You must check out Rebecca Traister's latest at Salon, Morning gory, on our obsession with woman-on-woman fighting and the frenzied coverage of a (much-desired) Sawyer-Couric showdown.
The whole piece is great, but I think Traister hits the nail here:
Painting powerful women as long-nailed, sharp-toothed competitors -- which, incidentally, they sometimes are, just like their male peers -- is a digestible way of dealing with them. We can marginalize them as shrieky playground girls, thereby turning them from real-life professionals into familiar and unthreatening caricatures of femininity.
And as Traister so acutely points out: Nothing sells like girl-on-girl action.
(By the way, this piece inspired Pandagon's Amanda to figure out how female bloggers can garner more attention: "an all-out Jello wrestling competition." Genius.)
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My favorite part is how women are more competitive or less competitive than men depending on whether the writer wants to characterize competition as drive and perseverance (John Tierney on how women Scrabble players can't cut it) or backstabbing and vindictiveness (apparently this New York magazine piece.)
The notion that men are more competitive than women is dragged out to justify the "woman bloggers" thing. That argument always makes me want to pick my jaw up off the floor. The top male bloggers aren't at the top because they compete with each other. They are at the top because they are incredibly supportive of each other, very cooperative, linking to each other, praising each other, etc. Calling the top bloggers competitive is like calling a daisy chain competitive.
I agree with Amanda. The top male bloggers not only support each other, they are very exclusive about it. Their idea of including women bloggers is to bring up that inane "where are all the women bloggers" question every three months. They tend to ignore lesser known bloggers whether they are male or female, but women get more of a short shrift. They tend to not link to women bloggers or even acknowledging their existence. That's not competition. It's living in an ivory tower where the top handful of men constantly pat each other on the back.
I would jello-wrestle only if it was strawberry jello. I look good in red.
Couric vs. Sawyer? Most boring smackdown ever. Inanity vs. Ass-kissery. They can both take a flying leap, and take Barbara Walters with them. Gah. And New York magazine is crap, it should be pointed out, unless you really care about the agony of amazingly rich white people. It's as journalistically valid as Us Weekly.