I am in my natural habitat.

As I slowly dip my head towards pen and paper, something halts me in my tracks.

A faint scent on the breeze; movement on my periphery.

Another woman! Who is she? Why is she here? Will she challenge my authority as alpha female?

My animal instincts kick in, searching for a weakness. If I find none, I must invent one or submit.

This isn’t   something that every woman experiences. Some women are above it all. I applaud their magnanimity of spirit, their largess.

I do, however, firmly believe that more women experience this than might admit. Or perhaps that’s just wishful thinking.

I’m not proud of it, and I almost always regret my foolishness. I end up attempting to make friends with most of those whom I’d initially dismissed as shallow, vapid, foolish, malicious or aggressive. Rare is the occasion on which my hackles have been raised with good cause, but those few times when other women have stepped on me to get ahead have made me suspicious.

It’s a deep societal construct. Because women are still so underrepresented in public life, deep down it can feel necessary to compete with one another for those coveted few slots. These are the “esteemed, independent, powerful women” who get to defy the limitations of their gender and soar to great heights.

There is, however, one more question that springs, unbidden, from the darkest recesses of my amygdala when another female approaches my territory: Is she better looking than   I am?

It is difficult to even admit that this occurs to me, but it’s generally the first in a string of vile comparisons (Is she funnier? Smarter? Better Dressed?) that make the trek from my primitive brain to my frontal cortex.

It’s ingrained from birth that women are valued first and foremost by their appearance. It’s not a conscious act on the part of some secret male elite like the Freemasons or the Bohemian Club, but it is a result of the media that we absorb nearly every second of our lives from the day we are born.

We can’t stop trusting each other. We can’t launch preemptive strikes at other women. We have to take responsibility for ourselves.

When someone tears us down to get ahead, we shouldn’t let that taint our view of an entire gender any more than we should let acts of violence taint our view of humanity as a whole.

People are people, and some women, like some men, are terrible people. No more, no less.