Girls who hate girls

image via cryybaby at etsy

Today, an acquaintance of mine announced in a conversation about one girl notorious for doing fairly nasty things: 'All girls are bitches'. A female acquaintance, that is. With one disparaging sentence, she condemned half the population, leaving the rest of the girls in the conversation to raise eyebrows and glance knowingly at each other. There will always be girls who hate girls: girls who are frightened of other girls, girls who don't want to be 'like other girls', girls who believe that other girls are weak or silly. I think that this particular specimen was a mixture of all of these things: a girl of the 'ladette' variety, fixed in the belief that other girls are drama-spewing mascara machines.

It's never entirely clear what the word 'bitch' actually means, and from what angle she was approaching it. Was she referring to cattiness, the assumption that a woman can't meet another woman without planning the right moment to stab her in the back? Or did it take on a slightly weaker connotation, the idea of a 'man's bitch', a criticism of the audacity of girls to have boyfriends and sometimes cry and occasionally get emotional about shopping? Either way, she deliberately isolated herself from these so-called 'other girls', casting them as a generic hair-flicking chocolate-guzzling mass of mood-swings and betrayal.

Aside from the obvious offence I took at being directly called a bitch merely on account of having two X chromosomes, I just felt sorry for her. Because if there's one lesson I have learnt in the past few years, it's that girls need girls. Oh, I believed precisely the same as her, even as recently as last year. Long story short, a drawn-out adolescent drama occurred which left me temporarily minus a group of friends. We were all very young, we were all hopelessly attempting to grow up, and none of us were particularly well-tuned to the feelings of others. Angry, frustrated and most of all confused, I found myself isolated from Girl World. Around me, friendship groups seemed to weave tighter into each other as I approached. I discovered flirting mostly out of desperation and to my utter wonder I found myself having easy conversations. Boys were just easy to be around, I found - no need for anything complicated, to feel guilty for not having organised a shopping trip or to wonder all day about slightly ambiguous remarks. No-strings attached, quick-and-easy friendship. The sort of friendships that were the equivalent of a pot noodle over a roast dinner, perhaps, but I would rather have eaten metaphorical pot noodles for the rest of my life than starved.

Months passed. I acquired a boyfriend and started talking to his friends: an instant, blow-up friendship group. Suddenly I was instantly invited to events and my social life picked up again. I was determined to be a real part of the group, to slot in perfectly. Embittered, I savagely convinced myself that I hated my girlfriends. I was determined for them to be boring and air-headed, not worth my time. That I had Real Feelings and Real Emotions, whereas they had pale imitations of the real thing. I truly believed that I had poetically suffered loneliness and therefore had bragging rights to some sort of tragic eccentricity. From afar, I watched them have sleepovers and worry about calories and discuss the events of Made in Chelsea, and thought them shallow. I, however, had substance - I was Not Like Other Girls, I was different and special!

Only, of course, I wasn't, and I'm not. Not unlike other girls, that is. After growing up a little, I discovered the astonishing truth: that all girls have emotions just as strong as anybody else. Real love, real hate, real happiness. Even girls who are nothing like me at all: even girls who have modelesque looks, even girls who play four different sports and go running for fun. As it turns out, they were sad that I'd disappeared from their lives and I was actually completely deluding myself about this so-called hatred and I discovered the truth: that having sleepovers and counting calories doesn't make you any less of a human being, and that actually, I was no less lonely in my attempts to be a girl in a group of boys.

Sisterhood is an anguish-ridden thing that utilises those Real Emotions in the best and worst ways possible. It's a feeling of belonging, of knowing that there's no possible other place to be. Of secrets and the sharing of secrets of varying importance. Of terrible competition and debilitating jealousy and sometimes absolute infuriation, and the most ridiculous, inextricable fondness. I still haven't watched an episode of Made In Chelsea, but I'm not entirely sure I need to.