Lend me your eyes, I can change what you see.

There are very few women among us who haven’t personally experienced the “rush” that comes from putting another woman down. If we are honest, we have to admit the pleasure of feeling “on top,” superior, right for a change, after a lifetime of being viewed and treated as hopelessly stupid and wrong. Some of us can hardly get enough of this bogus freedom, this elation. The inherent rewards are feelings of being powerful, as well as of being “on the right side,” which unconsciously means the men’s side against women; the momentary feeling of not being like other women, not being a woman at all, not a slave like them, removed from the degradation of our caste altogether; the incredibly heady feeling of escape from the bondage of our gender. 

The instant enough of us break this habit among ourselves, however, patriarchy will begin to wither. We must therefore take this ugly and ubiquitous phenomenon seriously, each one of us, and begin studying in our own lives how to stop getting our kicks from hurting one another. One sure way to at least disrupt this pattern is to refuse to give our co-addicts the fix, remembering that everything depends on breaking our own habit and on not feeding other women’s addictions. Whatever we do, we must learn never to give the expected, typical response. 

I believe women can love one another, can cooperate, can trust, can, in short, rise above our conditioning. I believe we are ready to practice what we know -that as we build one another up and rejoice in the achievement and triumphs, in the gifts and beauties of other women, we ourselves grow more gifted, beautiful, and strong. I believe that as we do this, we will forge a sisterhood so mighty that nothing in the world can stop us. This is my dream. It is a dream in which we each remember that every woman born is us.”