Working Through My Own Internalised Misogyny
By: Najwa Helyer
Tags: Editors Pick, Women, Race, Equality, Feminism

Recently I went for dinner with a friend of mine, Jeannette. When we meet, we sit and discuss really stupid things and never really talk about the world — we’re just one of those friends that meet to escape our realities.

For a laugh, I was joking about a recent weed-run that I made. I was texting Sam, the person I was meeting and for some reason, I just had the image that Sam was a man. Much to my surprise, Sam was a woman. I joked with Jeannette wondering if that was my internalised misogyny taking part in being surprised that I was meeting with a woman instead. I mean, women can be drug dealers too, I said to her as I laughed.

It then opened up the conversation of whether we had any internalised misogyny within us.

When I finally realised that I participated in misogyny, it was a slap in the face.

For a long time, I didn’t know that women could be misogynists. I was young and naive, but that was what I thought. When I finally realised that I participated in misogyny, it was a slap in the face.

I was always pro-women, how could I ever be a misogynist? But I was, I’ll say it here, now.

Familiarising myself with misogyny

I won’t lie, when I was in college, I enjoyed receiving comments such as you’re not like the other girls. It made me feel special and different even though I never knew what it made me different from. Unknowingly, I was competing with all the girls around me. I never wanted to be put in the same category as anyone else just so I could feel superior.

I took that comment as a compliment and took it in my stride. I strived to be “that girl” for a very long time and made sure that’s how everyone knew me. It was a very unhealthy relationship that I had with other women, they constantly surrounded me, but I never let time go by without turning it into some sort of competition.

What was I competing for? I never knew. Slowly my insecurities started to show, it became obvious to me and everyone around me that I no longer knew who I was. I remember sitting down and harshly judge women with what they wore, how they acted and their overall demeanour. It wasn’t a pretty colour on me, it definitely made me sad and bitter.

However, I was still very supportive of women, I supported women’s rights to choose and our equality in every aspect of the word. But I just wanted to support the women that were like me. I rejected anyone else that was different, anyone else that didn’t fit the definition of “women” that I approved of.

When I got to university, I had trouble adjusting. The writing was something that became really difficult because I never knew who or what to write about. I sat down with my professor one evening and he asked me about my life, what I loved and who I looked up to. When the common denominator was all women, that became his advice. I should write about gender and race.

Great, I thought to myself. I love women, so this was going to be easy. Wrong. It was hard. It forced me to open my eyes to my behaviour when reacting to other women and realised I had been practising the ideas of misogyny — endlessly tearing other women down, competing for the attention of men and trying to be labelled as “that girl” by men.

I was foolish enough to think that as a woman, I was special in being an athlete and in fitness only because it sounded better — it sounded different. My idea of feminism was to exemplify I was equal by joining them in what they did — like joining them in slut-shaming other girls, even though I participated in the same activities that the other girls were doing. It was hateful and ugly that when I look back, I’m disappointed in who I used to be.

What A Woman Should Be

Essentially, she’s everything. She’s the tomboy, the girly girl and everything in between. There’s no difference between one or the other.

I always had an image of what a woman should be and the woman I looked up to the most was my grandmother. She moved with such grace and ferocity, a force to be reckoned with and she made it known. Till this day, I watch her in awe how she navigates the world at the 80 years old.

Naturally, I thought that was how I was supposed to be. There’s nothing wrong with that, the issue was that I expected every other woman to have that too. I shamed girls who didn’t like sports and spent their time putting on makeup to change boys when in reality, I was doing the same. I just did it in a way where I was “one of the boys.”

The strangest thing about it was that I was raised by a family of women. I was constantly surrounded by strong women my whole life, it baffled me how I could ever look at another woman now and belittle her for her choices as a woman considering my choices made me a misogynist myself.

I constantly wonder where it came from, but my insecurities just overpowered my love for different women. Anything different is hard to accept, so I rejected it fully but it grew into something ugly in me. Through the journey of my own self-healing, I learnt from other women and saw what being a woman was.

It’s still a journey, I still catch myself sometimes when talking about motherhood or being pro-choice or pro-life, that it doesn’t matter that we differ in opinions. As women, we’re allowed our own opinions to how we see best to live our life. But I just have that little reminder in my head and tell myself that I’m not the only way to be.