Hmm. This is interesting because I’ve been accused of being a ‘woman who doesn’t like women’ as have many of my female friends and none of us are!
What I’ve found is that there is one very dominant strand of female socialisation which a big mass of women go through. They are close to their Mum’s and have a group of female friends throughout school and their outlook remains predominantly female throughout their lives and they prioritise their relationships with women even above those with their partner. They seem to internalise a lot of messages about what they think ‘decent women’ should be like and tend to have a highly codified standards of behaviour and expectations of how women should be have. These tend towards never appearing to be clever, false modesty (which they expect to be rewarded by affirmations of how great they are when they display it, being caring and preoccupied with emotions, and most importantly prioritising the females close to them above all others and supporting them 100% no matter how badly they behave. An example of this is that if a friend complains to you about a relationship with someone outside your circle of friends, a female colleague, a husband or boyfriend or mother in law - you must never, ever give objective advice which seeks to see the problem from both sides and offer a solution. You must only sympathise, tell them what an awful bastard the other person is, encourage a victim mentality and egg them on with any nastiness or vengefulness. They do also have a tendency to discuss things which are stereotypically female like emotions, relationships, children, beauty etc.
Which is fine. Everyone is different and horses for courses and all that. The problem is that sort of woman frequently thinks that their way of being a woman is the proper way and any woman who doesn’t behave like that is transgressing and deserves hostile behaviour.
So if you were someone socialised a bit differently: you had lots of older brothers and weren’t close to your mum; you were the quiet geeky girl with one close female friend that you talked to about science and books or you were football nuts and hung around with the other tomboys from the school team or boys: they really, really don’t like that and react with hostility and nastiness.
So obviously if you’re someone on the receiving end of that you learn to avoid that sort of woman. I know their are groups of women at work I don’t want to socialise with. I know they will want me to join in with a bitching session about Donna with accounts and when I don’t I’ll be seen as a snooty superior cow who doesn’t value the group dynamics.
So I avoid women like that. I don’t associate with them. But, because they are so convinced that they have the monopoly on the ‘right’ or ‘decent’ way to be female, they believe a rejection of women like themselves is a rejection of all women. But it’s not. It’s a rejection of women like them.
I tend to find females I get on with more difficult to find as they tend to be less visible, less keen to grasp onto other women in social situations and quite simply there’s less of them around. So sometimes I will gravitate towards men in social situations just because many of the women there are not my cup of tea. That means I get labelled as a woman hater - but I’m really not. I have some very close, valued female friends. I just choose not to spend time with women who have a very narrow and stereotypes view of what a woman should be.
I don’t hate women in general, I just hate that many other women put so much pressure on other women to conform to their expectations and attack them if they don’t.