Women. Too often we define ourselves solely based on our appeal to men. And in the name of furthering that appeal, we do more damage to each other than we allow men to.
In China, female relatives used to bind their daughters' feet to make them more attractive to men. Are men blameless in this? Of course not. The foot-binding initially had to be a male idea, since only a man would think that having a wife unable to walk gave him more status. But the crime was always perpetrated by women. (The modern equivalent, of course, is the high heel... which exaggerates the line of the female leg, but also hobbles a woman and makes her unable to run or defend herself adequately, all while causing a great deal of pain to the woman involved. Yeah, we haven't come that far, have we?)
In Africa, female relatives mutilate the genitals of young girls... once again, in order to make them more attractive to men. Of course, the initial idea of making a woman's enjoyment of sex nonexistent in order to keep her from sexually straying had to be a male one, but the mutilation is done by the well-meaning women... never by the men.
In the modern world, women are "catty" to each other. They back-stab and compete, all for the attention of men. When a woman doesn't dress or act up to "standards," it is the women who most often notice. It is the women who most often compete in matters of dress and manner ... all for the attention of men. I'm certainly not innocent of this -- all too often I've had resentful thoughts about a female friend because a man came between us, starting with my friend Ali's boyfriend Steve in high school and continuing to this day!
Men don't define themselves nearly as much in terms of their attraction to the opposite gender. Men who hit their 30's still single aren't considered "over the hill" or "doomed to be single for life," but women often are.
Not only that, but the whole concept of "he's just not that into you" exists for a reason. All too often, men are with women for convenience, and the women put up with it because they feel that somehow they aren't worth anything if they're single. They put up with less than they deserve out of a fear of being judged as single.
So, in some ways, the radical feminists of the 70's were right -- we do need to stop defining ourselves so much in terms of our relationships with men, and our attractiveness to them, and instead take pride in who we are, and in the depth of emotion and understanding that comes from a relationship with a woman -- a depth and understanding that's simply not possible with a man, not matter the compatibility, simply because of shared gender experiences and attitudes.
