No, It's Not Just Men Who Encourage Pickme Behavior
For a very, very long time, I avoided women and this is why.
![Angry woman Angry woman](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcca97072-5da7-4007-8628-f0cafbe32bd8_800x532.jpeg)
For the longest time, I was the girl who just didn’t have female friends. It was never in the cards. In school, girls hated me. I could nothing right. I was the annoying one, I was the piece of shit, I was the school slut.
Even when I was a virgin, I was called a whore.
As an adult, my relationship with women is still rocky. It’s at the point where I generally refuse to engage with female doctors. I don’t want to give them my business because I’m absolutely terrified they’ll hurt me for fun.
It was female doctors and nurses who went out of their way to deny me sterilization, IUDs, and birth control. It was a female nurse who told me I deserved to get raped. Female OB-GYNs were the ones that made my daughter’s birth ten times more traumatic.
It was a MALE gynecologist who sterilized me and also kept me tumor-free. While you still have to drag me to a doctor kicking and screaming, I’ll take a male doctor over a female one because of what women put me through.
For a while, I generally resigned myself to being the woman every woman hated — but no more.
I now have more female friends than I ever did in my entire life up until this point. And it all started when I started to notice a strange pattern in my life.
It all started when I started to interview adult film stars and noticed a strange pattern. The porn stars, fetish models, and escorts I met were all genuinely nice people. Raver girls kept their distance, for the most part.
But models? They didn’t.
Whether they were plus-sized, petite, runway models, or straight up porn stars didn’t matter. Almost all of my female friendships were in an industry where you had to be spectacularly good-looking.
Those who weren’t were generally very confident and not my coworkers. Huh. Strange, right?
It didn’t really hit me as to why this was until I talked to one of my friends.
I don’t think this girl realized how transformative our conversations can be. For the sake of our conversations, we’re going to call her Angela*. Angela is one of the most successful women I’ve ever met in my life — and she’s self-made.
To give you an idea of what type of a woman Angela is, I’ll give you the run-through:
She has a college degree. Actually, I think she might have multiple.
She’s been a covergirl of major magazines. Yes, these are magazines that you have seen on newsstands. The only one I even got a submission (not a tearsheet/publication) to on a similar rank was Vogue Italy and that was when I was 22. She has multiple publications on that level. That’s huge.
She is a major pageant performer. Like myself, she’s donned the tiara and sash. Unlike myself, I’m pretty sure she won.
She now owns multiple businesses while juggling her modeling career. As she’s put it, she’ll continue to model until she gets bored. She’s worth millions by now, I’m fairly certain.
She’s dated a billionaire and several major moguls. Did I mention that she’s sophisticated too? Yeah, she’s basically God-tier awesome.
When you talk to her, she’s actually an amazing kind person. She’s the type of person who will smack sense into when you need it and try to lift you up with her. I appreciate that.
We were talking about a time when people had claws out on me when she said something striking.
I was, as usual, complaining about people bitching about me. Actually, I think it was about what my life was like in high school and college prior to my nervous meltdown.
She remarked, “You know, I deal with ex-classmates telling me, on a regular basis, that I’m ‘hoing around.’ Most of them have two or three kids and have done nothing with their lives. I just bossed up and started demanding what I want. It’s not their fault they didn’t.”
“Wait, Angela, what do you mean?”
“I was an awkward teenager who took a lot of damn time to glow-up in high school. And that’s when the girls really started to try to cut me down. That’s when they called me a slut, that’s when guys started to focus on me, and that’s when I realized how stupid it all was.”
“Wait, are you saying…?”
“Yeah. Everyone there was trying to get me to break, get insecure, and hide myself. It was all envy. Otherwise, why the hell would they take time to cut me down. You don’t see people do that to people who are pitied.”
She explained something that really hit me hard as someone who was slut-shamed.
The girls who saw guys pay attention to Angela saw her as a threat. They saw everything as a zero-sum game. They could not handle seeing Angela get presents, attention, and dates with guys they liked.
Hell, they couldn’t stand Angela even looking good — dates be damned.
That’s why they went after her the way they did. Their time ruining her high school reputation was their way of cutting her down. Their way of shaming her for asking for more from men and trying to push her to be “modest” or ask for less was their way of evening the playing field.
In reality, Angela was never a real threat to them. Angela would have been totally happy to hit the gym with them or even show them the ropes in modeling. She would have been thrilled to cheer them on if they did the same to her.
Instead, those girls were the ones who let their insecurities turn into viciousness. And with that insecurity came the self-delusion of accepting less as a badge of honor.
All those times I had women advise me against modeling and shut me out of outings made sense now. They weren’t just doing it out of “moral obligation,” but rather, envy.
That’s why models often stick together, even if they are technically competitors in the same field. The same can be said with adult film stars, sex workers, escorts, musicians, and influencers. It’s a lonely life where you’re picked apart.
One thing I noticed is that men tend to get blamed for Pickme behavior in women — and I’m not sure that’s totally fair.
To a point, this is a behavior that is encouraged by toxic men. That’s why toxic men often insult women who they’re interested in. In a lot of cases, they’re trying to get some kind of attention — any kind — from their target.
Movements like the Red Pill tend to encourage men to encourage women to accept less through abuse because those movements are about exploitation. The men who subscribe to them envy women because they genuinely think life gets handed to women on a silver platter.
However, I can’t help but notice that I had a lot more totally platonic friends who were male rather than female. Why is this? Well, I guess it’s because I’m not a threat to them.
It’s generally women who were the ones that sabotaged my diets, cut me down on my looks, and spread nasty rumors about me. The funny thing is that this doesn’t actually help them get what they want.
This year, I’m working on myself and my own glow-up, boss-up year.
I don’t know about you, but I’m kind of tired of dealing with people who browbeat, berate, and reject as a form of weaponized envy. I know I’m a lover. I know I’m a great friend to have.
I don’t like getting bitchy with people. I don’t like having to clap back. This year, I’m saving my energy for the people who have my back rather than the ones who want to stab it.
Male or female, life is too short not to prioritize yourself. Who’s with me?
FUCK YES, OSSIANA! ROOOOOAR!
For what it's worth, I can talk about this from the male perspective - as a transgender woman...men wanted to find my weak points and exploit them. Women are doing no different now, I think. I'm curious why we all have to be so shitty to each other.
In other news, I love you, Sibling. 💜🏳️⚧️💜
I love your lion roar photo. No shame in it.