But what is an internalized sexism or misogyny? It is not hard to imagine that if the society is sexist, women won’t pick up or internalise those attitudes and definitions about their own gender on the basis of those beliefs. Internalized sexism happens when a woman is using the same sexist attitudes and beliefs about her gender towards herself and other women. Any woman can be subjected to sexist attitudes from two different sources: the opposite (e.g. men) and the same gender (e.g. women), so being a woman is like being caught between Scylla and Charybdis.

Reasons, which contribute to internalized sexism, are:

• A rule of hegemonic masculinity that is invisibly present and perpetuated on every level of Western society. Anything other than male/masculine is Othered – silenced, devalued and ignored. Women, as de Beauvoir has stated many moons ago, are Other by default, but gender intersects with other social factors, such are race, class, ability, sexuality; under the umbrella of Other can therefore fall low-wage people, trans persons, black, LGB+, people with disabilities etc. However, being a woman in a world of hegemonic masculinity is not a powerful social position.
• The lack of (women’s) power results in devaluation of femininity from any gender. Anything that is culturally conditioned and linked with femininity – for example colour pink, make-up, duckface, selfies, narcissism, frivolity, nipples, menstruation, sexual agency (or to put it more simple – women wanting sex and being slut-shamed for that), servile professions (low income, status and prestige, so-called feminized professions – waitressing), sex work (pornography, prostitution), entertainment (pop singers, dancers), self-care – is being perceived as not “serious” or “essential”. However, any woman who is transgressive from what is considered “proper femininity” (e.g. academic professions – women are still being perceived as second-class academics, having leadership skills, feminist values, being a cat lover, gender bending or sexually fluid), is also being subjected to same-sexist monitoring.
• Capitalism encourages competition and women are more than welcome to compete with each other in the “feminine areas” – fashion, beauty, fight for heterosexual men. The hybrid of allowed competitiveness and beauty is showcased in beauty pageants, where merely physical attributes of a woman are judged.

How is internalized sexism cultivated and perpetuated? Through external sources, such are early socialisation (learning of gender roles – boys like blue/are trustworthy, girls like pink/are flaky), media and advertising (women are either passive or evil/active characters); perceptions of women are being stereotyped and hence seen as less powerful. If women are perceived as “powerless”, then no wo/man wants to identify with powerlessness. Even though the latter is a result of an uneven power struggle, what is perceived as “powerful” is still associated with masculinity – rationality, emotional distance, physical strength, wealth etc.

How is internalized sexism manifested? Women, who have internalized sexism, suffer from self-hate, alienation from themselves and others, hate other women  sometimes just for being different (Othered for that matter – childfree women, educated women) and hence unrelatable, they do not believe/trust women, discredit them professionally, attack them personally, use victim-blaming strategies to shame women and unnecessary critique, they minimize the value of women, do not employ women, create hostile working environments, engage in passive aggression, but most importantly, believe in gender bias in favour of men. Sexist women rarely question or criticize the authority of men, their actions or behaviours or gender order of hegemonic masculinity in general. This deliberate gender blindness is just another aspect of their internalized sexism.

What to do? Firstly, this pattern has to be recognized and then deliberately unlearned. Internalized sexism is harmful to all women, because it positions them as primarily guilty until (or if) proven innocent. No woman should ever be put into a position to endlessly and constantly defend herself for being a woman.

The abject can be experienced in three different ways: (1) as dirt (i.e. corporeal changes and their climax – death, (2) in sexual difference (i.e. the female/feminine body and incest) and (3) by food taboos or repulsion. All those pillars of abjection represent the border or ritualised beginning of culture (i.e. order, civilisation, system, logic, masculinity) from nature (i.e. chaos, darkness, devouring, maternal, emotions).

The ultimate bearer of dirt is the human body and by keeping it clean (e.g. showering, bathing, using deodorants and perfumes, wearing clean clothes), the body becomes civilised (disciplined, moderated, composed). Mary Douglas has compared (hu)man body with the (male) society; both of them strive to the stability, unchangeability, rigidity, orderliness and cleanliness. If body would remain permanently clean (i.e. the same), it would not age and die. Yet everybody dies and every system is vulnerable and permeable at its margins. Body margins are its caveats and openings (mouth, eyes, ears, nose, belly button, rectum, genitalia, urethra) that render body as inescapably leaky and dirty – everybody must shit, piss, sweat. Some cry, ejaculate, menstruate and produce milk. The more are body openings and their fluids are postulated as dirty, the more the society aims to be homogenic, pure and close-minded – to distant itself from dirt. And it is the female body that is branded as inherently dirty due to its unpredictable leakage and production of body-specific fluids (menstruation, breast milk, vaginal mucus), accompanied by extra openings (vulva, urethra). Because more fluids exit a female body, the more ‘dirt’ can enter it.

The sexual difference (female – male) is another basis to experience abjection where male body is understood as universal and female as deviant or Other. The cause for a man’s attraction and repulsion against the female body is its difference – breasts and vagina at most. Yet that’s not all. Childbirth is defined as an ultimate abjection and the grotesqueness per ce that embodies a duality of personhood (Self plus Other or mother and child). The process of giving birth is the climax of abjection; a state of in/out, Self/Other, life/death, horror/beauty, of liminality and no self-control. An image of a woman giving birth resembles to the borderless flesh explosion that reiterates man’s somatophobia and fear for losing his (body) control.
The third aspect of abjection is food loathing – what is edible (healthy, nutritious or necessary) is culturally imposed. Food becomes abject when the boundary between nature and culture is crossed. For example, overripe fruits/vegetables (resembling to decay), unwashed food (possibility of the contagion), food that falls on the floor, food pulled out of a garbage can (close to the litter makes it impure), body excrement (eating boogers, scabs, blisters, drinking urine or covering yourself with menstrual blood). The ultimate taboo that combines all three abjections (food-dirt-desire) is mother’s milk. Mother’s milk gives life, is infant’s first food that is literally forced on her/him/they and she/he/they is the only person, allowed to drink it.

Food represents a constant repetition of a need to survive or live and at the same time a chance to rebel against the authority (i.e. parents: primary mother and/or secondary father), who has in the past decided for us what, when, how and where to eat. Without food, the body withers away and becomes the climax of an abjection – a corpse.

Here are some randomly chosen examples from contemporary western cultures that can be described as abjection illustrations:

• horror movies, filled with corpses, bodily waste, reproductive (i.e. maternal) bodies allow viewers to take pleasure & displeasure while watching them,
• ban of nipples, pubic hair and menstruation in social media sends us a message that particulars and fluids of female body are taboo,
• storm chasing as premeditated (cultured) pursuit of the weather condition (nature); its unpredictability arouses contradictory emotions (fear and excitement, esprit and paralysis) in a storm chaser,
• veganism as a dietary and ethical abstaining from eating animal products can be understood as rebellion against meat-eating patriarchal order that fuels on aggression and bloodshed and by not eating animal corpses, a person refuses to eat the abject.

Somebody is Othered by not belonging to a certain gender (hegemonic masculinity), gender identity (cisgender), sex (cissexual), sexual orientation (heterosexual), skin colour (white), class or social+economic+cultural capital (educated, middle to upper class), age (young for women, middle age for men), citizenship (by birth), physical, sensory, intellectual, mental, emotional and developmental ability (fully functioning body-mind), religion (Christian), geopolitical position (postmodern western society), eating habits (omnivore), lifestyle (capitalistic-consumerist), clothing (age and gender appropriate), family arrangement (heterosexual nuclear family unit), love arrangement (monogamy), marital status (married/in a relationship), emotional standard (discipline, moderation), sex activity (missionary position), body standard (male body), body size (thin for women, muscular for men), speech (without impediment), language (clear, formal), voice (moderate volume, appropriate to the social occasion, sounding adult), physiological preference (sight), dwelling (private home), anthropocentric worldview (man as the epistemological centre) …

Other is defined as different because she/he/them are measured up against standards of the dominant group. But it is not the concept of difference itself that is problematic (we should all strive to the societal diversity and plurality), it is the inferior position of Other as a consequence of a dichotomous relationship between them. Different is not equal because it invokes contradictory feelings; an abjection, as French philosopher Julia Kristeva has named this mode. Other appeals and appalls at the same time.

The abject status of Otherness has to be managed to be socially bearable and according to French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, there are two strategies of coping with the Otherness: ‘vomiting’ and ‘ingesting’. The first method (i.e. ‘spitting out’ the Others, which are seen as incurably strange or alien) is manifested as an isolation, exclusion or disdain: barring physical contact, dialogue, social intercourse and commercial trade, creating spatial, mental and emotional separation etc., which in its extreme version meant annihilation of the Others (incarceration, deportation, murder). The second one (i.e. ‘devouring’ foreign bodies to be identical with and no longer distinguishable from the ingesting body) took a wide range of forms: cannibalism, enforced cultural assimilation and appropriation, which means that their Otherness was annihilated.
Perhaps those strategies look outdated, yet they are still in use, but in a more complex and even disguised manner (e.g. covert sexism, aversive racism, online harassment, mobbing, discursive vilification, pathologization, medicalisation …).

So, who or what are or can be Othered? Women, non-hegemonic masculinities, non-binary people, genderqueer, agender people, femininities, transgender people, transsexual people, intersex people, LGB people, asexual people, children, old people (women in particular), people of colour (PoC), poor people, under- and overeducated people, illiterate people, digitally illiterate people, immigrants, apatrids, people with foreign accents, people with visible disabilities, people with invisible disabilities, people on the neurodiversity spectrum (autism spectrum disorder, bipolar disorder, ADHD or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, OCD or obsessive-compulsive disorder, ICD or impulsive-compulsive disorder), dyslexia, depression, anxieties, sleep disorders (e.g. circadian rhythm sleep disorder or CRSD), Tourette syndrome), people with speech disorders (stuttering, cluttering, sound disorders – lisp or sigmatism, rhotacism, lambdacism, muteness, apraxia of speech), people with voice disorders (mutational falsetto, spasmodic dysphonia), atheists, Muslims, Jews, Roma people, Hindu people, Wiccas, Neopagans, Nonwestern cultures, vegans, vegetarians, macrobiotics, collective community lifestyles (cult, kibbutz, commune), single-parent families, blended families, cross-generational families, adoptive/foster families, same-sex parent families, grandparents as parents families, cohabitation, LAT (living apart together), childlessness, singleness, polyamory, emotional excess and sensibilities, BDSM, kink sex, masturbation, age difference between sexual partners (younger man – older woman), fat bodies, ultra-thin male and female bodies, tall women, short men, bodies with missing limbs, people with dysmorphic body features, junkies, gossip, profanity, poetic language, psychotic speech, touch, smell, ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response), menstruation, breast milk, body hair (pubic hair, armpit hair and leg hair for women, back hair and lack of facial hair for men), homelessness, cooperatives, dancing and running as everyday body movements in the social conduct instead of moderate walking, nonhuman animals, nonhuman entities (A.I.), feminism …

As can be seen, the contemporary Otherness is a sum of an intersectionality of privileges and oppressions, yet those on margins lose most.

Those are Other matters.