I can’t believe I’m about to admit this publicly, but I’ve been re-watching Gossip Girl for the past few months. It started innocuously enough: the first free option on the Roku TV at one of the endless parade of AirBnBs over the long trip back to the U.S. this summer. I clicked on it and almost instantly felt my brain switch off. Chad and I joked about it as my dirty little secret.

And then I got home to Cape Town and realized the entre series is available on Netflix. Somehow, it has come to serve as a kind of security blanket, a comfortable and familiar home base to touch when the house is empty, which it often is these days. The shrill voices of attractive, ultra-wealthy Upper East Side teenagers somehow soothing after a long and draining day.

There are lots of things that make this admission cringey. I knew it wouldn’t age well, but considering it only ended about 10 years ago, I have been surprised to see how unrepresentative it is. All white, with a precious few persons of color and one regular gay character. The homophobia and classism warrant a whole separate diatribe, but it’s the frenemy-ship between the two female leads that’s had me spinning.

In my early-aughts memory, Blair and Serena were less awful to each other, and spent much less time competing for the attention of clueless boys who didn’t deserve them. I’m sure this was partly due to my age at the time, but I think it has more to do with (here comes the jump)…

my own internalized misogyny.

Somehow I made it to my forties before I fully realized that I was socialized not to like women - including myself.

I mean really, we all were. In many cases still are.

Patriarchy survives not just through men keeping women down, but by women doubting and mistrusting ourselves and each other. If we are (for example) fighting over the few positions of leadership not occupied by men and worrying about our weight, we quite literally keep ourselves small, we take up less space.

As a child of the eighties, I learned that I had to play a man’s game to get ahead. This included an often unconscious scarcity mentality around roles, salaries, you name it. I bought into this system, I played by its rules. And the genius of the system is that I thought it was working for me.

But once I started to notice my own inner misogynist, I saw her, so clearly, everywhere.

Systems of oppression isolate us from each other - and from ourselves - by design. As a white, cis, heterosexual, American, middle-class woman I experience far less of this oppression than many people. But I do see, more and more, the ways that the women in my life, particularly of my generation or older, have been taught to question ourselves, our intuition, our own knowing. To such an extent that many of us no longer trust how we make decisions - from how we feed ourselves to how we allow ourselves to feel and experience, to how we move through the world. (More on that in this post from a few months ago on the anniversary of the Roe v Wade reversal)

One way to dismantle these systems, to steadily take power back, is to believe in each other, and ourselves. Whenever you think, this is probably just me, but…I can almost guarantee you it’s not. This takes work, and sometimes it means faking it. Sometimes it still feels radical, at 43 years of age, to say: I trust myself. I have my own best interests at heart. I can take care of myself just as well as I take care of everyone else.

And there is enough to go around.

And if you need a reminder of the horror show of women undercutting each other and themselves (not to mention the tyranny of low rise, non-stretch jeans), I recommend a trip down GG lane.

You know you love me.

xoxo