Internalised Misogyny as an Autoimmune Disease

Let She Among Us Without Sickness Cast The First Stone

I have only recently figured out why it makes me so angry when someone says I hate men. I hardly think misandry is an egregious sin, yet I’m offended at the accusation - why?

I think it’s because I hate when someone gets halfway to a logical conclusion (you were so close!)

It’s obvious that my strong sentiment towards a specific gender is a major motivational force in my life. It’s also obvious that that sentiment is not “I Hate Men.” It is “I Love Women.”

Imagine you spend your whole life having cats, rescuing cats, fundraising for cats etc, and every day, a random person asks you why you hate dogs. It gets old fast.

It’s always been easy for me to love women. What’s harder is confronting the reality of the women don’t love other women. So: Have you met her? The woman who takes pride in Not Being Like Other Girls. She Only Has Guy Friends. She says women can’t be trusted. She looks down on women who are loudly feminine. She is the woman whose very identity is based on her alienation from female community. Quoting Gillian Flynn’s Cool Girl passage is passe at this point so I’ll spare you; you know who we’re talking about.

You also know that since the Pick Me became a derogatory pop culture meme, the definitions of the trope have gotten blurry. The Gen Z tiktokers making content parodying a trope of internalised misogyny didn’t actually experience the Cool Girl zeitgeist that Millenial women did. It was both remarkably similar to, yet totally different from, our current manosphere-infested era of violent misogyny.

It wasn’t loud, like it is now. In those days, the hatred of women whispered like a breeze that was entirely native to your climate. Because it was just a breeze, because that 2000s “postfeminist” era was itself a reaction to the 90s wave of feminism in the west (the world basically just has misogyny on a ten year trend cycle), because it wasn’t a typhoon, because Andrew Tate wasn’t flexing his plastic pecs while saying women should be enslaved, like some kind of AI-generated Adult Disney Villain, no one was allowed to talk about it.

If you did talk about it, if you ever addressed the sea of lukewarm misogyny that we all swam in, you were CRAZY. This was a time when a standup comedian said to a woman in his audience “wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by like, five guys right now? … What if a bunch of guys just raped her?” and the crowd thought it was hilarious. Not because they hate women, of course, only because they’re much too sophisticated to be sensitive about outdated issues like sexual assault. These are post-feminist times, after all. No need to bring up the past.

And because I think we’ve forgotten about the true origins of the Pick Me, because we have forgotten the scent of the soil in which she was cultivated, I want you to forget everything you think you know about her. I want you to meet the Not Like Other Girls’ Girl with me as if for the first time, not as an enemy, and not as the caricature that content creators currently love to mock, but as a patient. Why?

I have scalp psoriasis, which is an autoimmune disease. That means that my body is failing to identify the skin on my scalp as part of itself, and instead, due to an overactive immune system, attacking it as a foreign invader. I’m trying to protect me, but all I’m really doing is making my own scalp red and painful.

Internalised misogyny is essentially a spiritual sickness. It is the psychic equivalent of an immune system turning on itself, a body identifying its own cells as enemies to destroy.

All misogyny is rooted in mistrust and always has been, and all mistrust is rooted in fear. The fear of female power has ruled men’s decision since we discovered agriculture and for the first time in history, men were able to hoard resources and therefore hoard power. Hoarding power is neither an easy nor a particularly natural process. It takes deep psychological shifts to be able to override the empathy hardwired into the human brain and tolerate, let alone systemically inflict, human suffering.

All misogyny is rooted in mistrust and all mistrust is rooted in fear, but this fear is not rooted in reality; the hoarding of power is never done in self defense. The Pick-Me is not defending herself any more than men are - but she thinks she is, because her immune system is misfiring.

Just like men, the Pick-Me does not hate her fellow women. She is afraid of them, specifically, afraid of their rejection. I think the truth every woman knows at her core is that male approval is the most readily available resource in the world. Winning the love and trust of women, who are infinitely more discerning, who place value on kindness, empathy, and other interpersonal skills, however, requires much more from us. It’s easier to pretend you never wanted it in the first place. It’s easier to say the grapes are sour anyway.

Recently, I had to recover from the trauma of a woman I love telling me that she resents my successes. That to her, my win is her loss, and she hates being forced to witness it. That she didn’t see me as part of her sisterhood, but as a rival to compete with. I was not skilled at tending the wound her honesty inflicted on me; it took me months to heal. When I would think about it, I’d start to hyperventilate and then sob. The sobbing was obviously grief, but the hyperventilation feels more like the kind that might precede a panic attack. As if my mind had convinced my body that we are both in danger.

Years ago, I had a small foretaste of this same trauma. A woman I loved, who loved me, no doubt, gave me the distinct impression that she no longer saw my win as her win. She became oddly callous where she was previously compassionate, competitive when she previously cheered me on. And because this was such an unsettling shift in my usual dynamic with women, I had no tools to deals with it. I did not want to compete with her. I did not know how. So instead, overwhelmed with the betrayal of her envy, I abandoned her, when that was the last thing she needed. I don’t think she’ll ever truly forgive me.

In the years since, I have often wondered: why was I so upset at her? For letting her insecurities get the better of her for a bit? For not being 100% immune to something society shoved down her throat 24/7?

That seems a bit of an insane expectation on my part. Whose immunity has not failed at one point or another?

Let she among us without sickness cast the first stone.

How many times can you try to help a sick person before your compassion is overtaken by your fear of contagion? How long do you try to love a woman who hates women, before you turn on your heel and run, because goddamn it if I have to spend one more second with you I will also starting hating women?

There’s no easy answer to that.

All I know is that we, both as individuals and as a society, are defined by how we treat the sick. I believe this is an important metric of our Goodness, capital G. Do we ostracise them, or try to heal them? Emphasis on try. We do not take an infected person to the hospital because we are certain they will be cured. We do it because we owe it to them to try; because everyone deserves a chance to get better.

We do it because we know that to treat the sick as a lost cause is a moral failure.

Maybe I cannot claim to love women while discarding them for having imperfect immune systems. Maybe the Pick-Mes among us deserve more than our denigration and judgement. Maybe they deserve our compassion and care.