our baby girls. Would you have your angel grow up in such a world of ugliness? Would you have your baby girl turn into a fishwife, a harridan? A bully whose viciousness causes the suicide of a female class mate? That’s what some families are growing these days, little female murderers. Character assassins. Mean girls on steroids driven by self hate and this kind of messaging:

Don’t want your kid to turn out that way? Then kindly, let’s stop being those ourselves. Kids emulate what they see.

The great Madeleine Albright made a women’s power phrase go viral when she said some 25 years ago

“There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.”

When you and I and all our sisters descend into the sewage of sister hate, when we waste our immense personal power and potential ripping each other to shreds about dreds, when we castigate one another over pantsuits or poundage, we sell our souls to the Devil HIMself.

I recently met a magnificent Black woman, Rosennab, here on Medium. It’s not just that she’s a PhD, a fourth degree black belt in Taekwondo. It’s not just that she’s a superb storyteller, poet and speaker.

She sent me a video, which I watched, enraptured, as I sat at my kitchen table.

She is fucking magnificent. Her beauty, her accomplishments, her vitality, her Essence lift me up. She is a GIFT. What is extraordinary about Dr. Bakari speaks directly to what is extraordinary in me, but in completely different ways.

Karolina threw down the gauntlet. I am throwing down the gauntlet. Do you and I possess the moral courage to see that others who succeed lift us? That such things are an invitation? That what they achieve is not only a reflection upon our womanhood, but is an equal challenge for us to find what is extraordinary within us?

Or will you wield the terrible sword of sister hate, and live in the hell of your own making?

Good sisters, all, when I see your beauty, whatever you look like, whatever your body shape, whatever life you chose, I see my Sister in her beauty. In all her immense potential.

I see the Great Goddess in you, and all that is sacred.

Will you harm or will you help? Will you hurl insults or will you heal?

For if you choose to help and heal, Sisters, you and I will indeed break the bonds of lies that threaten to bind us forever. When we heal ourselves we heal each other. We can heal our brothers, who desperately need us as we can be, not trodden upon, limited and abused. When we can do that we can heal our Earth.

Up to you, up to me, up to all of us.

With special thanks to the above-named Goddesses, along with Terri Ducay, Ann Litts, Margaret Kruger, Jessica Lovejoy, Kris Gage and all the other Medium Goddesses who constantly challenge, support and lift me up by their amazing selves.