Killing Envy

How not to be consumed by jealousy for other women

A new study finds that women with bigger breasts “are more likely to experience aggression from other women who perceive them as a threat…” academics concluded. “Physical traits that are desired by men can drive tactics of intrasexual competition in women… impacting women's likelihood of engaging in rival derogation tactics, such as verbal and indirect aggression.”

LOL, same as it ever was, I thought. When I was 17, a friend called me “Saggy Tits” for a year, which, being 17, I assumed to be the simple truth about my tits, as opposed to her perceiving my bigger boobs as an existential threat to her burgeoning sexual allure and attempting to neutralise that by doing me down.

Decades have passed and nothing has changed where girl-on-girl envy is concerned - unless, of course, it has.

Because it’s got worse.

We could be said to be in the midst of an Envy Epidemic, couldn’t we? What with social media making us feel awful about lacking things we literally hadn’t even known existed until two secs ago when we scrolled the wrong way on Insta. Our inadequate hamstring definition, our inadequate table placement, our inadequate eyebrow placement ; the fact that, though we went to the right part of Puglia, we stayed in the wrong hotel, or: the right hotel, just, the wrong f**king room! And look at that smug bitch who got it right! F**k that smug bitch, who got it right! God, she’s awful, isn’t she? Also? Her tits are saggy? And her eyebrow placement is probably fake. Probably AI.

All of which would be dreadful enough - just one big, sticky mire of self-loathing and all-engulfing lesserness turned outward with no actual benefit to anyone – if it weren’t for contemporary feminism demanding we must not feel such things! Not about other women! Where’s the sisterhood? Which leads to suppression, denial, and/ or us performing some extraordinary mental gymnastics to justify our feelings, reframing them not as envy, but as righteousness. Probably even feminist righteousness. (A woman I did not know, had never met or even seen, accused me of “body shaming” her by posting a picture of myself in a bikini on the socials once. “Do you mean: you looked at me - well, a very carefully angled and lit image of me - felt bad about your own body comparatively, which triggered all sorts of  feelings of inadequacy, which you chose not to process, instead distracting yourself from your discomfort by becoming furious with some stranger off the internet instead?” I asked her.

“No. You just clearly hate other women,” she replied, then unfollowed me.

Ah, but hang on… It occurs to me that, what with my Saggy Tits story and my Bikini Selfie story, I might somehow be suggesting I myself am only ever subject to female envy - never responsible for doling any out.

F**k, no! Nothing could be further from the truth. I have been addled by envy for ever - and only ever for other women. Men? Who gives a s**t? Let them Man On with impunity. But women? Women?  They need to be stopped!

When did my lady envy first stir? Teenage, probably. As a kid, I think I mainly accepted that most other girls probably just were better than me; but by 13, 14, on getting my first whiff of the power emerging sexuality gives a gal, I pretty much simultaneously started resenting how that could be mitigated by the emerging sexuality of the gal sitting next to me at the bus stop, in class, wherever. Because I was Good With Words, I quickly understood I could undermine the status of anyone I suspected might be prettier or sexier or cooler than me, by inventing a nickname for them. I was like the Donald Trump of Mean Girls. I called one of them “Foetus Face”, a second, “Fake Tannie Annie”, a third “Maquillage” (she wore a lot of foundation, I was doing A level French and thought that tres sophisticated); they all spread among my social set, spread and stuck and how we laughed!  

I grew out of the sexual envy - mainly. Grew up, got a bloke who made me happy, got a job, a career in journalism, which satisfied me on a kajillion levels all at once… Although that in itself would bring with it, its very own jealousy issues. Epic ones.

Professional jealousy, inter-female-writer jealousy, is a whole other world of envy-related pain, isn’t it? Watching the very public ascent of other women writers, and squirming and aching and broiling and soul-shrinking with the injustice (she’s not even very good!) or the presumed unfairness (she just knows the right people!) or the accusations of plagiarism (I HAD THAT IDEA FIRST!). Having other women writers, or other women who would be writers, snipe at you from the sidelines of the internet, because it appears to them that you are ascending (though heaven knows, it never feels like that to you). It’s ghastly. Unless it’s the one thing that really keeps us going, keeps us striving, keeps us hustling?

Nah. It’s mainly just ghastly.

Oh, the bitching sessions, the WhatsApp groups I’ve formed with other women writers, so we might lament the success of that other one altogether! The nights I’ve lain awake, wondering: why her? Why did she get that cover interview, when I could have done it at least as well? Why did her book sell so phenomenally, while mine just pootled along? Why do I feel so overlooked for her, so by-passed, so also-ran; why, when I tell anyone what I do for a living, do they always always reply: “Oh, do you know who’s work I love? It’s **** *******’s! She’s so good !” The times I’ve thought: “If only I could be more vulnerable, more relatable, less spiky, less controversial in my writing… then surely I’d be as popular as INSERT NAME OF THE FEMALE COLUMNIST YOU LIKE MORE THAN ME HERE!”

Oh, it is soul rotting stuff. And we’re all pretending we don’t do it, but we all do. Don’t we? I almost applauded recently, when another writer erupted on social media, a tirade of fathomless fury, because her recently published book had not been the smash hit best seller Netflix-optioned mega force she’d anticipated, while the book of another female author, a similar-sounding proposition, published around the same time, had. It was just so f**king unfair, she raged; all the truth and time and work she’d put in, the risks she’d taken, the money she’d lost, turning down smaller pieces while gambling on this one, big one. Why that other author, and not her? Why?

All that stuff we’re supposed not to feel (but we do, we all do), and we’re definitely not supposed to say out loud (but she had).

Equally, I’ve felt it, the professional envy of other women, the lack of comprehension regarding any success I may have had. I had the misfortune to gain a boost in profile, to get my first job on a national newspaper, while still being a relatively young woman - not a thing other women live with comfortably, let me tell you. The first time my photograph was used on the front top strip of a newspaper, to puff the article I’d written inside, my editor told me “the feminists [on staff] aren’t sure about your by-line picture…” I was deeply puzzled; all I could conclude was, there was something fundamentally inadequately feminist about my face. Now, of course, I realise I was just a bit too 27 years old, for their tastes. Things got spicier from then on in. Rumours about which of the senior male editors I’d been sleeping with to secure my job abounded. The internet buzzed with how awful I was; I once found a thread about me on a parenting site – yeah, that one – started by a woman who said “I don’t want to be unsisterly or anything, but I have it on good authority Polly Vernon only gets work by getting down on her knees.” Oddly, it wasn’t the “unsisterly” bit that got me, or even the suggestion I was being commissioned in return for sexual favours (anything but my actually being good at this, eh?), it was the “good authority” bit.

Someone else blogged it was all about me being rich enough to afford the dresses I wore in shoots; which made me laugh (bitterly) because I wasn’t rich, the dress in the specific image she referred to had been bought on sale at Miss Selfridge for £17.99; and b*tch! At least say I’m only getting work because I look good in the pictures!

But no, she couldn’t even concede that.

And on and on and on. When the internet really got going, and trolling became a Thing, I realised all my trolls were women - all absolutely not working through their envy issues in real time. Not that any of them would think of themselves as either envious (they were good feminists! How could they possibly be?), or trolls. They were simply speaking Their Truth.

Which was that I am awful.

Of course, to some people, in some respects, I am genuinely awful. I have certainly not led a blameless life to this point, I think it’s highly unlikely I will, in the future. I am wary of automatic recourse to the “oh she’s Just Jealous” explanation for every challenge to everything, because – well. I’ve hurt people, I’ve caused offense, written things I should not have written; I’ve made myself legitimately unlikable and worthy of rage, from time to time. I am human after all, it’s very much part of the deal, I find. So I’m not saying for one moment that no element of the backlash and interrogation I’ve experienced over the last decades was legitimate. Some of it definitely was.

But some of it seems to come from a questionable, and distinctly female, place. “Well, you do take up a lot of space…” a noted feminist said to me, a few years ago, when I asked her why she thought so many women – women who considered themselves good, decent feminists - felt so entirely free to rip into me, another, you know, woman .

“It’s nothing to do with you being a writer,” a very wise woman, a psychologist, once said to me. “It’d be the same if you worked in Tescos. It’s just what we do.”

Case in point: “I spent the night at a hen do friggin broiling with jealousy, because another hen was a brilliant dancer,” a mate just said to me, over the phone, after she asked what I was working on. “Broiling. At the same time, I was thinking: what are you? Six years old? But Polly:  I still felt it.”

“I was talking about this with a friend at the weekend,” said the woman sitting next to me in the café where I’m writing, once I came off the phone. “Sorry, I was eavesdropping… My friend and I, we’re both singers, and we were wondering why it is we’re so much harsher on other female voices, than we are men. We tear them apart! We never do that to men. Are we just terrible feminists?”

In respect of this and so much else, I think we are all terrible feminists, because we are all also people - and that can really undermine your political belief systems, from time to time. I should also say I do not buy into the “The Patriarchy made us like this” justification for female envy: the idea millennia of male oppression set us up in competition with each other, so it’s their fault - but not our responsibility. I think that definitely is why we find ourselves saggy tit-deep in the envy pickle, but also that, if we’re aware enough to see it clearly, we should also be smart enough not to indulge it – certainly not to use it as an excuse.

It is not an excuse.

What can we do? See it clearly in ourselves. Understand that it’s as much a part of who we are, as the more palatable bits. Accept that it’s in direct opposition to any feminism to which we might lay claim - but that’s OK. We Are All Shit Feminists Sometimes (Ohhhhh… that might be the title of my third book!). Dig into what lies under it, because envy is only ever sadness, weaponised. A rage over our own (perceived) failings and lackings, the pity over things that damaged us when we were kids, things with which we’ve never quite reconciled, turned outward, against this one other woman who, in that moment, seems to be parading all the things she has, but we feel we do not, like they’re prizes on the conveyer belt in The Generation Game.

I’d also say, I’ve found myself experiencing far less professional jealousy, lately. It’s kind of evaporated over the last years. This is categorically not because I’m becoming a better person. I really wouldn’t know how to do that if I tried, which I haven’t. I think it’s because the last few years have left me rather broke. I’ll write about that another time in more detail, but let’s just say, for now, that the internet has gutted my beautiful industry, Covid then exacerbated that, the cost of living crisis left me spectacularly conscious that, when your fees don’t increase for a few years, what once felt like a decent salary, is reduced to: just about being enough (for now).

But this has only served to make me realise how completely I love what I do. How unbelievably lucky I am; what a gratitude-inducing miracle it is, that I am still doing it at all. Being broke is making me hustle, it’s making me imaginative and resourceful (which is precisely why you find me here), and it’s also meant I’ve totally taken my eye off the careers of other women writers. Cos who gives a flying f**k if some other chick is doing what I do, only to a larger, more ecstatic audience, for more money? Really?Not me, babes! Not any more. All that matters is that I have enough work - which I do - that I make enough money – for the time being, at least – and that I do all this by LISTENING TO THE VOICES IN MY HEAD and then putting them in some sort of order which seems to connect with people and distract them and make them laugh and think and maybe even change their minds?

And that, truly, is enough.