Woman Informed Blog

Research by Bearman, Korobov and Thorne describe how incidents of sexism exist on a spectrum. Mundane, everyday sexism is the background of our daily lives. These everyday experiences have a profound impact on women’s mental health and relationships. One result of day-to-day sexism is the pervasiveness of women’s feelings of unworthiness and powerlessness. The source of these harmful feelings about self are often left unexamined.  

One of the dimensions of internalized misogyny identified in research conducted by Binaz Bozker in 2020 is that women devalue themselves. They judge themselves less worthy than males. When women feel they hold less value and are less worthy than their male peers, their sense of self is damaged and that may lead to feelings of incompetence and the acceptance of powerlessness.

Women’s self-targeting derogation, or value reduction, includes an internalized patriarchal sense of morality. Derogation keeps women in their place, a place that supports the disproportionate distribution of power in patriarchal systems as women believe they are exactly where they need to be and are unworthy, or unsuited, for a different position in life. This morality is oppressive in that it confines women to live within a limiting and narrow spectrum of behavior norms, creating barriers for women’s full ability for self-expression and life possibilities.

The authors of Internalized Oppression, Bearman and Amrhein, outline how in everyday conversation and situations, women’s experiences and characteristics are invalidated and trivialized. In comparison to men, patriarchal society does not value women’s values, choices, feelings, thoughts, opinions, views and preferences. When this becomes internalized, a woman does not believe in their own judgements, and she is more likely to rely on men. In this way, she abdicates her power of decision making and her life choices.

Another way that this dimension serves the aim of oppression is that when women internalize powerlessness they may self-silence their voice and avoid asserting their ideas, decisions and power. This is an obvious win for oppressors. Embodying power, being decisive and demonstrating assertiveness are traits reserved for men in patriarchal structures. There are also financial and professional consequences of internalizing these gender expectations. A woman that owns her agency traits of power and assertiveness may realize more competence and success in many professional areas, especially male dominated fields.

Women learn early that the need to be liked versus respected relates to how we hide our voice power, assertiveness and elements of self that don’t fit gender norms. Women that reject the oppression of patriarchal values asking us to act as if unworthy and powerless face social consequences. They will be perceived by people that uphold patriarchal values as less desirable. For women to be both relational and empowered, it may require she strategically seek out and maintain relationships, friendships and social networks of similarly empowered people to avoid social penalties and nurture supportive relationships that are in line with an empowered value system.

When a woman abdicates her power, she may give in to cultural pressure.  In this case, women may internalize a low expectation of their capabilities and live their life accordingly. This submission may be reflected in the full spectrum of life choices and level of conformity to gender role expectations. Women may choose careers perceived as designed primarily for females even if she has other interests and unowned talents. She may design her life in alignment with women’s expected role in society. When women do achieve, they may not own their own capabilities that contributed to success.

Patriarchal society glorifies women’s extreme self-sacrifice and may idealize renouncing, ignoring and sacrificing women’s self, desires and needs in service to men, their children and other people, even if harmful to their self, and often outside of awareness. This internalizes a loss of self. Women may justify their disadvantaged position as a “choice” as a defense strategy against feeling stigmatized.  Patriarchal approved “choices” for women lack the status, self-determination, security, economic advantages, and resources needed to be realistically and fully empowered in their life choices. Women learn that the perfect wife, mother and family member is self-sacrificing, devoted, obedient, forgiving and compassionate without the boundaries of a healthy self.

Acting as if weak, powerless and unassertive internalizes powerlessness. Leading a lifestyle that includes acting as if having extreme powerlessness, more than reality requires, confirms thoughts, actions, feelings and beliefs about personal powerlessness. Acting as if we don’t have needs, desires, opinions or boundaries confirms a weakened sense of self. Unfortunately, there is a holistic effect of this response and a vision of an alternative, more valuable, powerful and authentic self, is lost.

The values, norms, standards of behavior and hierarchies of the United States are patriarchal, and this means that all men are privileged over all women. This privilege creates harm and causes oppression. This harm is exponential for women with intersectional identities, including those that experience racism, ageism, classism, cis-genderism, and heterosexism.

Harmful patriarchal norms are so much a part of our everyday life that without intentional awareness, it may be hard to notice. This would not be an issue except that it is an issue. For groups privileged by patriarchy, it may be difficult to see that there is indeed a problem. Patriarchy has prescribed gender norms that when outside awareness, accepted and internalized, support the perpetuation of a patriarchal society, continues the cycle of oppression and has the potential to damage to all women’s physical and mental health.

Even with an understanding of how internalized oppression works to perpetuate patriarchy by instilling internalized misogyny within women, it can still be difficult to conceptualize another way of being that is better for all women and all of our society.

As a first step, people that chose to be a part of the solution may work to increase mindfulness and awareness and look deeper at generally accepted gender norms to examine the underlying factors that may support patriarchy and harm women.

Lets examine how valuing beauty and youth is a patriarchal supporting norm as it relates to the choice of a mate.

Women’s youth and beauty are valued in patriarchal society because these attributes are in service to men as their sexual partners. The acquisition of young and beautiful women also serves men’s egos as a younger partner is perceived as a status symbol. In addition, relationships with much younger women often have a power inequity. A study published in the journal, Psychological Science, Sex Differences in Mate Preferences Across 45 Countries: A Large-Scale Replication reported that men prefer attractive and young mates and women prefer older men with financial prospects. An interesting finding supports the idea that these mate choices are related to power inequality and patriarchal norms. The study found that cross-culturally, as gender equality increases, men and women both have mates closer to their own age. 

As men and women make the choice to enter these relationships with large age differentials, they may be sacrificing their future relationship satisfaction. Researchers have found that age gaps of less than 10 years increase relationship satisfaction. Another study found that marital satisfaction declines with the duration of the marriage, for both men and women in couples with larger age gaps. For women, the later dissatisfaction may impact mental health. One Korean study found that when the age gap was greater than 3 years, the severity of women’s depression increases as the gap increased by every 1-2 years.

What this research suggests is that women that chose older mates instead of their equal may do so because they have bought in to patriarchal norms regarding their own competence, agency, and power and therefore desire to trade beauty and youth for financial considerations. Men that choose younger mates may buy into the normative nature of male dominance and believe women have less value as they age.

The paradox of internalized misogyny is that women that perceive less sexism, women that don’t think sexism exists, have a higher level of internalized misogyny. Women that voice sexism-denying opinions do so based on their own perceived experience. The key here is understanding that perception does not necessarily reflect the reality of the environment. Some women claim “I am not oppressed” to make a statement of empowerment, refusing the label of victim. When reviewing the data, this view may reflect a denial of reality rather than a truly grounded and embodied sense of empowerment.

A study published in the journal Counseling Psychologist reported that internalized misogyny is an inversely related moderator of the perception of sexist microaggressions. This means that women reporting more sexist microaggressions have less internalized misogyny and women reporting less sexism have more internalized misogyny. The study offers that one possible explanation is that the perceptibility of sexist microaggressions may be masked by internalized misogyny.

This new finding is consistent with the original Feminist Identity Development Model (FID) by Downing & Roush, developed in 1985, and later research published in the Counseling Psychologist titled Perceived Sexist Events and Feminist Identity Development Attitudes: Links to Women’s Psychological Distress. This study found that women that are more progressed in their feminist identity have lower internalized misogyny and have higher awareness of sexist microaggressions.

There are a wide range of nuanced opinions on the status of sexism, misogyny and gender-based discrimination in our world. Some believe these things exist in other countries, but that women in the United States have it pretty good. Some think that these are things of the past, a history to be understood. Others think it is getting better. In the most extreme cases, women assert claims that they do not think sexism and misogyny exist. None of these beliefs are not in line with the current research on the state of sexism within our society.

While these beliefs may reflect a lack of current knowledge on the subject, they can also be understood to be a reflection of how the dynamics around sexism, misogyny and gender-based oppression have evolved and changed. Laws, human resources departments, Title IX coordinators and modern social standards of behavior have taken overt sexism underground into a more subtle, and maybe even more dangerous form. Women continue to be oppressed, causing physical and mental health damage.

Another study supporting a link between sexist beliefs, beliefs that would be found in someone with internalized misogyny, and lack of awareness was published in the Psychology of Women Quarterly, Seeing the Unseen: Attention to Daily Encounters With Sexism as Way to Reduce Sexist Beliefs. It suggests that women who endorse sexist beliefs lack awareness of the more subtle forms of sexism. They just don’t notice and when they do notice, they discount the incidents.

Internalized misogyny harms a woman’s mental health, relationships and our society. The lack of mindfulness in relation to sexism and the resulting levels of internalized misogyny in women is an important issue that needs to be addressed at multiple levels, including at an individual psychology, within our mental healthcare system, and the related issues of social justice.

The concept of patriarchy is generally understood as a set of political, social, and economic systems that privilege all men over all women. The beliefs and values of patriarchal systems undervalue the “feminine” and overvalue the “masculine.” In patriarchal systems, power, resources, and authority are distributed unevenly to ensure that men dominate.

In conversations about patriarchy, people tend to conceptualize patriarchy as an external force that resides outside an individual’s self-concept. The truth is, part of patriarchy does live externally. With awareness, we come to realize that there is also a part of it that resides within us, even if we identify as a woman. This we name as internalized patriarchy, a close relative of internalized misogyny, that may be conceptualized more broadly than misogyny and specifically as the internalization of patriarchal order. All people may experience internalized patriarchy in relation to both their feminine aspects and gender identity including cis-gendered women, trans women, non-binary people and men.

As with all aspects of the human shadow side, it is not comfortable to recognize and own personal participation in patriarchy related to internalized and unexamined oppressive norms. We are raised in a patriarchal society and few people put much thought into how this has formed our personality, values, beliefs, and behavior patterns.

For women-identified people, examining the shadow of internalized patriarchy and internalized misogyny may be especially difficult as it calls women to examine what they believe to be proper, true, right, just and moral. For many women, it is the only way they know how to be relational, even though adhering to patriarchal norms damages the ability for authentic and intimate relationships.

When a woman experiences internalized misogyny, she internalizes, assimilates, or buys into, the expectations, self-concepts, roles, and expected elements of her core identity and gender identity based on misogyny, sexism, harmful gender norms, cultural double standards, gender symbolism and societal stereotypes, consciously or not. It may seem that this order of things requires no examination as it is the way life works. However, internalized misogyny harms women’s mental health. Women may go along in life taking depression medication as a way of life. She may not question this need as 17.7% of her women friends, and if over 60, more that 24.3% of her women friends in the United States also take antidepressants. From 2009-2010 to 2017-2018 the percentage of U.S. adult women that use antidepressants increased, while use by men did not. That is just the way things are.

It is a well understood phenomenon that after long periods of oppression, targeted groups begin to internalize harmful cultural stereotypes. As oppression becomes embedded in our society, it becomes embedded in the target group’s sense of identity. This has been identified and studied in relationship to racism and is shown to have negative mental health consequences. It is considered by some as the most harmful psychological effect of oppression.

When internalized oppression becomes embedded in a woman’s sense of self, she then serves as a supporter of the self-perpetuating system of patriarchy. It is in this way that internalized oppression strengthens the oppressor and the oppressed become participants in their own subordination and the subordination of other women. Internalized oppression subjugates the mind of the oppressed. This subjugation is most often below conscious awareness.

It is important to remember that the tendency to blame women for internalized misogyny is victim blaming. Internalized misogyny is the result of domination. Once in place, it uses the oppressed to reinforce sexist cultural and relational factors, including structural systems that maintain a patriarchal order. The social order works to maintain women in this subordinate position. In this way, internalized oppression is a reinforcing factor, not the root of the oppression from which it stems.

The thinking that women are somehow responsible for their own oppression because women as a group exhibit signs of internalized misogyny has been debunked by research. A study, How Does The Internalization Of Misogyny Operate: A Thoretical Approach With European Examples, found that internalized misogyny parallels the state of gender inequality within a given society. Internalized misogyny is informed by the degree of gender domination, it does not inform it. This study concluded that the degree of women’s internalized misogyny found in a society’s women always lags behind the average level of sexist attitudes within that country.

Increasing self-awareness of internalized patriarchy and internalized misogyny, and questioning our related values, beliefs, roles, choices and behaviors is one way that all people, especially women-identified people, can resist the harmful impact of patriarchy on our relationships, physical health, mental health, and the well-being of our society and world.