Idolspizing Our Frenemies

Just about every woman I know will feel like they have a friend in Ann Hornaday after reading her article in today's Post, That Wonderful Woman! Oh, How I Loathe Her.

Describing the female phenomenon of being able to idolize and despise another woman at the same time, an emotion she dubs "idolspizing", Hornaday explores the root of woman's most vicious and unique brand of vice.

As she writes:
We all have them, those close friends, colleagues, casual acquaintances or complete strangers whose lives and careers exist -- it seems to us -- solely as a rebuke to our own. We respect them, admire them from afar, maybe even love them -- but with a twinge of . . . what exactly? Jealousy? Envy? White-knuckled rage? They're the people who are constantly reminding us that we'll never quite measure up. They're the valedictorians to our salutatorians, the bestsellers to our mid-listers, the mid-listers to our never-published, the homecoming queens to our also-rans. They seem to have sprung fully formed from our ugliest competitive streaks, our egos at their most fragile, our deepest self-loathing. They are our own squandered potential, fully realized.

It's amazing to me that this article ran just one day after the aforementioned Bravehearts book club met last night in my living room to discuss two nauseatingly accurate chapters about what else BUT jealousy and envy. Yet, unlike Hornaday who does no more than diagnose the vice, BraveHearts author Sharon Hersh instead offers a construct for understanding this uniquely female occurence. As she explains:

Jealousy grows out of a longing to be considered, remembered, inlcuded. Jealousy is cultivated by a desire for permanence, security, and abiding relationships. Jealousy is vulnerable to loss, winces at betrayal, and hates unfaithfulness. The roots of jealousy reveal the holy longing for relationships that God has written on our hearts.

AND later... "if jealousy fears to lose what it has, envy is pained at seeing another have what it wants for itself... Envy wallows in wishes and fantasies of things being different than the way they are. Envy ultimately wants to eliminate the object of envy. Envy destroys what it most admires and cannot have for itself." "

To be clear, Hersh is not justifying jealousy as a minor flaw. To the contrary, she goes on to discuss its destructive and painful effects in great detail. Yet for both writers, what seems remarkable to me is how consuming, distracting, and universal such petty comparisons can be. Hersh, presumably, has taken an inventory of Christian women and found that jealousy and envy are rampant. Likewise, Hornaday has presumably taken inventory among her New York writer friends and discovered the same phenomenon. What is equally remarkable is how epidemic their proportions are uniquely among women.

If I had to pick between Hornaday's perspective. which seems content to simply identify the trend in pettiness and rest in the justification that she's not the only one (heck no!), or Hersh's take, I much prefer Hersh's explanation which allows my weaknesses and insecurities to take context in a bigger story that helps me put words to disappointment or frustrated desire rather than pretend none of it really matters in the first place. Dreaming and desiring and loving and longing all demand high risks, but when we dismiss our losses (whether perceived or real) as nothing more than "a little healthy (or petty) competition" too often we diminish the very dreams that lie at the root of our envy.