An Open Letter to Internalized Misogyny (Alternatively, Titled: I’m Not Like Other Girls)

By Olivia Pfeiffer

Hi Internalized Misogyny, 

I have had an interesting relationship with you for my whole life. In middle school, I actively rejected my love of One Direction in lieu of cool emo bands like Panic at the Disco! and Twenty-One Pilots, even though I would secretly lie under the covers at night and watch interviews with Harry and Louis. I prided myself on being a bookworm who was more interested in reading Percy Jackson and Harry Potter than trying to do winged eyeliner. Though I may have been not outwardly expressive in my Taylor Swift obsession, the line “she wears short skirts I wear t-shirts/she’s cheer captain and I’m on the bleachers” rang very true in my own life. 

In high school, I automatically assumed that anyone who was pretty and popular was going to be mean to me, so I put up walls in order to judge them before I gave them the chance to judge me. Of course, looking back at this, it was rooted in a form of deep insecurity and jealousy towards their seemingly effortless confidence, especially during a period of awkwardness and uneasiness in who I was. Going from a small middle school of less than 20 people in my grade to a high school of 600, I felt unsure of both who I was and where I fit into my high school experience. To that end, it was easier to assume that people who looked like they knew where they fit in from the get-go were going to be automatically critical of me. As a result, I found confidence in myself in the classroom and in my intelligence, but sometimes that took form of internalized misogyny—I acted like because I did better in a pop quiz in literature, I was inherently better than the popular group of girls in my class who spent more time giggling than reading, at least in my opinion. In reality I didn’t know whether or not they actually did the reading; they just had more fun in class because they were with a better group of friends, and in my own self-doubt I looked down on them without any proof beyond my own feelings. 

You would think that by the beginning of college I would have figured out that so much of this was rooted in insecurity and tried to make amends before approaching students at Villanova. Perhaps it was not just this uncertainty within me, but years of media pushing the difference between the hot blonde and the smart brunette, with very few movies suggesting otherwise (thank you to Legally Blonde and Booksmart for presenting the alternative). For so much of my life, “the smart girl” was automatically associated with the insecure but nerdy brunette who stood in opposition with the pretty but “less intelligent” blonde, so it is no wonder that I not only aligned myself with the smart insecure brunette, but then was automatically critical of those who did not align with my trope. Arriving in college, I was wary of the traditional sorority experience, seeing the girls involved with it as vain and self-obsessed—regardless of countless involvements with philanthropy and on campus involvement, the images that I had built up with them in my mind in alignment with images presented by the media made me critical of them without reason. 

I’m still actively working to unpack issues of internalized misogyny, especially within the classroom, where I have to contradict my first internal assumptions about the group of girls in Greek letters in the back row. First, recognizing that I am dealing with these assumptions is important in engaging with people, and I am working to set aside these primary pre- conceived notions and take the time to get to know people instead. Regardless of hair or eye color, fitness level or perceived popularity, getting to know people on an individual level rather than projecting views of them based on media images or my own insecurities will be an important step in changing my inner dialogue.