The "Girls Support Girls" Lie
On women, power, and the refusal to pretend
Editor’s note:
This essay is not an argument against female friendship, cooperation, or mutual respect. It’s a critique of enforced solidarity and the idea that women owe one another political loyalty on the basis of sex alone. The distinction matters, because treating women as individuals rather than a bloc is not misogyny, it is the actual premise of equality. The examples and cultural references used here are meant to illustrate how slogans collapse under real-world complexity, not to deny the existence of sexism or dismiss genuine abuse. Disagreement is not betrayal, criticism is not cruelty, and refusing automatic allegiance is not hatred. This piece assumes women are capable of judgment, competition, and moral agency, and takes that capacity seriously.
“There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.”
Madeleine Albright said this1, and people applauded. It’s been printed on mugs and embroidered on pillows and repeated at women’s conferences like Moses just came down the mountain with it. The implication is clear: women owe each other loyalty on the basis of sex alone, and if you fail to provide that loyalty, you’re not just making a choice, you’re committing a kind of gender treason.
Not only is this absurd, but every reasonable person knows it’s absurd, which is why the slogan requires so much enforcement.
Before we go too far, it’s probably worth mentioning that I'm not speaking from outside the tent here. I majored in Women's Studies in college. I read the canon—Beauvoir, hooks, Butler, Friedan, Dworkin. I sat in the seminars, learned the frameworks, wrote the papers, and absorbed the language. I can tell you what the patriarchy is, what hegemonic masculinity means, and how intersectionality is supposed to function. My critique isn't coming from someone who doesn't understand feminist theory. It's coming from someone who understood it well enough to see where it collapses under its own weight.
For starters, women are not a monolith. We do not share a single set of interests, values, or goals. We compete with each other for jobs, status, attention, and partners, just like every other group of humans competes for scarce resources. Pretending otherwise doesn’t elevate women, it infantilizes them, reducing half the population to a victim class that must band together for protection rather than a collection of individuals capable of navigating conflict, competition, and disagreement like adults.
The “girls support girls” industrial complex needs women to be a unified bloc because the alternative (that women are individuals with divergent and sometimes opposing interests) makes the demand for automatic solidarity incoherent. You can’t demand that someone support you simply because you share a chromosome. Or rather, you can demand it, but it’s a weak claim, and deep down every thinking person knows it.
☆
Let’s start with what’s actually true: women are often brutal to each other.
Not all women, not all the time, but the idea that female social spaces are inherently supportive is a fantasy. Anyone who’s survived middle school knows this. Anyone who’s worked in a female-dominated office knows this. The hierarchies are real, the competition is real, and the mechanisms of enforcement (exclusion, reputation destruction, strategic withdrawal of warmth) are often more sophisticated than male equivalents precisely because they’re less visible.
There’s a reason the phrase “women are their own worst enemies” has survived as a cliché for decades.
Which brings me to Mean Girls. The movie that was meant to be a comedy, but also functions as a documentary.
The film worked because it named something everyone recognized but rarely said out loud, which is that female social aggression is real, it’s strategic, and it can be devastating. Regina George doesn’t throw punches because she doesn’t need to. She controls the social reality of everyone around her through information, access, and the selective distribution of approval. This is power, and pretending women don’t wield it against each other is either naive or dishonest, or both.
Rosalind Wiseman’s Queen Bees and Wannabes—the book Mean Girls was based on—documented these dynamics extensively. Girls form hierarchies. They enforce norms through relational aggression. They punish defection with social death. This is standard human social behavior showing up in female form. The only unusual thing is how committed we are to pretending it doesn’t exist.
☆
The “girls support girls” framework requires this denial because acknowledging female-on-female competition would undermine the premise. If women hurt each other, then women can’t be understood purely as victims of male oppression. If women have power over each other, then “the patriarchy” isn’t a sufficient explanation for female suffering. If women sometimes choose to undermine other women for personal advantage, then sisterhood isn’t a natural state requiring only that men get out of the way, it’s a political project requiring women to act against their own immediate interests.
And here’s the thing that might really piss some of you off: sometimes it’s rational not to support another woman.
If her values conflict with yours, solidarity requires you to betray your own positions. If she’s simply wrong—about a fact, a strategy, a decision—“supporting” her means lying. The demand for unconditional support treats women as so fragile that they can’t handle disagreement, so incompetent that they need protection from criticism, and so interchangeable that their individual qualities don’t even matter.
How is this not condescending?
☆
One enforcement mechanism for “girls support girls” is the “pick me” accusation.
If you’re a woman who disagrees with feminist orthodoxy, you’re a “pick me.” A term they’ve deemed to mean a woman who criticizes other women to gain male approval. If you hold men and women to the same standards, you’re a “pick me.” If you acknowledge that women have agency and therefore responsibility for their choices, you’re a “pick me.” The term exists to foreclose disagreement by attacking motive rather than argument. You’re not wrong, you’re a traitor! You’re not reasoning differently, you’re simply performing for men.
This is a kafkatrap. If you deny being a “pick me,” that’s exactly what a “pick me” would say. If you argue that your position is based on evidence or principle, you’re told you’ve internalized misogyny so deeply you can’t even see it. The game is rigged so that any deviation from the approved script confirms the accusation.