The Invisible Standard: Male centrism within the experience of womanhood.

 Sarah Leading Abraham to Hagar—Matthias Stom, 1632

Have you ever been called “crazy” by another woman– or caught yourself saying this? What if that judgement isn’t really yours, but something shaped by invisible standards rooted in the patriarchal values we’ve unconsciously absorbed? What if she actually isn’t, “Pretty… but nuts”, and you’ve just accidentally subscribed to an ideology you probably don’t want a part of?

Full transparency, I think that there has most definitely been a couple of points in my life where I can admit– I’d fallen victim to a similar mentality. Retrospectively, I’ve come to understand that breaking out of this mould takes a while and oftentimes, a wake-up call from observers around you can help with this. My role in this article is not to berate you for your opinions on another woman, but to push the alternative of reflection rather than violent rebuttal.

When pondering on the content for this piece, I tried with all my might to visualise anything but my personal experiences with fellow women who had expressed such a viewpoint. Alas, I came to the reasonable conclusion that such content ceases to exist if I had not witnessed them myself. Let me explain; we, as a society, prioritise the pursuit of progression in terms of equitable opportunities being made available to both genders. Yet, this view can sometimes fatally discount the idea that perhaps it is not material pursuits we are seeking equality for, but rather our emotional viewpoints toward one another.

As women, a large chunk of us have been trained since adolescence to consider the perspective of the male in each and every decision we make– if we need to look a certain way to be deemed attractive by men, or if we need to assert our presence in male-dominated fields to highlight how we are just as good as them, if not better. Emotionally, we maintain subservience– to debunk the idea that we are highly volatile and care far too much. These are all things we have grown accustomed to in a man’s world, but it truly makes me wonder; what are we doing to impress one another instead?

‘Sycophantic behaviour’, or more informally, brown-nosing, refers to the act of excessively flattering or aligning oneself with another person in order to gain favour or advantage. This may manifest, for instance, in situations where one person (often a woman) prioritises and strongly defends a man they perceive to be innocent in potentially scandalous circumstances, sometimes at the expense of another woman involved in the same situation. It can also describe a dynamic in which a woman appears to value male approval over safeguarding another woman’s reputation, assuming ceteris paribus and that neither woman is aware of the other’s existence.

I happen to find this term oddly efficient, because it neatly captures a behaviour that would otherwise require several paragraphs of social analysis: the quiet (or sometimes audaciously loud and annoying), almost automatic tendency to side with male approval over female solidarity. Not always out of malice, but often out of habit, conditioning, or the subtle belief that proximity to male validation is somehow a scarce and valuable resource.

In that sense, it’s less about individual ‘spinelessness’ and more about a system that has, quite cleverly, taught women to compete where they might have collaborated– and to defend where they might have questioned.

Now, at this point, I know I've undeniably offended some of you. It’s okay, I’ll put the mirror down and we can just talk– play nice. I’m not a misandrist. I happen to love men. So there are most definitely exceptions to this demographic! There are men who deserve to be defended, but those are likely the ones who would never enable such aggressive bullying towards women in the first place. They are gracious, they are kind and they are…. real… I hope?

Judith beheading Holofernes—Artemesia Gentileschi, 1620

Shock factor aside, I assume that such a boldly painted picture can seem daunting to unpack– even I find myself asking the same relevant question of: Am I guilty of this? To that, I then raise you this horrifyingly neutral piece of advice my own old man had given me: When in doubt on what to do, do nothing at all. Maliciousness is not only fuelled by one’s innate motherly desire to protect, but it also stems from personal offence being taken. Two women– who in the grand scheme of things, owe nothing to the other in any sort of way– can simply learn to coexist in spite of millions of factors that may pit them against one another.

Who cares if she’s dating your ex? She's done nothing to you personally. Put the knife down, she hasn’t been in your life in almost 2 years. Why are our versions of loyalty so heavily fortressed? Men don’t nearly care as much about these things, so could we possibly learn to do the same? Not to be more like them, but to like one another a little more?

I ask you, who set this system up? It wasn’t us, it never was. Even when there’s pre-existing tension, we ought to be able to pause and ask what exactly we’re fuelling when we escalate things further. Is it about validation, or is it about revenge? Neither is particularly noble, and both tend to cost more than they’re worth.

Because at some point, it stops being about the original issue altogether and starts becoming a performance– one where the loudest reaction feels like the most justified one. In that performance, it’s all too easy to lose sight of who actually benefits from the chaos, and who simply gets caught in it.

What would it look like, then, to refuse the script entirely? To see another woman not as competition, collateral, or a convenient villain, but as someone equally burdened by a set of rules neither of you wrote. Maybe the real act of rebellion is not grand, glamorous, or even particularly visible. Perhaps it is simply choosing not to participate in the cruelty. Choosing discernment over spectacle, reflection over reaction, and dignity over the cheap thrill of being chosen by a system that was never built with us in mind.

The truth is, calling a woman “crazy” has rarely ever been a neutral observation. More often, it has been a socially acceptable way of disciplining her for being inconvenient, emotional, wounded, loud, misread, or simply unlikeable in a way men have long been permitted to be. When women then echo that language without interrogating where it came from, we do more than insult one another, we help keep alive the very structure that has diminished all of us.

This is not a plea for all women to be saints, best friends, or blindly loyal to one another. It is something far more realistic, actually; a plea to be more conscious. To ask, before we mock, dismiss, or side-eye another woman, whose approval we are really chasing and what exactly we gain by offering one another up so easily. If we are serious about progress, then surely that progress must include the way we speak about women when no men are in the room, and especially when they are.

If the patriarchy taught women to mistrust one another, then I fear we’ve been remarkably obedient students.