Why You So Obsessed with Me: Rethinking Envy
About the series: “Why You So Obsessed with Me”
We all have our obsessions — that T.V. show we can’t seem to stop rewatching, that ex that still lingers in our minds even after blocking them, that fixation on a certain musician that we would do anything (anything!) for. Some are juvenile interests that make our lives more entertaining, while others can slide into dangerous territory (like that ex, for example). And when the word “obsession” gets paired with any marginalized identity, the term has an even more negative connotation — think LGBTQ+-centric fandoms or “feminine” interests. At Camp Thirlby, we want to explore these obsessions and deconstruct the concept to be a potentially liberating one, which is where our series “Why You So Obsessed with Me” comes in. To the tune of Mariah Carey’s song, our Camp Counselors have delved into their various obsessions even more to unpack what they might mean for their lives and identities, entailing the movie they can’t stop watching or their fixation with the scary, scary future. Whether it’s a method for them to grow into their obsessions or decide to leave them, these memoirs act as a shrine to the things we love, and maybe love too much.
Recently, I rallied a group of friends and compiled a dozen or so videos of them reciting the Cool Girl Monologue from Gone Girl. The monologue is an evisceration of the “cool girl” trope: a girl who’s down, a girl who’s chill, a girl who’ll hang with the boys and laugh along with the gentle misogyny that pervades the hang sesh.
The protagonist, Amy Dunne, muses on the trope: “Cool girl is hot. Cool girl is game. Cool girl is fun. Cool girl never gets angry at her man.”
That’s what it means to be a cool girl: you hide the emotions that aren’t pretty, you remain small and two-dimensional, you let absolutely nothing shake your cool.
Most of our uglier emotions are relatively innocent, and subsequently easy to write about. Many feminist essays have explored anger, sadness, loneliness in women. But after recently conducting a very informal Google search, I couldn’t find a single feminist essay on envy that didn’t revolve around the Freudian concept of penis-envy. Why? Envy is shameful. Envy is not cute. Envy implies not only a dissatisfaction with one’s own life, but a resentment of the satisfaction that someone else is taking in theirs. Envy requires two agents: the envier and the envied. That’s what makes it so embarrassing — to envy is to admit that someone else is above you, and to admit that you resent them for it.
So, we don’t speak of it. We push it down, deep down. We temporarily delete our Instagram accounts and lift our chins and argue that “social media is poison” (which we’re pretty much right about), and that comparing ourselves to one another is horrible and unnatural and ruining our lives (which we’re actually wrong about).
Any social psychologist will tell you that social comparison is a natural part of living in a society (unfortunately). Social comparison on its own is not problematic, but platforms like Instagram exacerbate the behavior, leading us down a rabbit-hole of self-doubt, social comparison, and general suffering.
I, like pretty much all of us, have been there. I’ve spent an ungodly amount of time looking at (stalking) the Instagram of a friend of a friend. 9 times out of 10 she is someone I’d like to be: creative, clever, beautiful, funny, interesting. I compare my photos to hers. I compare my captions to hers. I compare my hair, my shoulders, the length of my fingers and the width of my thighs. I fixate on every single way in which I am an inadequate teeny tiny rat of a girl compared to her.
Everytime I emerge from this social comparison spiral, I wonder (1) why the fuck I did that, and (2) what it is about these girls that turns me into a spiteful rat monster. So, dear reader, I researched.
What I found is that envy is just a step away from admiration. We are envious of people we wish we were like, envious of the hair we wish we had, envious of the creativity we wish we possessed. If envy and admiration are essentially (forgive me) sister emotions, I couldn’t help but wonder: why do we default to envy over admiration?
And then I remembered misogyny! Historically, women have been taught to distrust one another. As Chimananda Ngozi Adichie famously said (and Beyonce famously sampled) “We raise girls to see each other as competitors. Not for jobs or for accomplishments, which I think can be a good thing, but for the attention of men.”
Our society profits off of feminine competition. Take a look at beauty competitions and reality television, women are forced into a dynamic that necessitates a winner and a loser. Envy is profitable! It keeps us buying serums, crystals, and kale caesar salads to make us prettier, healthier, better — and all the -ers rely on comparison. Until we acknowledge its power over us, envy will remain effective, it’ll keep us competing against each other instead of working with one another. We’ve been conditioned to believe that there’s only so many seats at the table, when in reality we could just pool our resources and buy a bigger table.
When we see each other as colleagues (dare I say...comrades?) instead of competitors, envy becomes admiration. Envy becomes useful. As ugly and embarrassing as envy is, it’s motivating. Dr. Mina Cikara, a social psychologist at Harvard University, distinguishes two types of envy: benign and malicious. When we see a picture of someone at brunch, we don’t typically wish a pox upon them and their family — this is benign envy. We see what they have and immediately want it for ourselves. As long as envy is benign, we have the power to reappropriate it to our mutual benefit. Our envy of one another becomes a tool to motivate us to be better versions of ourselves.
Of course, that won’t work every time. There will be times when seeing a girl in a bikini jump off a boat into the Aegean Sea will motivate you to go lie in your bed and feel sad for yourself, but that’s alright! Social comparison will continue to breed envy, and while we can do our best to acknowledge the emotion and use it to our advantage, we also have to know when to cut our losses and call it quits. We can temporarily delete our Instagrams and lift up our chins and argue that Instagram is poison — sometimes that’s what we need. And besides, if you really want to abstain from social comparison, what better time to do it than during a quarantine?
Erasing envy isn’t useful to us, but recognizing it and noting its power over us can be. I envy, you envy, we all envy...so what! Envy itself isn’t the culprit responsible for our overwhelming despair; it's how the systems and structures that compose our society have used it to keep women down. If we can recognize that envy is rooted in admiration, we can use it to improve ourselves and rise to the level of those we look up to. Who knows, maybe we’ll give “green with envy” a whole new meaning.
About the Author
Megan Burns (she/her) is a social researcher at New York University mainly interested in identity, morality, and policy. An observer by nature, both her personal and professional work is largely inspired by the people around her. When she's not writing (which is often) she enjoys art galleries, reading short stories (or long stories), shirley temples, dancing, and collecting knick-knacks.
