From Bible Women to War Games: My Journey with Internalized Misogyny
By: Daniella Mestyanek Young
Tags: Army, Misogyny, Internalized Misogyny, Cult

Earlier this week, I shared a single tweet on my own experience with internalized misogyny, & then I got told to, essentially, watch my tone or I might make all women look bad — by a bona fide women’s hero.

My journey with internalized misogyny started when I was raised in a religious cult, the Children of God, run by a man who believed that women should serve men. He called us ‘Bible women’ or ‘David’s Handmaids’ & we were essentially trained from birth to, quite literally, serve men with our lives, & our bodies.

The idea that anyone, but especially a girl, could choose what she wanted to be when she grew up was laughable. We were walking uteruses & sources of free labor for men & the cult. My mother started having babies at age 14, & continued till she was 37, an example of God’s will.

When I was 15, our indoctrination year of preparation to become ‘Family adults’, I was told to calm down, grow up, & that I needed to prepare myself, as I’d be having my own children soon. There was no option to ‘be’ anything other than a vessel for God & your husband, and other men in the organization. I would be no more than a uterus to be filled time and again, for the glory of God.

So, I got the hell out of there. How did I do it? By going against the structures. By choosing a guy, temporarily, that was so unacceptable to the power structure that I was literally considered ‘sullied’ by it, & they couldn’t have me back. Questioning the structures led to my excommunication. Which, of course, we can all see now was actually my freedom. But, at the time, I was considered the black sheep, the radical, the one going against the ‘good’ of the organization. I was the one who couldn’t be pulled back in line, so I was cut loose.

Out in the ‘real world’, I noticed that everything was still measured on a male scale. In everything I did, I still was having to constantly prove that I was ‘as good as the boys’ in a world that wasn’t prepared to accept that as a norm, but only to see it as an exception.

This is one of the primary ways that misogyny (the hatred of women) manifests itself in our culture. Much like is the case with racism, it’s not the people out there actively spewing hatred against Black people or women that are the problem, it’s easy to spot the problem with those people….

It’s much more subtle: the stereotypes that are in everything, the male-created norms that we are all measured against. It’s assuming that the current way of doing things (the male way, because let’s face it, they’ve run the world till now) is the only way, the right way.

In college, I married a misogynist, because of course I did. (He was a white supremicist too, but we only find that out 12 years later). It was noticeable to me that he didn’t want me as me, he only wanted me to play a part — the perfect wife, moldable, always glorifying him. I’m not that person…(oh, don’t worry, I divorced him.)

When I joined the Army, it dialed right back up to ten from day 1. I was told by my recruiters, and by the 3 men on my officer school decision board, that as a woman, I’d stand out. That I’d have to be better, run faster, work harder, & guard my reputation more than any of the men would. And whatever you do, don’t ever, EVER, let them see you cry.

In Basic Training, when I made a casual joke about becoming an infantry officer, I learned that the United States Army in 2009 was still…..wait for it…. segregated!!!! Having come from abroad, & from a clearly backwards society to the land of the free, I could not believe that it was still legal anywhere in America to deny women jobs based on their gender. But apparently, it was so in the Army.

So, I took the advice everyone gave me. I cut my hair short, but it still couldn’t make up for my girlish face & my feminine bone structure. I ran fast, faster than nearly all the men, but it still didn’t mean they’d accept me in the boy’s playgrounds of Ranger School or Special Operations. In officer school, after a graded & timed 5-mile run, someone said, “it’s all fun & games until Mestyanek crosses the finish line; every guy after her is worthless, & other girls don’t matter.” It wasn’t till I left the Army & thought about that more, I realized what it meant.

So often, as a society, we don’t let the women at the top celebrate their wins, even the small ones, or the ones we tell them to work hard for, for fear of making the men look bad. At the same time, we create a hierarchy where only the 1 or 2 women at the very top even matter. But I couldn’t see any of that then.

So I doubled down. I truly, truly believed that if I proved that I was the best, reaching all the same perfect metrics on the same male-normed scale that they did, then one day, they would accept me. That I’d be able to be a part of the team, that I’d make ‘all women’ look good.

And, according to my bio, I succeeded. I could beat my commanders (all male) on PT tests & leave everyone else in the dust on a run. I represented the 101st Division on our 10-mile competition team, twice, & was selected as one of the first women to go onto the combat teams. I won the marathon on Bagram airfield while also running an entire Battalion’s intelligence section while deployed, no big deal. Sleep less, work harder, always prove yourself. I just was that girl.

My whole career, I heard men say things like: “Well, no, I don’t think women can do X. I mean, Captain Mestyanek can do it, but she’s not a woman, if you know what I mean.”

Still, I thought we’d change the mindset, one badass woman, unquestionably ‘as good as the men’, at a time.

It wasn’t until a bad investigation gone even more wrong, when I was asked to take sides with the men in charge, to literally take one for the team, I realized that I was never going to be a part of the team, not really. To them, at best I was an exception that proved the rule.

Every time I worked harder to prove that I was indeed badass, that I was in the top 10 percent, the top 1 percent of women, I was just reinforcing their stereotypes that 90, or 99 percent of women just couldn’t hack it. I just didn’t realize that it was their scale was wrong. I didn’t realize that I was never going to be good enough because I wasn’t up against the individual men that I was trying to impress by being always better. I was up against a system that was stacked against me from its very foundation — and systems are always stronger than individuals, that’s why we evolved to develop them.

It took time, a lot of time, for me to process it all. In my humble opinion, that kind of processing, critical though, and deep work around ones experiences and what they really mean would be very, very hard to do while still in the Army, still surrounded by that environment, those stereotypes, & those metrics that I would have still had to meet — at least for women who swallowed it all, hook, line & sinker the way I did. I watch them now, making great strides into an argument they will never win.

After years of deprogramming, of reading a ton, thinking, writing, & going back to school to study group behavior, power structures, & the systems of oppression that are the foundation of literally everything about our nation & our most honored organizations, I’ve started to see things very differently.

These days, when people ask me ‘why does everything have to be about gender?’ the answer is simple — because it is. Because everything in our modern world was built on the idea that women & minorities, anyone different from white, cis-gendered men, is an other. This means so much.

It means our world isn’t build for us. It’s built to subtly, but very decidedly benefit men. And men built every, single last metric by which we measure success — why then are we surprised that it naturally supports the hypothesis that men, & men’s way of doing things, is better?

In recent research I’ve done at Harvard University, I’ve found that “Due to the (historically) segregated nature of military service, the restrictions that were placed on women, & the ensuing negative attitudes that developed towards even the idea of femininity in a warzone…

…women who choose to don the uniform have traditionally been forced to adopt a deep-acting state with regard to their gender identity on a semi-permanent basis for the duration of their service (Doan & Portillo, 2016).

Women simply cannot operate effectively within the organizational culture of the US military without constant efforts to ensure that everyone around them forgets that they are female — an impossible feat in a heavy masculinized and dedicated homosocial environment.

Out of basic survival instincts as well as any desire they might have for career advancement, women must assume a ‘third gender’, a form of translocational positionality that psychologists found to be unique to women in the military (Doan & Portillo, 2016).

They are, in essence, seen as, at once, overly feminine by their male colleagues and as far too masculine by the rest of the world. (to read the whole paper, check this link, daniellayoung.medium.com/nice-girls-don…)

This means that we can’t beat it. Not really. Not the way it currently stands. We can’t compete in a system that was created to keep us out, by fighting to establish that we are ‘good enough’. It quite literally will never be good enough.

What we have to do now is start from scratch. We have to realize, & we have to guide the men in power, & who still almost exclusively make the rules & build the standards & metrics by which to measure us, that misogyny hurts us all. Literally, & figuratively.

We have to internalize the notion that women aren’t ‘scaled down men’ that once in a blue moon can, indeed, be as successful as the men are. Women are women. We bring absolutely, entirely different things to the table, to the boardroom, or to the fight. Those things are necessary. (We’re also pretty damn good at operating in a men’s world, because we’ve been forced to for all of history, so we bring that, too.)

Those unique things deserve to be recognized, & we need to build the systems that recognize them.

And we really, really, need to stop making individual women feel like they are the representation of their gender, that their successes might make ‘all women look good’, & that their individual failures are ‘the reason women shouldn’t serve’ in whatever role or job they want to.

Once we realize this, as a society (& we are far away from that point), we can begin to tear down the systems that stand & begin to build ones that don’t privilege one gender over the other & call it ‘success by the standards’.

When we finally stop playing the man’s game, and are free to play the women’s game, maybe we can actually have a societal dialogue about which is more effective.

Maybe, when we can finally compete on even playing fields, maybe then we can win.

Photo Credit: CW3(retired) George Chino, Army Blackhawk pilot and photographer

Daniella Mestyanek Young is an American author and TEDx Speaker. Daniella has been breaking through barriers and challenging authority figures since her earliest childhood memories growing up in the horrifying Children of God Cult and on through her service and deployment to war twice. Daniella served as part of the first group of women who integrated into deliberate combat arms missions back in 2011 and has since spent the majority of her time leading in veteran service organizations to try and help folks heal and find their own definition of success after their service.

Daniella is married to the world’s best special operations helicopter pilot (retired) and speaks primarily in Brazilian Portuguese with her daughter, who sasses her back in three languages. Daniella is currently at work on her memoir, Uncultured. She can be found speaking speaking truth to power, irritating vetbros and stamping out the kyriarchy on Twitter @daniellamyoung. She can be contacted at daniella.m.young@gmail.com