Chapter 39 - Why Are Women So Mean to Each Other? It's Time We Talk About It.

Why Are Women So Mean to Each Other? It's Time We Talk About It.

Women have fought for generations to earn respect, equality, and a seat at the table. So why are so many of us still tearing each other down instead of lifting each other up?

In this heartfelt episode of Burn It Down and Begin Again, Erica tackles one of the most painful realities of modern life—female bullying, online cruelty, and the silent competition that too often exists between women. Inspired by a real-life social media incident, she explores why insecurity, comparison, and unresolved wounds can cause women to attack the very people who should be their greatest allies.

Drawing from psychology, personal experience, and powerful real-world stories, Erica discusses the Queen Bee Syndrome, social comparison, cyberbullying, body shaming, and why another woman's success is never a threat to your own. She also shares why kindness is a choice, how small moments shape who we become, and what it truly means to be a "girl's girl."

If you've ever been judged, bullied, compared yourself to another woman, or wondered why women sometimes struggle to support one another, this episode is an invitation to choose a different path.

Because another woman's light doesn't dim yours.

It simply proves that there's enough room for all of us to shine. 

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Transcript

Erica 0:00

Women have fought for everything the right to work, the right to be taken seriously, the right to take up space. We have clawed our way into boardrooms, into operating rooms, onto stages, into every arena that told us we didn't belong. And after all of that fighting, some of us have decided to spend our free time on social media tearing each other apart in comment sections. I need someone to explain that to me because I genuinely don't understand it. And today we're going to try. Welcome to Burn It Down and Begin Again, because sometimes the only way out is through the fire. I'm Erica, and this is my story, told one chapter at a time. Not to relive the pain, but to reclaim the power that was buried beneath it. I share it boldly because I know I'm not the only one. Too many of us carry stories like mine of trauma, silence, survival, and shame alone. But healing isn't just about surviving what hurt us. It's about becoming the women we were meant to be, how we can transform pain into purpose, rebuild a life on our own terms, and show what is possible when we rise to the strongest version of ourselves. If you hear yourself in my words, know this. You're not crazy, you're not broken, and you're definitely not alone. This podcast is part of Czechology: real women, real stories, and real transformation. We're here to break cycles, rise higher, and create lives that radiate power, purpose, and passion. So if you've walked through hell and you're ready to grow, evolve, and rebuild, then stay with me. There's hope here, there's healing here, and there's an army of us rising with you. Now, let's begin. Hello, guys. Welcome back to Burn It Down and Begin Again. This is Erica. If you are new, welcome. If you're an old hat here, we're glad you're here also. Sorry guys, I know that this is late. My daily real life is getting in the way of so many different things. I'm busy, I just don't know how to squeeze it all in. But uh anyway, here I am, a couple days late. And uh, real quick, if this is your first time, let me tell you what this space is. Burn it down and begin again is a part of gecology, and that's a community that's built for real women having real conversations about real transformation. We talk about rebuilding, we talk about starting over, finding your path when you have no idea where you're going. We cover absolutely everything here: concepts, manifestation, motivation, health, relationships, or just living our best lives in general. This is your support system. This is the place where the women who feel lost, overlooked, or like you're starting something too late can come in and be reminded that you are none of those things. And if you've been here a while, you know I don't sugarcoat and I don't perform. And if you're new, welcome to the unfiltered version of my life and hopefully yours. And before we go anywhere else, just take a moment and leave me a rating, uh, some stars on whatever platform you're on. Drop me a comment. It really matters, guys, because the algorithm responds to engagement, and that's how more women are gonna find us, and that's how we grow this community. So if you could do that for me, you know I appreciate your time more than you know. All right, so let's get into it. Today we are gonna be talking about women who are bullies. There was something that happened to me recently, uh, something that was kind of brought to my attention. I was really kind of shocked by it, uh, where a woman that I know on social media was being a bully to another woman, and I never would have expected that from her. And if she's listening to this, I don't know if she listens to my podcast, but she'll know who she is. And not to call her out publicly, but to call her out publicly. Hey, when you've got a social media platform, especially when there are people that are following you and you have a large amount of followers, you are setting an example for other women. Somebody that I know not super well. We don't hang out, but we definitely travel in the same social circles. Who has a really good uh Instagram and TikTok following made a comment on Instagram that my daughter brought to me, and I was very shocked by the comment that she made towards another woman. As women, we need to stick up for each other. We need to be, and what is it about women that we get weirdly competitive or we're just fucking bitches to one another? I see that all the time. And so that's what I wanted to talk about today because I think that it's so important that we teach our kids, our daughters, that women are meant to be celebrated and we are meant to back each other up. And I think it's so important that we pass this along, especially to our daughters. Women need to stick together because we have fought so long and so hard to get to where we're at. And when I see stuff like that, it makes me sad. But before we get into it, I do want to talk about my challenge of the week. So if you guys have been following me, you know that I was sick and out of work for 49 days, which I never believed in a million years would happen to me. I'm such a healthy person and it just knocked me on my ass. I'm back to work and it's been challenging, I gotta tell you, because I went from being at home really doing nothing except for just resting for a long time. And then gradually, you know, I started towards the end rebuilding my stamina, getting out and taking a walk with my dog or doing a little bit of exercise or just doing more around the house stuff, but it did not prepare me for going back to the job that I have, which is such a busy on-your-feet job. I'm in sales and I'm juggling a lot of different stuff, and I love what I do, but definitely has knocked me out. So go out and take my little naps on my lunch break. It's a half an hour, but it helps me a lot versus eating. I'm like, okay, I'm just gonna go nap. But I've been coming home and sleeping for nine and a half to ten hours every night and still sometimes needing a nap on my days off. So I've definitely been getting back into the swing of things, and that's been a challenge. But the other big thing is I really switched gears. Being off work made me realize that as much as I love my job, it is just not who I am ultimately. I have other avenues that I am pursuing, and I told you guys about Take Us With You when Elise was on a couple weeks ago, but that's really taken off for us. Uh, we have an Amazon channel attached to it. Uh, we also have been picked up by some other affiliates, booking Viator. We're doing TikTok go. And these are all avenues to make money, and we're working as a partnership. Plus, I have my own Amazon channel, and I really realized uh being home that I can just live a better life for myself if I'm not working that nine to five grind. And I want to step out of that, and so I'm manifesting that for myself. So the challenge for me is not only going back to work physically and mentally and doing the extra workload, putting out that high output uh sales, but also knowing that my heart is really somewhere else now. So I am beginning to use my drive in the morning to manifest certain things, and of course, in the morning when I get up and I'm really already living in a different plane of existence, knowing that I have a timeline for myself, but that job for me is going to be something of my past in the not so distant future. And I'm I'm giving it a year to two years where I will hopefully be able to leave and just make money on my own, which would be great. Got a new manifestation board, my vision board up there, and I've there's all kinds of things I'm super excited about, but it does also require me working a lot. I'll work hours before I even go to work on all the social media content before I go in and put a full day in. And being 56, I'm proud of myself that I can do that, but it is a sacrifice because man, there's other things I'd like to be doing. And for example, I'm sitting in my messy room. There's like house stuff that needs to get done too. Something's gotta give, right? And so I just am trying to juggle it all and put it all together. And uh that's my challenge of the week. So let's get into today's topic: women who are bullies. So, as I kind of teased earlier, I had this thing happen to me where my daughter comes in with a screenshot. And this is somebody that we both know personally. We've been to parties and things like this. And this gal who I really do like and respect, she has lost tons of weight. She's rebuilt her body, she has made a social media following for herself. She's in bikini contests now in her 40s. She's just living her best life. And she has some fun content that she puts out, kind of flaunting that look and the changes that she's made, some before and after stuff. And I've just been so uh impressed and uh happy for her that she's been able to do this. So, as I said, she's transformed her body through exercise and clean eating. She's a big advocate of peptides too, which, as you guys know, is very much a part of my world. And so I've always felt that kind of kinship and connection with her. She also tends to be very positive. She posts a lot of stuff that I really relate to about manifestation. Her content following has really grown. So my daughter comes to me with a screenshot and she's like, Mom, have you seen this? And, you know, I don't troll social media, but it popped up. There's this random video that's going around, which had nothing to do with this person that I'm talking about, where a random woman is talking to her mailman and asked the mailman not to walk across her lawn when delivering her mail. And it was basically because of the mailman's uh reaction that this kind of went viral. But the mailman he didn't take it well and threw the mail on the ground and basically pitched a fit, and a security camera caught the whole thing. That's the video. That's all that it was about. And you can see in the video that there are some free weights just sitting on the ground kind of by this woman on her lawn, just weights, you know, completely irrelevant to anything going on in that video. And this person who I've been talking about, this this friend of mine, someone who's done this work, knows her own body and her own life and exactly what it feels like to be judged for her size, comments on this video why don't you just shut up, Fatty, and pick up those weights instead? That's the comment, word for word. And I was shocked. And I wasn't just shocked, I was angry, you know, because this is someone who has built a platform on transformation, on knowing that struggle, on knowing that pain. And she aimed this mean comment at a complete stranger whose only crime was having a disagreement with her mail carrier, and she had some weights next to her, right? The woman in the video, like I said, she wasn't even particularly overweight, just a little bit, you know. Not that it would matter if she were. I mean, who are we to make comments that are so random like that for people? So it had nothing to do with reality, that comment. It was just cruelty for sport. So, and I'm not a psychologist and I'm not here to build a clinical profile of anyone, but what I am doing is using both of these things, that story and the comment, as a jumping off point for a conversation that I think is long overdue because this is about a pattern, and this pattern is everywhere, right? So let's zoom out. The internet has given everyone a megaphone, and a lot of people are using that megaphone to just be cruel to strangers for absolutely no reason. Trolling has become normalized, like it's part of the landscape now, and we're supposed to just accept it as a cost of being online. And I do not accept that, and I don't think you should either. What I do want to focus on specifically today is why women are doing this to other women, because that's the part that I really can't let go of. I think we should be each other's champions. We marched, we organized, we fought for the right to be in rooms that were never designed for us. And we're still fighting, guys, for equal pay, for bodily autonomy, for the basic right to be taken seriously in a world that has historically treated us as an afterthought. And in the middle of all of that, in the middle of all that fighting, some of us are still spending energy tearing each other apart on social media for sport. These are women who are posting their lives, posting their bodies, their joy, and being met with commentary from other people, including and especially other women who have decided that their existence is up for critique. And that's what I want to talk about. So let's talk about the psychology of why women compete with one another. There is a concept in social psychology called the Queen Bee syndrome. And it literally describes something uncomfortable. You know, women who have worked incredibly hard to get somewhere can become the harshest critics of other women. The theory is that when you've sacrificed enormously for something, you can unconsciously resent anybody who seems to have it easier, or you protect what you've built by making sure that nobody else gets close to it. Research also shows that women tend towards what's called indirect aggression, social undermining, public humiliation, exclusion, more than direct confrontation. It goes underground. It comes out sideways in comment sections in a drive-by comment about a stranger's weight on a video that has nothing to do with weight, right? And then there's the competition piece. And I want to talk about that specifically because I think it shows up in ways that we don't necessarily recognize. Competition between women isn't always loud or obvious. Sometimes it's very silent. And I've seen this happen so many times. You know what I'm talking about. You have a friend or a colleague or someone who you follow online who seems to be doing really well, and outwardly you're happy for her. You say the right things and you might even mean them, but there's this quiet thing happening underneath where you're constantly measuring yourself against that person, comparing, right? Tracking where she is versus where you are. And I think that's human nature. It's not just with women. We all do that, but we start to feel a little twinge of something when somebody else, uh, maybe that's close to our peer status, announces something that's a win. And maybe we don't feel so successful in that area of our life or in our life in general at that moment in time. And so we have to throw on a little dig. It's something that we don't feel good about, we don't want to admit it, but it's definitely there. And that is that competition. It's silent and internal, and it's totally corrosive, you guys. I mean, not just to the woman who's getting commented on or targeted, but to you as a person as the one who's doing the targeting. Psychologists suggest that this kind of social comparison is deeply ingrained and actually starts off early with both men and women, but girls specifically are socialized to evaluate their worth relative to other girls around them. Um looks, things like their grades, popularity, who likes them, who doesn't. By the time we're adults, that comparison mechanism is so automatic we didn't even notice that we're running that program. We just feel the output, right? The twinge, the resentment, the quiet deflation when somebody else is already getting the things that we wanted and we're not there yet. And what that silent competition can turn into when it goes unchecked, it turns into a need to diminish oftentimes, unless we're really, really aware of it, to comment, to take up space and somebody else's joy in a way that makes you feel like you're evening the invisible score somehow. And that's where cruelty comes from, guys, not strength from insecurity that never got addressed. And I say this without judgment because I think most of us have been in that version of ourselves. But the difference is what are we gonna do about it when we recognize that we're doing it? The comment that was there, it just doesn't disappear when you close the app. It stayed in my head. And that woman, if she was reading the comments in the mailman video, maybe she'll say it, maybe she won't. But if she does, she's probably gonna carry it for years. Those things hurt. Studies on cyberbullying uh consistently show that it produces anxiety, depression, social withdrawal, and lasting damage to how people see themselves, especially when a lot of us don't really have big social circles anymore. Our social circle is social media for a lot of people. It is this lasting damage on how people see themselves. Just that little comment can do that to us. The public nature of it amplifies everything, right? So even though the people reading it don't know you, if you're the one that's getting targeted, they're sniggering at you behind your back. And so it becomes this thing that we feel like we need to withdraw from. Something when a person is being mean in front of an audience, that shame multiplies. I did want to give a real quick shout out to somebody whose content I've been following and who I think has really contributed to part of why I decided to record this episode. He's a guy. His name is James Capola. I could be pronouncing it wrong, Cap Capola, I think it is. You can find him by that name on Instagram at James and then underscore, and the last name is spelled C-A-P-P-O-L-A. He is a health and fitness coach that uses his platform to not only promote health and fitness, but to call out the bullying and trolling of women online, whether it be by men or women. And so he reposts videos of stories of women being publicly humiliated, and he speaks out against it. And I love that channel because I think we need more of that. Some of what he shares is really actually hard to watch. Uh, one story in particular stopped me completely, and this was actually done by a man, but a woman posted about a night out for her birthday, and she's with her girlfriends at some busy bar, she's having drinks, she's celebrating, and then she recognizes that she is the heavier girl in the group, and she refers to herself that way as she's telling the story. So there's there's this table of guys next to them, and she notices that they're talking about the group. And one of these guys gets up and walks specifically over to her and starts making conversation to her. And she's really caught off guard. This never happens to her. She's never the one that gets approached, especially in the middle of all of her really spelt girlfriends, right? And she has this whole internal debate. She describes, is this real? Should I engage? You know, uh, why is he doing this? And this guy asks for her number. So she thinks, you know, to herself, why not? The second she writes down her number and gives it to him, I swear this is what she describes in the video. The guy turns around, shouts back to his friends, and says, Hey, you guys owe me 50 bucks. And then he says to them, See, I told you fat chicks are always easy, and walks away laughing, and the entire group starts laughing. This was on her birthday. I couldn't believe that story. And she shared it bravely on social media. And so, James, this guy James, reposted it and had some commentary about it. But it made me really fucking mad, you know, at every single person, uh, that guy and all of his buddies who thought that that was entertainment and that a human being's humiliation was worth what? What did they get out of that? The point is, bullying in general seems to be something that happens a lot in this society. And a lot of us are burning through our precious energy, using it to put down other people. So, what bothers me more than anything else is the fact that women are doing it. Because you know, guys, they can be assholes, whatever. But I'm concerned about as women, how do we treat one another? We should be supporting each other, you guys. We should be backing each other up. We should be taking the time to lift each other up. The gap between the public persona and the private behavior is pretty big right now. A lot of us want to seem like we are good people, but we'll do things behind the scenes when we think people aren't watching that are shameful. The transformative content, the positive stories that we post, health journey that we share so openly and bravely, and then we turn around and we're an asshole to the woman standing next to us. And I'm not saying that one moment defines a person's entire character forever. People are complicated, I know that, but I just think it was odd that this person that I knew just randomly, when she knows what it's like to be heavy, she knows what it feels like to be invisible. Why would she do that? Why would she just randomly be an asshole to somebody she doesn't know? So I am calling her out, and I'm calling all of you guys out. Integrity isn't something that you post on your main feed when everybody's watching. It is what you do when you think that nobody is watching. The room was not empty. My daughter was in that room on social media, and then she brought it to me, and now I know, and now I can't really look at that person the same way anymore. It changed how I feel about her. That admiration and that, like, wow, she's done such a great thing. That dialogue in my head now is like, she's a mean person. She's mean. So, what do we do instead, guys? It's not complicated. We just make it complicated. You know, we see a woman win, we need to be genuinely happy for her. Not performatively happy, but I'm talking about actually happy. Leave a kind comment. Guys, I'm always doing that. And not because I'm a stellar person. I am supportive of people. I would never dream of just randomly being mean to somebody for no reason. It's just not in me because one, I care about how other people feel and how I might affect them. I don't know what's going on in their life or what their story's about. I mean, would I be mean if I see somebody being mean? Yeah, and honestly, I had half a mind to comment on that, but I chose not to because I thought, man, we travel on the same social circles. So this was my way of calling her out in the odd chance that she's listening. I've I wanted to call her out, you know. You have to catch yourself, guys, in that silent moment of comparison, that competitive thing that runs underneath for your happiness for somebody. You have to remind yourself that you are every bit as important as the person standing next to you, and vice versa. We need to lift each other up, especially as women. What is it that you actually want for yourself that you're measuring against the woman standing next to you? Because that's the real question. And that twinge isn't really about her, it's about you. And you deserve to address it directly with yourself instead of letting it quietly poison your mind. The way you show up for other women around you matters, guys. Being a girl's girl isn't a vibe or an aesthetic. It's a decision that you make in small moments when nobody's applauding you for it. Another woman's success is not a threat to your success. Her body is not your commentary section, and her joy is not your competition. One thing I am super proud of is my girls, my two girls are girls girls. They are fierce friends. They have a group of women friends that they stick with, that they stand up for, that they would fiercely defend. And I am so proud that I raised girls like that. Girls that actually take the time to stand up for the women in their life and would not tolerate for one second somebody being a bully. I gotta tell you a story. My oldest daughter, I was with her when this happened. Now, it was a a guy that who happened to be in this story, but this is the kind of woman that I'm talking about. You know, this was a couple years back, so she's pretty young. We're in Some kind of a drugstore. We're standing in line. There's a woman behind the counter. There's a line of people, and there's a a guy at the counter, and then there's a guy behind him, and then there's us. And so the guy in front of us, directly in front of us, starts lambasting the woman as he gets up to the counter about how long she took. I mean, he was being really, really mean and just ripping her apart. And she was just trying to, you could tell she was really intimidated. This guy was just taking out whatever was inside of him and this poor girl. And my daughter literally said, Hey, who do you think you are talking to her like that in front of all these people? She just spoke up. She goes, You know what? You're a jerk. You need to keep your mouth shut. There's other people behind you. We don't want to listen to this. You leave that woman alone. And I was like, damn. And he looked at her and I was getting ready to say something too. And if he said anything back to her. But that was my daughter's moment. I didn't say anything. And he didn't answer either. He just kind of shut up and went on about his business and got out of there. And when we got up to the counter, the woman had silver in her eyes, the tears lined her eyes. And she said, thank you to my daughter. That's what I'm talking about. We need to be that way as women for one another, guys. Every day we get to decide what kind of woman we're going to be. Not in like a grand declaration, but in the comment we leave or that we don't leave. How we talk to other women and what we say about them when they're not in the room. That woman in the video deserved better. And the woman at the bar on her birthday deserved better. Every woman who is just out here trying to carry what she's carrying deserves better than having to fight with somebody randomly, adding to the weight of her life. I know this was a short one today, guys, but I wanted to just say if you are one of those women who are a bully, stop it. Just stop it. You know who you are. Take your time, guys, to lift the women in your life up. And not just the women that you know personally. I'm talking about maybe online you see somebody struggling and they're heavy as hell, but they've lost 10 pounds. Leave a nice comment for that woman. It took guts to get out there and put themselves on social media feeling not great about themselves, right? I'm here to start a conversation today because we cannot keep doing this as women to one another. We're too strong for this. We're too good for this. We have fought way too hard for this. And we are absolutely better than this. I think that it's time that we all start living our lives to be living proof of that. Thanks, guys, for being with me this week. I genuinely appreciate you. Again, I'm sorry this episode is late and I'm sorry it's short, but I'm trying to balance everything in my life. Here's your uh reminder go out and be nice to everybody this week, not just the women in your life, but every single person that you come into contact with. Do not forget that you are a beacon and your life can change people. Your kindness, opening the door, a kind word. You don't know what it does for the guy that's receiving it. Maybe they're having a horrible time. Maybe they feel like giving up. Maybe we don't know, right? Take your time to lift people up and be constructive instead of being an asshole. And that's what I hope you'll do this week. Thanks for being here and holding this part of my story with me. If today's episode resonated with you, please don't stay in silence. Share it with someone who might need to hear it. And if you're walking through your own fire right now, know this you are not too broken, you are not too late, and you are never ever alone. This is Burn It Down and Begin Again. I'm Erica, and I will see you in the next chapter.