This blog highlights some of the issues around the upcoming piece Encouraging Female Friendships.
Coming up on April 11th is a piece called Encourging Female Friendships: Moving From Competition to Cooperation. Much has been written in the past few years about girls relationships with other girls.
We've heard a lot about the queen bees and the relational aggressors, the female bullies and the alpha girls. We had a different name for them when I was in high school. We didn’t analyze them and their motives. Back then, there were just some girls that weren’t nice, and you had to find a way to deal with them. In many cases, these girls have grown up into women that aren’t nice either, and they rule the PTA or the book club or the moms group with the same sweet smelling iron fist they once used to keep the other cheerleaders in line, or to keep the girls with the misfortune of having imperfect hair on the outside. They’re still around. I guess it just bothers us less, busy as we are now with careers and husbands and kids. We just don’t have the energy to care about whose popular and who’s not anymore.
But what we don't talk much about is the way our culture encourages girls to compete with one another at the expense of developing true, meaningful relationships with other girls, and how that simple arrangement can contribute to the way girls mistreat each other, even within so called "friendships". I'm not talking about competition in academics or athletics. I'm talking about competing against one another for status, popularity, and the attention of boys. We train our girls from an early age, marketing make-up and sexy clothing to girls beginning in grade school, stuffing teen magazines full of articles on how to "get the guy". Certainly our girls are not missing the message here.
What would it be like if we lived in a world where girls spent their time, energy, and talents working together instead of working against each other? Just imagine what they could accomplish....
