Are You a Sell-Out Sister?

It’s hard to be a woman. So much is expected of us: we need to be the perfect wives/girlfriends, selfless moms/friends/daughters, successful businesswomen -- all while being beautiful and thin. We’d like to think that since other women face similar challenges, that they would support us in ours. We’d like to think that we’d do the same for them. But sadly, this is often not the case. We tend to compete more than collaborate. We pick each other apart with the same critical eyes through which we see ourselves. Deep inside, we think that by knocking her down a few pegs, we might not feel so deficient in comparison. But it never works. In subtle ways, Sell-Out Sisters sabotage the collective power of us all. It’s not just the mean girls who’ll throw a fellow sister under the bus.

1. comparing and competing
2. judging or insulting ourselves and other women
3. accepting the media’s superficial definition of femininity
4. minimizing our opinions
5. judging another woman’s choice to work or stay at home with kids
6. making snide comments about another woman’s looks
7. supporting companies who demean women in their advertising
8. agreeing with the media that any amount of fat is unacceptable
9. buying into the $55 billion-dollar-a-year diet industry
10. agreeing that physical imperfection is ugly
11. making fat jokes or laughing at them
12. gossiping about a woman sleeping around
13. going to movies that treat women as primarily sex objects
14. accepting sexism and misogyny without questioning
15. calling other women sluts, cunts, bitches, or whores
16. not speaking up when we’re offended or we disagree
17. sabotaging another woman's career advancement
18. devaluing our internal qualities
19. interfering with other women's reproductive freedom
20. trying to silence other women
21. embracing the porn star/stripper conception of femininity
22. flashing our breasts
23. watching shows in which women compete based on looks
24. being publicly sexual with other women merely for male attention
25. treating ourselves as objects for men’s arousal
26. believing that being sexy is the most important quality in women
27. idolizing celebrities and models as beauty ideals
28. idolizing celebrities and models as actual role models
29. seeing beauty ideals as obtainable if only we tried hard enough
30. buying tabloids that gossip about which celebrities have packed on the pounds

NOTE: NSFW image below

I had just finished writing this post when I received an email forward from someone close to me. It was a perfect example of a Sell-Out Sister. The woman who sent me this has been morbidly obese for much of her life. Since she was a child, she's been ridiculed and treated poorly due to her weight, and this treatment continued into adulthood. This makes her selling out particularly sad.

Here's the email: