Cat Fight

In movies such as The Devil Wears Prada, 27 Dresses, Legally Blonde, Two Weeks Notice, Drive Me Crazy and Mean Girls, we see women treating other women disrespectfully and being catty towards one another.
The movie Mean Girls, for example, is about Mean Girls in high school (hence the title Mean Girls). The girls in the film are constantly backstabbing each other and talking about each other using derogatory words towards each other. One group of girls, known as "the plastics," have a book, in which they write mean things about every girl in school (scene is pictured on left). Many of the things are lies and end up getting people in trouble or hurting their self-confidence.

In the movie Two Weeks Notice, Mr. Wade (Hugh Grant), the male protagonist, and the client of Lucy (Sandra Bullock), the female protagonist, is getting a divorce. At the settlement meeting between the ex-wife and Mr. Wade, the ex-wife calls Lucy a "stupid bimbo"; thus women call each other names that validate hegemonic ideas placed upon femininity. "Women have very negative self-concepts, when asked to select adjectives to describe themselves, they select such terms as, uncertain, anxious, nervous, hasty, careless, fearful, dull, childish, helpless, sorry, timid, clumsy, stupid, silly and domestic,'" (Campbell 400) and when women call other women terms such as "stupid bimbo" they are only affirming this type of discourse in themselves and forming this type of conceptual idea about women in our culture. This is derogatory, because women then become their own worst enemies. If in movies, we act a certain way based on the discourse society has set out for us, then women are confirming this feminine discourse and showing society they (as women) approve of it.

In The Devil Wears Prada, two co-workers compete against each other to move up the totem pole in their work place. In one scene the main character Andy (played by Anne Hathaway), steals the opportunity of a lifetime from her coworker by backstabbing her even though the co-worker has worked so hard for the position. The cattiness between women sows a seed in our culture that women can't get along with each other adding to the idea that women don't support each other but instead fight. This goes against the feminist idea of having unity between the feminine gender in order to fight the male patriarchy and thus puts down women by further instilling the idea that women can't be civil with one another.


Image of Women		Derogatory