Internalized Misogyny and Me

When I was much younger, I mistook glorifying my more masculine traits for feminism.


It started as young as five or six when I asked Santa for a tool box “with real tools” for Christmas. The 1980s era department store Santa was taken aback and asked if I was sure I didn’t want a doll. I thought for a moment and said “maybe a Mr. Mouth game and some books, too...but don’t forget my toolbox!” The Santa laughed, called me an unusual girl and posed for the picture.

The story didn’t end there.

Me Busy Internalizing Sexism

On Christmas Day, when I ecstatically opened up my toolbox, both my parents seemed excited about my unusual choice and my father bragged to his brothers at dinner about how he didn’t need a son to work on projects because he had a handy daughter – me. On one hand, this was all very life affirming for me and rather progressive for my father. He was an early proponent for women in the workforce. My choices were being embraced and my interests encouraged by my parents. On the other hand, I was getting the distinct impression that the masculine nature of those choices made me better than girls who chose dolls and tea sets. “I’m not ‘that kind’ of girl” had entered my lexicon. That year I began discarding the feminine things around me. Dolls went into storage, dresses were cast aside – even my favorite “swirly” dress, and I learned how to skid on gravel with my bike just like the neighborhood boys. It wasn’t enough to simply be boy-like, but I felt the need to look disparagingly at other girls and root out girl-like behaviors in myself because I now saw them as less-then rather than equal-to boys.

Institutional misogyny is not only overt gestures of sexism - like a wolf whistle or the objectification of women in advertising. It's also rooted in forming and reforming our perceptions of self -even to the point of forming an allyship with patriarchal norms. Misogyny becomes internal.

As I got older other teens were embracing prom dresses, make up, and other trappings of their sex – I felt I couldn’t engage in the same without losing my status as one of the guys – a status that had an inherent power, for I knew that men held more power than women. I saw myself as an advanced version of womanhood. Someone who could work with the men by conforming to their own behaviors. I saw myself as ahead of my time for my sex instead of traveling along a path well-worn in the 1970s and 80s.

To my confusion, other women never joined me in my version of equality. In fact – I didn’t move forward either. When working my first jobs out of college, co-working men took clients to strip clubs; which was a place I couldn’t personally follow and still be considered a professional woman. Despite my disinterest in make-up, dresses, and my affinity for that tool box...I was still held hostage by my gender. It had nothing to do with anything I was willing to do or not do. How I was perceived in the workplace was dictated by my lack of a penis. It controlled the dress code, either overtly or through peer pressure to conform to heels and hose, it controlled whether I was respected in meetings, it even controlled how I presented myself. Women were either bossy and controlling or considered air-headed and weak. There was little room between the two to maneuver and so I was held in limbo – between two unflattering stereotypes.

One day I found myself working at a newspaper, six-months pregnant, as an advertising copy editor and I learned that the new coworker that was just hired was making $2/hour more than I was. He didn’t have a degree and he had no experience. I had just asked for a dollar raise and was told it wasn’t in the budget. When I left for maternity leave, I didn’t come back. One could say I gave up, and maybe I had, but I was tired of spending so much energy fighting for something I supposedly already had – equal rights.

 "Institutional misogyny is not only overt gestures of sexism - like a wolf whistle or the objectification of women in advertising. It's also rooted in forming and reforming our perceptions of self -even to the point of forming an allyship with patriarchal norms."

The recognition of the challenges women had in the workplace dissipated by the time I entered the workforce in the 1990s. It was our mother and grandmother’s fight, not our own. If we didn’t do well in our careers, we had no one to blame but ourselves. It’s very difficult to fight something that isn’t visible to others.

I wish that I could now give you some easy steps for dealing with internalized misogyny. It’s not that simple.

It wasn’t until years later, after working evening and weekend jobs to help support my family and eventually attending graduate school, that I realized that patriarchal behaviors were nearly universal. Women perpetuate them almost as often and vehemently as men. My generation must be re-educated to even recognize the sexism that surrounds us as we were already trained to see ourselves as a post-feminist generation. When we learn to recognize the misogyny, we can expose it for what it is – but in the act of recognition we are forced to also see our own folly in following the patriarchal norm. One would think that it would be a comfort to all be guilty of this together: “Yes, all men...but also most women!” But, unfortunately we don’t seem to work that way. There seems to be nothing harder than admitting we are wrong.

If the “Me-Too” movement did nothing else, I brought the world’s attention, however briefly or hotly contested, on the vast effect of sexism on the workplace. There is now a recent moment of recognition that all is not well. A touchstone, if you will, that we can all (mostly all) recognize to and know that our plight is known by someone else, even if we can't yet acknowledge our own role in ignoring the issue in the first place.