[apretty]

Originally Posted by evolveme

You can witness these types of behaviors as early as kindergarten, even pre-school.

i fought 'believing' you or acknowledging this truth until i got to the part about seeing it in little girls... while i am childless, i am hugely involved in my nieces' life and this struggle-for-power, sadly rings true.

and while i do (reluctantly) acknowledge this behavior, i cannot help but wonder where it stems from (because i want to take the root cause of this 'round back!) and while i do think that we've ALL (to some degree) experienced this 'good girl' conditioning, i can't help thinking about this *struggle* as a form of competition, not unlike a 'beauty pageant', where there can be just one (crowned) winner. girls are conditioned to 'be good', i mean that's an obvious part of it--but i think sadly, more so they're conditioned to 'win' in ways that defeat other girls/women. for some reason it would seem that there can be just *one* female 'top' position (which they can never really attain, just struggle for!) while men are conditioned to work/play/win *together*. (not to mention that this is celebrated as a 'masculine' trait)

i think also, that little girls are taught to not trust *female*, bombarded with messages of 'less-than' and weakness and quite possibly, if grown women are searching to pin-point how and why they've been 'silenced' we find ourselves looking for ways in which 'femmes' have 'silenced' us because we *still* believe that female, specifically femme = EVIL (due to our heavy and as yet, very UNpacked knapsack), not to mention, i strongly believe that we all find what we're looking for...