Feminism Won’t Be Helped by Women Lying to Each Other
By: Rebeca Ansar
Tags: Relationships, Culture, Feminism, Personal Development, Women

The world is still very unequal.

We are in a period of waking up to the reality that when two people cheat, it’s often the woman who gets socially flagellated. As much distance as we’d like to put between ourselves and the world of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter”, we’re still way too close for comfort.

If a married man cheats with a woman and they get found out, it is often this female outsider to the marriage who has to tug around the title of “homewrecker”. Many times, the married man is even absolved because cheating is just what men do, or so we’re told.

The ones of us who have managed to remove our heads from the sand are now contemplating how something as brazenly sexist could be so normalized.

Of course, this is garbage logic.

It’s not how people work unless we let them renege their share of responsibility because of all that privilege. In an equal setting, adults, in general, would learn to take proportionate accountability for their choices.

That’s one of the big milestones of growing up.

It reasonably follows that the attached man is the one responsible for contributing to the demise of his relationship through the act of infidelity and all the other fissures of trust that come with cheating. There’s the gaslighting involved, for example. Hard to come back from that.

But is the attached woman, the partner who learns that she has been betrayed, supposed to keep all of her anger directed at her partner. Would it be unethical, and even un-feminist for her to harbor anger, resentment, and other unhappy feelings toward the other woman?

We make mistakes. We’re human. We can have desires that conflict with our ethics.

It’s more complicated than that.

Our society has a lot of problems. It has the problem of point the entire finger at women and not holding men accountable. Yes, the right thing to do is for us to examine our biases and ask ourselves why we are scapegoating women. But that’s not the whole story.

We coexist in a community. That’s what society is. We might not always talk to everybody. We might not know everybody, but we are still connected.

When a woman suspects or knows that another woman is being gaslit and taken advantage of, she still may not be directly responsible for ruining the marriage, but she is responsible for her role as a helper. She is helping a man exert psychological power over another woman.

This is why the issue isn’t as simple as “why are we talking about the woman at all.”

There is still accountability.

Feminism isn’t intended to lead us to a world where women don’t have any accountability. This ideological tool can help us solve the rampant problem of unequal distribution of responsibility between women and men.

But, while the other woman is not responsible for destroying a marriage, she is still responsible for being a person who is okay with manipulating other human beings for her benefit (presuming she knows).

We make mistakes. We’re human. We can have desires that conflict with our ethics. Most of us don’t have to live out our lives as our worst decision. We can change, and hopefully becoming more accountable will help us do that.

A wronged woman is entitled to feel upset that she can’t even trust another woman in the world to empathize enough to not be a party to her betrayal.

If you believe that this is not the other woman’s job, well then that’s one for the patriarchy. Feminism isn’t just about you or me or any single person. It’s about systemic change, and for this systemic change to happen, we women must watch each other’s backs.