I spent part of last week in Charlottesville with a group of incredible women (thank you to everyone who came out). At dinner the first night, the conversation turned to the Envy chapter of On Our Best Behavior, where every chat about the book unfailingly tends to go. This is the chapter about women’s covert and undiagnosed wanting, and how we tend to deride and cut down the women who are provoking our envy, rather than recognizing that our dislike and aversion is not about them at all…it’s that these women are simply holding up a mirror for us and pushing on a dream we have for ourselves. (More on this here: “Sin: Envy” and “Owning Our Wanting.”)

Women also want to talk about the Envy chapter because it’s the chapter that most directly addresses internalized patriarchy and women-on-women hate, tracing it all the way back to the witch trials. In my experience of sitting with groups of women, 98%-100% have experienced women-on-women hate, most frequently at work, but in our calls for sisterhood and #womensupportingwomen, we insist there’s nothing to see here, and tend to paper over that pain. And well, we can’t heal what we refuse to acknowledge. And we’ll never be able to see or understand what’s driving us to undermine each other when the underlying issue (envy, our unrealized wanting, fears around scarcity, anger) is repressed, and not part of our conscious awareness. This is a big part of our internalized patriarchy. And to resolve this, we must begin to talk about it, finding functional ways to address that women can be vicious to each other without feeling like we’re setting ourselves back, or undermining our case for equality. (Interestingly, the etymology of vicious is vice—and, as On Our Best Behavior points out, women have been carrying the Seven Deadly Sins since 590 AD, when Pope Gregory assigned them all to Mary Magdalene.)

There are other components of internalized patriarchy as well, namely a deep-seated preference for seeing men as experts and leaders. Men have this bias, but so do women—and we’re the only ones who can understand and address this in ourselves. While men need to make their own moves to equalize society, we can’t offload our own internalized patriarchy onto them to take care of. It’s the responsibility of each of us to find it in ourselves and ferret it out—men can’t bridge this gap for us.