It’s time to get really honest with ourselves. If you were raised as a girl, you probably have some internalized misogyny: the projecting of sexist ideas onto other women and even yourself, mostly subconsciously. You probably also have to fight to correct it every day because of how deeply ingrained that misogyny is.
I can make a pretty safe bet you hated a fair amount of women celebrities for no reason other than the fact other people did, so you thought it was cool.
I’ll own up to it — I hated Kristen Stewart and Taylor Swift for most of my middle school and even early high school years. They never did anything to offend me personally, and I had no true reason to dislike those women.
But I definitely regurgitated a lot of stupid reasons to dislike them that I heard my peers saying or saw on the internet, all of which were baseless and sexist insults.
At the time, I didn’t fully understand sexism or gender inequality. I was just doing what I — and many other teenage girls — thought was cool. Embarrassingly enough, I bet most of us hated on other women celebrities because it was what the boys were doing too, and we wanted their attention and approval.
That behavior is far in the past, and I have grown out of needing male attention and validation. As a senior in college, I am now able to look back at that time in my life, unpack it and understand just how much internalized misogyny I had.
Internalized misogyny appears not only in degrading other women, but also in degrading yourself. If you — as a woman — are hating on other women, then you are bringing yourself down with them.
Society often tears down and attacks women, normalizing the casual hatred of powerful or successful women, especially those who don’t fit the mold for femininity. As we grow up, we are also taught to see each other as competition instead of peers. This breeds some ugly behavior.
Most of this can be attributed to the society we grew up in — we are immersed in sexism and gender stereotypes from the start. It takes unlearning what society has taught us about gender and sexuality to recognize our own internalized misogyny.
Through education and self-acceptance, many women are able to shed their internalized misogyny and learn to uplift fellow women. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people out there who continue hating women because of their own immaturity or self-esteem issues.
If you find yourself constantly tearing down other women to feel better about yourself, it is time to grow up.
I am talking to every single person who says they hate Taylor Swift and when asked why, attributes it to her dating life. They say she dates too many men, she writes too many songs about men, she’s never single and on and on.
Dating people does not make you a bad person. So, why should it make Swift a bad person?
Additionally, who cares what she writes her songs about? No one is forcing you to listen.
It is worth mentioning almost every single song you listen to by any random artist is going to be about romance or relationships. Men write about relationships and sex as well. Why does Swift get singled out for doing something most other artists do?
Could it be the social and psychological brainwashing that tells us she’s dated too much because she’s a woman and it’s unladylike? Or the ardent protectiveness we feel over the anonymous men she ended things with?
The bottom line is: It is sexist to hate on Taylor Swift because of her dating life or her openness about her relationships. She is not hurting anyone, and it’s a pretty bad excuse when you could just admit the truth — you are insecure and do not like when powerful women do what you wish you could.
So many female celebrities get hate from other women for similarly arbitrary reasons, and it all comes from internalized misogyny. It is time to stop this ugly behavior of women tearing down other women and leave it behind in middle school.
