3 minute read
Did anyone see Love Island this week? Two new girls entered the villa and the existing girls started baying for blood as they watched some of the boys interact with them. It made for unpleasant viewing, watching immature eye-rolling behaviour and listening to the childish heckles of a group of young women, wracked with envy and unsure what to do with their feelings. It was directed mainly at one of the newcomers who put on a brave face and played up to it, but also admitted that it was getting to her. It was uncomfortable to watch and made me want to shout at them all to support each other on what is undoubtedly an experience that will screw with their heads.
Madeleine Albright, the first female Secretary of State, famously said,
“there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.”
She was introducing Hillary Clinton who was then campaigning to become the first female Democratic nominee. It wasn’t the first time Albright had used the phrase, and after that rally, she went on to say “In a society where women often feel pressured to tear one another down, our saving grace lies in our willingness to lift one another up.”
I was reminded of Albright’s quote as I watched a group of young women act childishly, and meanly, clearly feeling threatened by the presence of another. Why would they do this?
I think it’s because, for centuries, a women’s value was based on two things: her attractiveness and thus her ability to find a husband and provide (male) heirs. Women had no other reason to exist in society, save to look pretty and keep a man happy.
In 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, that this emphasis on marriage and aesthetic upkeep, causes women to become cruel under their calm exteriors, as they’re placed in a perpetual state of competition with one another. At the time, once married, men and women were legally considered to be one person, a woman having no separate legal rights from her husband. With so few rights and little to no education, the chance for economic survival outside of the marriage was non-existent. Wollstonecraft argued that the fear of being replaced (by a younger, more desirable model, one considered more likely to birth sons) led women to become sneaky and deceitful towards men, in an attempt to hold onto them, and limited the possibility of forming caring bonds with other women.
So for decade after decade, young women have learned that competition in the shape of another female is bad and requires sneaky tactics to be fought against. In 2019 women may have gained equal rights in the eyes of the law, but centuries of heavily engrained beliefs mean we still place so much of a woman’s value on her physical appearance, and
The ladies of Love Island tapped into those heavily engrained beliefs this week as they attacked their potential replacements. If the next generation is taught more about being each other’s equals, and learn to value each other for more than just their appearance, perhaps Love Island in 2035 will be a show where you can get all the feels watching people fall in love, but less discomfort watching women tear each other down.
