How Pop Culture Taught Us to Expect the Worst From Each Other

The Story We Were Handed

There’s a scene most of us can picture without trying too hard. Two women walk into the same room. Their eyes meet. Something cold passes between them. One smiles — but not really. The camera holds just a beat too long.

We know that look. We’ve seen it a thousand times. On Bravo. In high school movies. In romantic comedies where the female lead’s nemesis is another woman who is too polished, too threatening, too ambitious. We know it so well that some of us have started bracing for it in real life — the moment a new woman enters our orbit, the part of us that was trained by a thousand screens waits for the competition to begin.

But here’s the question worth sitting with: Did we learn that instinct from life, or from television?

This post is about that question. About the myth of the catty woman — where it came from, how deeply it got wired into us, what the research actually says about female relationships, and why it matters that we start telling a different story. Not a naive one. Not one that pretends conflict doesn’t exist. But an honest one — because women deserve that.

We learned to distrust each other from a script someone else wrote. It’s worth asking who wrote it, and why.

Part One: Where the Mythology Came From

The Screen as Teacher

Media doesn’t just reflect culture. It shapes it. Researchers in cultural studies have long argued that what we watch repeatedly becomes a kind of internal script — a set of expectations we carry into real rooms with real people. When female rivalry is the default storyline, we start to see rivalry everywhere.

The myth of the catty woman didn’t begin with reality television, but reality TV perfected it. Shows like The Real Housewives franchise, America’s Next Top Model, The Bachelor, and countless others built their entire emotional architecture around female conflict. The editing was deliberate: tears, accusations, the signature table-flip. Producers have been surprisingly candid in interviews over the years about the practice of manufacturing tension — seating women who’d argued near each other, withholding sleep, keeping the alcohol flowing, then selecting footage that told the most dramatic possible story.

We watched those shows and called them guilty pleasures. But there’s very little guilt in how deeply those storylines rewired what we expected from other women.

Hollywood’s Long Love Affair With the Female Villain

Film has been doing this work even longer. The bitchy queen bee. The manipulative coworker. The scheming ex-wife. These archetypes are as old as cinema itself, and they all carry the same subtext: other women are the threat.

Think about how many iconic films center female rivalry as the primary conflict. All About Eve. Mean Girls. Single White Female. Cruel Intentions. Heathers. The Devil Wears Prada. These are good movies — some of them brilliant movies — but they’re also part of a very long pattern of framing woman-against-woman as inherently more dramatic, more interesting, more cinematically worthy than female solidarity.

Mean Girls deserves its own sentence because it is so culturally embedded that many of us quote it without noticing. The film is a satire of female social cruelty — but because satire has to show the thing in order to critique it, what many viewers absorbed was the thing itself. “She doesn’t even go here” became a way of talking about women who don’t belong. “She’s not a regular mom” became a compliment. The critique became the culture.

The Romance Triangle and the Vilified Woman

One of the most reliable engines of female rivalry in pop culture is the romantic triangle — two women competing for one man. This storyline is so common it barely registers as a choice anymore. It’s just structure. The hero. The good woman. The other woman.

The problem isn’t that love triangles exist — they do, in life. The problem is the frequency and the framing. When the majority of female conflict onscreen is routed through a man — when two women can only meaningfully relate to each other as rivals for male attention — it sends a clear message about the perceived limits of female relationships. Women exist, the story implies, primarily in relationship to men. Other women are obstacles.

Soap operas built entire decades of content on this premise. So did primetime dramas. So, frankly, did a significant portion of literary fiction written by men about women.

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Part Two: The Reality TV Machine

Designed for Conflict

Reality television is worth its own extended look because its influence on cultural expectations around female behavior has been particularly significant — and particularly insidious, because it presents itself as real.

The premise is seductive: these are real women, in real situations, having real reactions. No writers. No scripts. Just authenticity. Except, of course, that reality television is among the most heavily constructed media formats in existence. Casting directors specifically select for volatility. Producers use what’s called “frankenbiting” — editing together fragments of sentences from different conversations to create exchanges that never happened. Contestants are coached on confessionals. Story arcs are mapped out before filming begins.

And the women who are cast as villains? Many have spoken publicly about how their editorials bore almost no resemblance to who they are. They were transformed in the editing bay into archetypes — the manipulator, the two-faced mean girl, the jealous one — because those archetypes generate clicks and conversation and advertising revenue.

We watched, and we learned. Not that these specific women were like this, but that women, generally, are like this. The cumulative effect of hundreds of seasons of manufactured female conflict is a cultural baseline assumption: put women together, and this is what happens.

The Women Who Were Punished for Not Fighting

Something interesting happens to women on reality television who refuse to participate in conflict. They are often edited into irrelevance — the quiet one, the boring one — or they are framed as secretly plotting, their stillness recast as suspicious rather than simply peaceful. Niceness gets coded as strategic. Diplomacy gets coded as weakness or deception.

The message is circular and impossible: fight and be labeled catty, refuse to fight and be labeled boring or fake. The mythology self-reinforces. There is no version of female behavior that the machine doesn’t find a way to make threatening.

There is no version of female behavior that the machine doesn’t find a way to make threatening.

The Housewives Effect

The Real Housewives franchise, now spanning over a dozen cities and more than fifteen years of content, has created something genuinely unprecedented in media history: a sustained, serialized, deeply character-driven study of upper-middle-class female social dynamics. And its primary currency has always been conflict.

What’s worth noting is how many viewers — particularly women — watch these shows not to feel contempt for the cast but to process something. Female friendships are complicated. Female social hierarchies are real. The Housewives, as manufactured as they are, touch something true. The issue isn’t that the conflict onscreen is entirely invented. The issue is that it’s the only thing that gets amplified.

All the scenes of genuine warmth, loyalty, humor, support — and they exist, any honest viewer will acknowledge them — get trimmed to make room for the fight. The friendship is backdrop. The rivalry is the story.

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Part Three: What the Research Actually Says

Female Friendships Are Among the Most Protective Relationships in Human Life

Here is what pop culture has systematically obscured: female friendships, when studied by researchers across psychology, sociology, and neuroscience, consistently show up as one of the most significant protective factors for mental health, longevity, and resilience in human life.

The UCLA researchers who coined the phrase “tend and befriend” — describing women’s stress response as one oriented toward nurturing and seeking social connection rather than purely fight-or-flight — found that women under stress instinctively reach for other women. Not to compete. To survive. Female social bonding is, in evolutionary terms, one of our most essential and durable strategies.

Studies on female friendship networks consistently show that women tend to invest deeply in a small number of close relationships, marked by high levels of emotional disclosure, mutual support, and reciprocal care. The picture that emerges from the research is not the one we see on television. It looks more like a lifetime. It looks like showing up.

Female Competition Is Real — and Mostly Misunderstood

Acknowledging the protective power of female friendship doesn’t require us to pretend that female competition doesn’t exist. It does. But research suggests it looks quite different from what pop culture depicts.

Studies by evolutionary psychologists — including work by Tracy Vaillancourt and others — have found that when female competition does occur, it often takes indirect forms: social exclusion, reputation management, the withdrawal of alliance rather than direct confrontation. This isn’t evidence of female duplicity. It’s evidence of social intelligence operating within systems where direct conflict historically carried significant costs for women.

What gets labeled “catty” behavior is often women navigating systems where they have limited formal power. Gossip, social signaling, alliance-shifting — these are the tools of people who can’t afford to fight openly. They’re not uniquely female; they’re the tactics of the structurally constrained.

The issue is that pop culture strips this context entirely. It presents indirect conflict as evidence of female nature rather than as a rational response to social conditions. And in doing so, it makes the behavior seem inherent rather than situational — something women simply are, rather than something they do when the options are limited.

Women Are Not More Jealous Than Men — They’re Just More Monitored

One of the most durable myths about female relationships is that jealousy is somehow more fundamental to them — that women are more prone to envy, more likely to undermine, more threatened by other women’s success. The research does not support this.

What researchers have found is that women’s social behaviors are more observed, more commented upon, and more likely to be interpreted through a lens of competition than men’s equivalent behaviors. A man who speaks dismissively of a colleague is ambitious. A woman who does the same is jealous. A man who networks strategically is savvy. A woman who does the same is calculating.

The myth of the catty woman persists in part because we are watching women more closely and interpreting what we see through a pre-existing narrative. The screen handed us the story first, and then we looked for evidence of it everywhere.

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Part Four: How We Internalized the Story

The Woman We Became Suspicious Of

One of the quieter effects of this mythology is what it did to how women see other women entering their lives.

The new woman at work. The woman at the party who seems to know everyone. The woman your partner mentions a few times. The woman who is doing something similar to what you do but doing it louder. Pop culture gave us a template for all of them — and the template is threat.

How many connections were never made because we brought that template into the room? How many friendships were never started because something in us was already scanning for competition? How many women looked at another woman’s success and felt a flicker of something they didn’t want to name, and then felt ashamed of the flicker, without ever pausing to ask where it came from?

The internalization of the catty woman myth is not just about how we see other women. It’s about how we see ourselves. If we believe that women are fundamentally rivals, then our own moments of envy or frustration toward other women feel like evidence of our worst nature. We carry the myth inside us and then confirm it by finding it there.

The Queen Bee We Were Afraid to Become

There’s a specific cultural character who haunts many women in professional settings: the Queen Bee. The senior woman who doesn’t support younger women, who hoards access, who treats other women as competition rather than colleagues. She became, in the 1970s and 1980s, a kind of cultural boogeyman — proof that women in power were no more enlightened than the systems they’d navigated.

Research by Naomi Ellemers and others at Utrecht University found something more nuanced than the popular narrative: when women behave in “Queen Bee” ways in professional settings, it is most often a response to gender-hostile environments. Women who achieve senior positions in organizations where women are not expected to succeed sometimes distance themselves from gender identity as a survival strategy — not because they don’t care about other women, but because being visibly female has come with costs they’ve already paid and don’t want to pay again.

The Queen Bee, in other words, is not evidence of female nature. She’s evidence of what hostile systems do to people. But pop culture took her and made her a character type — and many women have spent years being afraid of becoming her, or falsely accusing other women of it.

Complimenting Other Women as Radical Act

Here is something small but worth naming: genuine compliments between women can feel surprisingly loaded in a world that has told us we’re rivals.

Telling another woman her work is brilliant. Amplifying her name in a room where she’s not present. Recommending her for something she didn’t ask to be recommended for. These should be ordinary, unremarkable acts of human decency. And yet many women report that they feel strangely significant — because they run directly against the current of everything they were told about how women relate to each other.

When we compliment each other genuinely, we are refusing the mythology. That is worth acknowledging. It’s a small refusal, but it adds up.

When we genuinely celebrate another woman, we are refusing the mythology. That is worth something.

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Part Five: How the Narrative Is Changing

The Stories We Started Telling Differently

Something has been shifting in the cultural narrative around female friendships, and it’s worth naming clearly. The shift is incomplete, inconsistent, and sometimes commercially motivated — but it is real.

Films like Bridesmaids, Booksmart, Little Women (the 2019 adaptation), and Everything Everywhere All at Once have centered female relationships as primary, complex, and worthy of serious storytelling — not in service of a romantic plot, not as backstory for a man’s journey, but as the story itself. These films show women who compete and disappoint each other and come back and do the difficult work of love.

Television has produced shows like Fleabag, I May Destroy You, The Bear (in its portrayal of female mentorship), and Reservation Dogs that treat women’s inner lives with a complexity that older Hollywood almost never managed. The women in these stories are not the catty villain, not the supportive sidekick, not the trophy. They are people.

Social Media: Both Problem and Solution

Social media has a genuinely dual nature in this conversation. On one hand, it has amplified the performance of female competition — comment sections that tear down visible women, viral threads dedicated to critiquing female celebrities’ bodies and choices, the “pick me” dynamic that rewards women who publicly distance themselves from other women.

On the other hand, social media has enabled forms of female solidarity that simply didn’t exist before. Women finding each other across geography and life circumstance. Niche communities of women who share specific experiences — grief, chronic illness, career transitions, the particular ache of the empty nest — discovering that they are not as alone as they thought. The visibility of women supporting each other, publicly and without apology, is genuinely new.

The internet didn’t invent female community. Women have always found each other, always built the networks that sustained them through the things that life delivers. But it made those networks visible in a new way, and visibility matters when the myth has been invisibility.

A Generation Watching Differently

Younger generations are watching the mythology with more critical distance than their predecessors. Media literacy education, feminist criticism becoming mainstream rather than niche, the ability to immediately share and discuss representation online — these have created a generation of viewers who push back on the catty woman trope in ways that have real cultural consequences.

When Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B collaborate instead of feuding — as the press was actively rooting for them to do — it is noticed and celebrated. When Taylor Swift and Selena Gomez publicly maintain a long friendship, it becomes a kind of cultural landmark, exactly because it defies what the template said should happen. The exceptions are celebrated because people are hungry for a different story.

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Part Six: What’s True, What’s Myth, and Why It Matters

The Honest Accounting

Here is the honest accounting, because this conversation deserves one.

Women can be unkind to each other. Female social cruelty is real — the exclusion, the weaponized silence, the calculated rumor, the group that closes ranks. It happens. It has happened to most of us at some point, in one form or another, and it leaves a mark.

The question isn’t whether it exists. The question is whether it is the defining truth about female relationships — the bedrock reality that everything else is built on. And the answer, clearly, is no.

What is equally true — more frequently true, though far less frequently told — is this: women show up for each other in extraordinary ways. In hospitals, in kitchens, in phone calls at 2 a.m. In the way a woman will notice another woman struggling and quietly realign herself to help without being asked. In the decades of friendship that outlast marriages, outlast careers, outlast every version of who we thought we were going to be.

Both things are true. Pop culture chose one to amplify. We get to choose which one to look for.

Myth vs. Reality — A Clear-Eyed Look

The Myths:

• Women are inherently more competitive with each other than men are with each other.
• Female jealousy is a fundamental character flaw rather than a human experience amplified by specific conditions.
• When women conflict, it’s because of their nature — not because of limited resources, hostile systems, or scripted situations.
• Supportive female friendships are the exception. Rivalry is the rule.
• A woman who is unkind to other women is revealing something essential about womanhood.

The Realities:

• Female friendships are among the most resilient and health-protective relationships humans form.
• When female competition occurs, it is most often a response to conditions — scarcity, hostile environments, manufactured situations — not an expression of essential nature.
• The behaviors labeled “catty” are most accurately understood as the tactics of people navigating systems where direct power is limited.
• Women’s social behaviors are disproportionately observed, judged, and reframed as threatening relative to equivalent behaviors in men.
• The narrative of female rivalry serves specific interests — ratings, advertising revenue, the preservation of the idea that women cannot be trusted in positions of power — and those interests are worth naming.

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Part Seven: What We Actually Do With This

Watching More Critically

The first and most accessible thing is becoming a more critical consumer of the media you already watch. This doesn’t mean stopping watching things you love, or performing a joyless political audit of every show. It means developing the habit of noticing.

When two women are set against each other onscreen, ask: is this necessary to the story, or is this a reflex? When a female character is framed as threatening, ask: threatening to whom, and why? When female conflict is depicted, ask: does the story grant these women the complexity of real human beings, or are they archetypes doing the narrative’s work?

Noticing doesn’t neutralize the effect entirely — we are still watching — but it creates a small distance between the story and the story we carry away. That distance matters.

Auditing the Template We Bring Into the Room

Consider — honestly — whether you bring the catty woman mythology into your own relationships. Not as an indictment, but as information.

When a new woman enters your professional world, what do you notice first? When a woman in your social circle achieves something significant, what’s the first feeling that moves through you before the congratulations? When a woman is unkind to you, do you generalize it — this is how women are — or do you hold it as the specific and complex behavior of a specific and complex person?

These are not comfortable questions. But they’re worth sitting with.

Building the Friendships the Mythology Said Weren’t Possible

The most countercultural thing many of us can do is invest seriously in female friendship. Not performatively — not for the Instagram caption — but genuinely, with the patience and vulnerability that real intimacy requires.

Female friendships, especially in adulthood, require some of the same maintenance as any long-term relationship. They need time, and honesty, and the willingness to come back after the moments of distance or friction. They need us to resist the pull toward easy transactional connection and choose something deeper.

The friendships I have with other women are among the defining relationships of my life. They have held me through things that nothing else could have reached. If the mythology had won — if I had believed that the rivalry was more real than the love — I would have missed them entirely.

Telling Different Stories

If you make anything — write, teach, parent, build a community, run a workplace — you have the opportunity to tell different stories about what women are to each other.

Celebrate female friendships explicitly. Name the women in your professional world who have supported and shaped you. Tell your daughters and younger women in your life that the rivalry narrative they’ll see onscreen is a manufactured story, and that there is a better, truer, more nourishing one waiting for them in real relationships.

The mythology persists because it’s told more frequently than the alternative. Frequency is not permanence. It’s just volume. We can add our voices to a different kind of noise.

The mythology persists because it is told more frequently than the alternative. Frequency is not permanence. It’s just volume.

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A Different Inheritance

We inherited the catty woman. She arrived in our cultural bloodstream through decades of carefully edited footage, arc-driven screenplays, and a media industry that found female rivalry more profitable than female solidarity. She told us what to expect from each other, and too many of us believed her.

But she is not the truth. She is a story, and stories can change.

The truth is messier and more beautiful: women are complicated, and sometimes unkind, and also profoundly, reliably, extraordinarily capable of loving each other well. The truth is that the friendships between women have sustained civilizations — quietly, without cameras, without a producer in an earpiece telling them where to stand.

The truth is that somewhere right now, two women who have known each other for thirty years are sitting together without performing anything, saying the things that have no audience, holding something between them that no one manufactured and no one could edit into something other than what it is.

That is the inheritance worth passing down. That is the story worth telling more.

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For Your Own Reflection

If you’d like to take this further, here are a few questions worth sitting with:

• Which onscreen female rivalries did you absorb most deeply — and do you notice their templates showing up in how you interpret real relationships?
• Think of a female friendship in your life that has most defied the mythology. What has it given you?
• Where in your own life have you applied the catty woman template to another woman — and what did you lose by doing so?
• What would it look like to invest differently in one female friendship this season?
• What story are you currently telling — through your choices, your words, your work — about what women are to each other?

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