they want you to hate me

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I have a confession to make: sometimes, I dislike other women. There are women on the internet who irritate the absolute shit out of me, women whose politics I disagree with, whose feminism I question, whose behaviour I question, and whose content makes me want to launch my phone across the room.

I imagine there are women who feel exactly the same way as me, and that’s the point.

Feminism, despite what the internet may tell you, isn’t about agreeing with every choice a woman makes simply because she is a woman. And although it might look pretty written in bold pink letters and be incredibly shareable, I don’t particularly subscribe to the idea of supporting women’s rights and women’s wrongs.

Women can be wrong. Women can cause harm. Women can uphold the very systems we claim to oppose. Women can be misogynistic, racist, transphobic, classist and generally just fucking awful people. Being a woman does not automatically exempt you from criticism, nor should it.

But lately, I’ve become curious about whether we’ve crossed the line somewhere between holding women accountable and becoming completely fucking obsessed with watching them fall.

Over the last few days, I’ve watched yet another disagreement between women online become something much bigger than the thing we were originally talking about. To simplify an incredibly nuanced conversation into three words: the Drew discourse. I watched it unfold and made commentary on it myself (see here if you’d like to read further: Drew / ER Discourse). My stance throughout was to remain cautiously within dialectical thinking — something I think is increasingly missing from modern feminist discourse. And yet, already, I’ve seen multiple aesthetically pleasing videos of women staring directly into the camera, yellow or pink text splattered across their faces reading some variation of: the sound I hear when Drew is finally cancelled.

And I can’t help but wonder: are we just waiting for women to fuck up?

Are we waiting for the moment we can finally point at them and say, see? I fucking knew it.

See, she was never a real feminist. See, she was problematic all along. See, you shouldn’t have listened to her.

Why are we so desperate to find a woman to root for and another woman to destroy?

When I first started the work I do online, it began with a non-profit organisation (Say it Loud) I created to support survivors of sexual violence. Within months of creating the page and it doing relatively well, I received an email from a fairly well-known creator — who I will keep anonymous — essentially threatening me and telling me I needed to take my page down because I was “copying” what she was doing.

Bearing in mind, neither of us were exactly the first people in human history to create an online space for survivors of sexual violence.

I remember being completely baffled by it. Here were two women, supposedly working towards broadly similar aims, and somehow my existence within that space had been interpreted as competition.

Years later, I remember having a conversation with my best friend, who also runs a very successful Instagram page. She said something to me that has stuck with me ever since: there will always be a portion of your followers waiting for you to fuck up.

Waiting for you to say the wrong thing. Waiting for the badly worded sentence, the opinion they disagree with, the take that doesn’t quite land. Waiting for that little piece of evidence they can hold up and say: there. I knew she wasn’t feminist enough.

And, of course, I am in no way suggesting that this is a simple black-and-white argument of they either love you or they hate you. There is nuance to absolutely everything.

As I said at the beginning of this piece, there are numerous women I have personally and publicly criticised — cough, Taylor Swift — so I’m certainly not suggesting that women shouldn’t criticise other women. Feminism without criticism would be completely fucking useless.

But criticism is not the same thing as waiting for someone to fuck up. Disagreement is not the same thing as delighting in someone’s downfall and accountability is not the same thing as collectively deciding that once a woman gets something wrong, everything she has ever said, done or contributed must be retroactively declared worthless.

There seems to be a strange appetite online for discovering that a woman we once liked was actually terrible all along. We build women up, attach increasingly impossible expectations to them and then experience an almost collective satisfaction when they inevitably fail to meet them.

One minute she is a feminist icon. A girl’s girl. The voice women needed. Someone who “gets it.”

Then she gets something wrong and suddenly, the trial begins.

Old tweets are resurfaced, clips are taken out of context, people rush to explain that they always knew there was something off about her. Entire videos are created celebrating the possibility that she might finally be “cancelled.”

Almost this idea of maybe you should have listened when I said it. Maybe my feminism is better than hers.

Perhaps that’s what makes me so uncomfortable about the idea of waiting for a woman to be cancelled is the anticipation of the execution.

When did feminism become a purity test that seemingly no woman can pass?

Women have always been encouraged to look sideways at one another. Who is prettier? Who is thinner? Who got married first? Who has the better career? Who is the better mother? Who is ageing better?

Except somewhere along the way, within supposedly progressive spaces, I think we added another question to the list: who is the better feminist?

And I wonder whether, sometimes, we haven’t actually dismantled the competition between women at all.

To make it quadruple clear, I am not suggesting that we stop holding women accountable. We absolutely should — and I include myself in that. If I say something harmful, get something wrong or deserve criticism, I should be challenged on it too. Nor am I basing this entire argument around the Drew discourse. I am fully aware that her response to the criticism she received was arguably just as reactive and, at times, unfair. But that is almost exactly my point.

Why do disagreements between women so quickly require us to get the fucking pitchforks out? Why does someone have to become the villain? Why do we have to choose a side, assemble our respective teams and prepare for battle when, for the most part, we are supposedly fighting the same fucking fight?

I don’t want a feminism where women are protected from criticism simply because they’re women. But equally, I don’t want a feminism where we are constantly waiting for the next woman to put a foot wrong so we can collectively drag her.

Feminism, regardless of what category you find yourself falling into — radical, intersectional, liberal, choice, or somewhere in between — is obviously not one singular ideology. We disagree on a lot. Sometimes, quite fundamentally. But for the most part, surely there is one thing we can agree on: we fucking hate the patriarchy.

So regardless of what we do and don’t agree on, and regardless of whether another woman has said something wrong, behaved badly or made choices we would never make ourselves, shouldn’t there still be some part of us rooting for one another?

And by rooting for women, I don’t mean blindly defending them. I don’t mean excusing harm, abandoning our politics or screaming women’s rights and women’s wrongs whenever someone does something objectively fucking terrible. I mean rooting for women to learn. Rooting for women to do better. Rooting for women to change their minds when presented with new information. Rooting for women to succeed without needing another woman to fail in order to do so.

Because if our ultimate fight is against the systems that oppress women, I’m not sure how much closer we get to dismantling them by constantly searching for the next woman to exile from the movement.

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