Celebrating Female Friendship

“I didn’t realise harems were such dangerous places,” Legend of Yunxi’s Prince Qin observes with some surprise to his wife, Yunxi, and I can’t help rolling my eyes. Of course harems are dangerous places. Of course these women are going to fight for survival, using whatever means available to them. I stop. Even as I’m berating Prince Qin for not realising women can be cruel to each other, I have been berating the writers for depicting women as vicious, catty and two-faced.

How did we get here? How did we arrive at a point where women are seen as cruel, vindictive and passive aggressive in nature? Why do the stories tell us that women can’t be true friends? Why are female friendships always seen as drama filled?

If you do a Google search of “women are vicious”, you’ll get 11,000,000 results. Yes, that is 11 million - with six zeros. That’s a lot, and this belief comes out in our media and literature in many different ways. Over the past few years, there has been a growing awareness of this stereotype and how it affects women in this day and age, which is something I will look at later. First, I want to dig into how these stereotypes came to be.

The History

The thing about stereotypes is that they come from somewhere, which usually means they have a grain of truth to them. If we accept that it is true that women are, or at least can be, vicious, passive aggressive and cruel, why is that?

I think the answer, at least in part, lies within the reasons I was defending the cruelty of the women Prince Qin was astonished by. Allow me to explain.

In Legend of Yunxi, Prince Qin is brother to the Chinese emperor, who has a large harem. The emperor is depicted as capricious, cruel and selfish, and the very survival of his wives depends entirely on his good will. They have no power, no autonomy, and no prestige outside of being his wives. This sets up something any consumerist will recognise: a demand-supply paradigm.

To elaborate: we have a group of women in demand of something that is in short supply - the good-will of their husband. Gaining this is not a matter of politics for them, few of them have any political designs. It is a matter of survival.

This social structure is not unique. We see it in a story from a completely different time and culture, the ancient Jewish book of Esther. To summarise the pertinent points of the story for those who are unfamiliar with it:

We open to a weeklong royal party thrown by King Xerxes of Persia. He has been showing off his wealth and beneficence as a ruler. On the seventh day, the drunk king decides showing off his material wealth is not enough. He wishes to show off his wife. He sends some men to order her to come wearing her royal crown. For reasons we are never told, Queen Vashti refuses. His Majesty is incensed. “What,” he asks his wise men, “must be done to Queen Vashti?” (Esther 1:15)

Everyone agrees that Queen Vashti must be punished. This rebelliousness can not be tolerated, even in the queen. They strip her of her title and access to the king. But a king must have a queen. So, they decide to gather all the beautiful virgins, give them a year’s worth of beauty treatments, and send them in, one after the other, to be assessed by King Xerxes. After he was finished with them, they joined his concubines and only saw him again if he asked for them by name. I doubt Xerxes knew who half the women in his harem were. Eventually, he chose Esther to be his queen.

We do not know what the conditions were like in the king’s harem. Were the women friends? Enemies? Were there factions? Rivalries? Not one jot of this is recorded. What we do know that there were many of them, and that displeasing the king had dire consequences, including, as Esther points out later in the story, death. Again, we see the same demand-supply paradigm set up for the women: many, possibly even hundreds of them, stripped of all power and autonomy and forced to rely upon the good will of a king who probably did not remember them.

The connection between this social structure and women acting competitively is made clear in the stories of another time and place: the books of Jane Austen.

In Pride and Prejudice, Austen tells us that social security and survival was a primary motivator for women. About Charlotte Lucas marrying Mr. Collins, even though he “was neither sensible nor agreeable; his society was irksome, and his attachment to her must be imaginary”, she tells us that “without thinking highly of men or matrimony, marriage had always been her object; it was the only honourable provision for well-educated young women of small fortune, and however uncertain of giving happiness, must be their pleasantest preservative from want.” In other words, marriage was the best way to avoid poverty.

Unfortunately, marriage was, in and of itself, no guarantee of a good life. Many of the eligible young men were insufferable (Mr. Collins), selfish (Mr. Wickham) or downright cruel (Persuasion’s Mr. Elliot). Once again we see is a group of women without any real power, autonomy or influence forced to compete for that most limited of resources: the approval and protection of a good man with sufficient means to care for them adequately.

Austen makes it clear this resulted in some women behaving in passive aggressive, or outright vicious, way. Take for instance, Miss Caroline Bingley and her hatred of Lizzie Bennet. We are plainly told that “Miss Bingley saw, or suspected enough to be jealous; and her anxiety for the recovery of her dear friend Jane, received some assistance from her great desire of getting rid of Elizabeth.”

This is frequently played as Miss Bingley being a terrible person, but consider her social position: she is sister to a man with wealth, but no land, a precarious situation for a woman to be. In order to secure a future in which she is not tossed about by the whims of her brother, marriage to a man like Mr. Darcy - generous, respectful, with land and wealth in abundance, is ideal. Is it any surprise she should wish to marry him? Can we really condemn her for setting herself against a threat to this hope?

The Present

Authors like Jane Austen wrote stories examining the dynamics of social relationships, both the good and the bad, resulting in characters such as Caroline Bingley who were a reflection of a reality of the time. However, as people are quick to point out, times have changed. Women are no longer socially and financially dependent on men for survival. At least, not in the west. Why then, does this belief, and this behaviour, persist?

They do persist. Consider the TV shows Pretty Little Liars and Gossip Girl. Both feature female friendships as a centrepiece of the show. In both cases, the characters are demonstrably wealthy, with all the security and freedom of white upper class women. Despite this, the plots of both shows are constantly driven by the women being cruel, vindictive, and catty. It is simply accepted that this is how women treat each other, regardless of societal pressures and structures.

It would be remiss of me to argue that there is no longer pressure on women to view each other as competition. Workplace pressure to be the best in order to be recognised exists for women, encouraging competition among them in a way it does not for men. The Reese Witherspoon movie Legally Blonde is an excellent example of how this can work, and how damaging it can be.

Furthermore, celebrity culture is constantly setting women against each other, or presenting them as being in competition with each other. For a recent example of this, look no further than the “love triangle” between Sabrina Carpenter, Olivia Rodrigo and Joshua Bassett. Each released a song within a few months of each other. Some believe these songs are connected, leading to intense media speculation about the relationship between the three young people (Carpenter, at 21, is the eldest). The most common conclusion was that Carpenter and Rodrigo were at odds with each other over Bassett. People persist in believing this conclusion, despite both women making statements to the contrary.

The combination of all this means we are inundated with examples of women behaving in vicious ways due to jealousy and competitiveness. This is especially harmful for young people who do not have the critical thinking skills required to identify, analyse, and disregard or accept such examples as reality.

We see the effects of this most clearly in high schools. The teen years are a tumultuous time for anyone, but especially so for young girls who are trying to figure out who they are and how they fit into the world. Mimicry as a form of learning is commonplace, and what people mimic most is what they see most: tropes found in literature and on film. Teen girls copy behaviours of jealousy, competition, and underhanded viciousness. This is then perceived as the natural way for girls to behave, and people write about them in shows, movies, and books, reinforcing that this is the way we behave. It becomes a type of self-perpetuating cycle: art mimicking life mimicking art. 

The Solution

How do we combat this? How do we break this cycle and empower women of all ages to stop tearing each other down and instead embrace female friendship as a place of unconditional support and love?

I believe the answer lies in switching our focus from women competing with each other, to women supporting each other. As Taylor Swift sings in her 2019 hit single You Need to Calm Down:

Yeah we see you over there on the internet
comparing all the girls who are killing it
but we figured you out
we all know now, we all got crowns
you need to calm down

Female friendship is powerful. In a 2019 article for Forbes Women, Shelley Zalis said: “We need to reverse the stereotype that women don’t support other women. There is research that shows women in particular benefit from collaboration over competition.” Women do better when we can encourage each other to be better, and can help each other along.

To make this change, we need to recognise the social structures and pressures that encourage competition, jealousy and viciousness. We need to examine them critically, but compassionately. We need to refuse to feed into them, approaching women who are caught up in them with understanding instead of condemnation.

We need to teach our girls, and grown women, to see the women around them as friends, supporters and role models, instead of as enemies. We need to celebrate the healthy friendship in our lives and our media, drawing attention to them rather than stories of conflict and competition. The more examples of healthy friendship we see, the more we learn how to engage in them.

What does this look like practically?

1)      Notice your thoughts and behaviours and critically examine them. Are you jealous of your friends? Do you support them unconditionally? What can you change to be a better friend to the women in your lives?

2)      Notice the attitudes and behaviours depicted in the media you are consuming. Where are they coming from? Are they helpful? If you find they aren’t, look for books, movies, and shows that are more helpful.

3)      Talk about these things with your female friends. Call each other out on behaviours or attitudes that tear other people down, but make sure you are doing so from a place of love and desire to see each other grow. Discuss ways in which you can support each other, ask for help and give it freely.

4)      If you have children, especially if you have daughters, make sure you’re having these conversations with them. If they are consuming unhelpful media, talk with them about why it’s unhelpful, and point them in the direction of more helpful stories.

5)      And finally, remember that you are human: fallen and flawed. You will never get this perfectly right 100% of the time. That’s ok. Be gentle with yourself. As long as you apologise and try again, you’re on the right track.

Conclusion

The stereotype that women are vicious and incapable of being true friends is an old one, but it makes sense given the historical reality of women stripped of power and autonomy, being forced to compete for the good will of a small group of menfolk for their survival. This does not, however, justify its continuation in this day and age, nor does it justify the dismissal and condemnation of women who struggle with these things. It is up to us to begin dismantling the social structures that encourage such behaviours and begin building new ones that encourage friendship and support between women.

This is only a short article, and I can not cover everything there is to say on this topic. Other incredible women doing great work in this area are: Jameela Jamil and her I Weigh campaign; Dr. Brené Brown and her work around shame and vulnerability; and Tsh Oxenreider and her podcasts Women’s Work and Simple. YouTube channel The Take provides excellent video essays analysing many of the tropes about women in media. I highly recommend checking out their work. If nothing else, please do give Dr. Roxane Gay’s essay How to be Friends with Another Woman a read.

My female friendships are the most important relationships of my life. It is with them I laugh, cry, and drink tea (and sometimes something stronger). It is them I turn to when I am struggle, and them I call on when I’m celebrating. We challenge each other, inspire each other, and love each other. I yearn to see more of such friendships promoted in media.

Female friendship is as readily available as a phone to call to your best friend, and it is up to us to celebrate it in all its hard, beautiful glory.