Why women are the worst misogynists
... and my high-flying mum, who NEVER helped me, was a classic example, says VIVIENNE PARRY
BACK in the late Sixties and early Seventies my mother was a very successful businesswoman. She took over my grandfather’s ailing TV retail firm and built it up so well she won a Businesswoman of the Year award.
So, you might imagine, in an era when feminism was all the rage, when sisters were apparently helping each other, that my mother would be all too keen to help other women succeed — as she had.
Ha! Hardly. My mother would rather have walked on hot coals than mentored another woman — even me, her daughter.
When I became the first person in my immediate family to go to university, far from encouraging me to break any glass ceiling, she was faintly appalled.
‘Whatever for?’ was her initial reaction. After all, I had been sent to a school that trained its ‘gals’ to be the wives of diplomats and doctors. Mother didn’t expect me to go off and study zoology, never mind specialise in immunology and genetics.
So horrified was she at my subsequent success that even when I became a presenter on BBC science programme Tomorrow’s World in 1994 she never once complimented me on it.
So why was my mother so against helping anyone of her own gender climb to the same heights as she did? Why was she so loath to laud female achievement — even when the female forging ahead was her own daughter?
The answer’s rather simple: I fear my mother was a misogynist.
It may seem like a contradiction in terms — isn’t misogyny, or the hatred of women, expressed only by men? Not so. As I, and many of you know, women can be more misogynistic than men.
Perhaps my mother — and I’m trying to be kind here — just wanted me to avoid the difficult life of a female pioneer. But in truth, I think she was one of those women who believed the most awful thing another woman could do was ‘get above herself’.
Women should know their place — at home, with her husband and children. But obviously she herself was somehow excused those duties.
Worryingly, I believe that things have become even worse than in my mother’s day, when women hating other women was restricted to muttering behind the lace curtains or the squashing of ambition in uppity daughters. Modern-day misogyny is far more violent and hateful — and it’s women who are the worst offenders.
For example, why do you think there are still so few women in high-ranking positions in top companies? Because the ladder of progress is all too often kicked from under us by other women who are keen to preserve their positions, rather than letting a rival female in.
THe only time I have been fired was by a woman, on a matter of principle (mine not hers). She was that most heinous of women bosses — the sort who act like a sweet ten-year-old in the presence of male bosses, but behave like a tyrant with male underlings and, when faced with women, turn into a psychotic she-devil.
This particular boss had clawed her way up to be the lone woman on the board. And believe me, that was the way she intended it to stay. She wanted to be the sole female in the room, the only recipient of the men’s attention.
Wrong as her behaviour was, I can sort of understand the logic behind it. When there are so few women at higher levels, many of them think they must behave like a tigress, using every weapon at their disposal to protect their position against other ‘sisters’.
‘Leaning in’, as Facebook boss Sheryl Sandberg exhorted women to do, clearly hasn’t taken off yet.
Indeed, rather than behaving like women should — encouraging, nurturing, promoting other females — many display the cutthroat characteristics for which men are so often attacked.
In this, as in so many things, my mother was ahead of the curve. When the daughter of a friend asked her for advice on how to succeed as a businesswoman, the reply was brisk and unhelpful: ‘Learn how to drink a man under the table’.
In other words, be more manly than the men. And she could indeed outdrink any man.
It is true that women misogynists have been seen throughout history. Queen Victoria famously denied equal voting rights saying: ‘Let women be what God intended, a helpmeet for men but with totally different duties and vocations’. It’s not clear how she thought being Queen empress fitted into this world view. And the Suffragettes did not get much support from women. Admittedly, many were turned off by their acts of militancy, such as smashing windows and setting fires. But even the less vociferous supporters of suffragism — the type who held peaceful 300,000-strong rallies — were viewed with suspicion by women in the general population.
It must have grated that the very people they were trying to liberate castigated the Suffragettes as bitter spinsters, sneering at them for being ‘unnatural’.
Sound familiar? This is just the kind of abuse thrown at women today, by other women.
Much of this female-on-female misogyny now occurs online, which is, in some ways, merely a technological manifestation of an ancient phenomenon.
And the more attractive the woman, the more indirect aggression she draws from her female peers. No doubt it dates from the days when we had to attract a man to the door of our cave.
It’s typically directed at goodlooking women as they are seen as a threat, which is possibly why classical scholar, the wonderful Professor Mary Beard — a woman beautiful with wisdom not Botox — attracted more male than female online trolls.
When I was a Tomorrow’s World regular, men were invariably complimentary about my appearance. It was women who made the comments, including my favourite: ‘You’re so much more attractive off screen.’ A masterclass in a passive-aggressive misogynistic barb, if there ever was one.
My mother, of course, found fault with every dress I wore onscreen: ‘Did it have to be green? You looked like a leek’ — although her insults did at least reveal that she’d been secretly watching.
NATurALLY, the more a woman thinks she’ll get away with making misogynistic remarks, the more she’ll do it. And so the internet is perfect, the female poison-pen writer’s dream medium.
There’s no comeback, no direct confrontation, often near-total anonymity, as well as maximum devastating impact.
Professor Tracy Vaillancourt of McMaster university in Canada is well known for her work in the area of indirect aggression.
She carried out fascinating research where conversations were recorded between pairs of women who had been shown photos of the same woman dressed in different clothing.
The female in the photo, when dressed plainly, was seen as a potential friend. But the more provocative her outfit, the greater the bitchiness she attracted.
But what’s worrying is that today’s misogyny by women goes further than mere bitchiness.
Take the insults hurled at Leslie Jones, the black star of the femaleled Ghostbusters movie remake. Much was vilely racist, but there were many horrible things said about her appearance — shockingly, much of it from women.
Indeed, women comprise a truly disturbing percentage of all misogynistic tweets, according to think tank Demos. Their research earlier this year revealed that half of all tweets using the words ‘slut’ and ‘whore’ came from female users, with some 20 per cent of these using the words in a highly aggressive or threatening way.
remember the case of Caroline Criado-Perez, who campaigned to get an image of novelist Jane Austen on British banknotes?
When she succeeded, she didn’t get acclaim. She received 50 death or rape threats an hour for days from internet trolls. And you’d think all those must have been men, but many, including the most extreme, were women.
There are shining examples of women who don’t succumb to misogyny, though.
Take Chief Medical Officer Dame Sally Davies. Appalled at the lack of senior female medical researchers, she successfully took on the entire male medical establishment and told them none could apply for any of the £1billion research funds she controlled as head of the National Institute for Health research, unless they signed up to a scheme to improving female representation in academia.
But actions like these are few and far between, and it’s hard not to conclude that the sisterhood doesn’t exist — or at least, only functions when women aren’t in competition with each other, whether for promotions, partners or compliments.
Because, as any one who has been on the receiving end of a misogynistic remark could tell you, the sharp tongue of a woman always cuts so much deeper than that of a man.