For most of my life, almost every instance of emotional and physical harm I’ve experienced — in friendships, relationships platonic or romantic or familial, the classroom, the workplace, online, offline — has been chalked up to, “She’s just jealous of you.” She’s just jealous of you has been a clean and simple way of summarizing and concluding the inexplicable and unspeakable that women do. Jealousy is the solution, a kind of emotion provoking of behavior that has become socially acceptable to not warrant further inquiry or understanding; it is after all a woman’s greatest evil, memorialized in film, music, literature, art, propagated by a culture of silence.
I loved this. Such a universal feeling among women I think and always bubbling underneath the surface but never discussed.