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In an October NPR interview, British author Allison Pearson, describing the experience of the working mother in her new novel, I Don't Know How She Does It (Knopf, 2003), repeated: "If a woman isn't being judged by another woman, she'll beat herself up just to save time." The women I've asked since I heard her say this, agree. They know exactly what she meant.
The origin of such feelings isn't hard to trace. It has nothing to do with women in any inherent sense and everything to do with the place of women in the masculine-valuing conditioning of our culture. In spite of the gains women have made, Pearson is pointing out that in 2003 this hasn't changed as much as we'd like to believe. Women's responses to her book also say she's hit the nail on the head. Those self-defeating messages go back to pre-school days when boys were put down by being accused of doing anything like a girl. Girls were supposed to go along with that, just smile, be quiet, and act as if such putdowns didn't matter. But, just as we know that name-calling does hurt, no matter how we're told to ignore taunts instead of changing the things they represent, such putdowns teach relentlessly who's on top in our society. We just can't ignore them and hope they won't matter by repeating rhymes that say: "But names can never hurt me." Well-trained women in our system aren't supposed to do things in their own interest, value their own opinions of themselves, cooperate with other women to change their demure status, or find value without well-conditioned males and male approval. When they step out of the role, they're put down further by labels that imply, or just plain say, they must be man-haters and lesbians. There's a sense in which, in the midst of the gains for LGBT people, homophobia in and toward women has increased. It used to be okay, or at least tolerated, when women did things together. They could dance together, show affection publicly, and spend time together in ways such as vacations that would have raised red flags for men who did the same. There was less public homophobia for women. Our culture's sexism, which took boys and men more seriously, tolerated the tomboy in a way it didn't accept the girly boy. Girls and women who deviated weren't given enough credit in doing so to threaten the system and its gender roles. They were more cute than threatening, like children are cute, like "old maids" were considered just harmless oddities.
Men aren't always responding with cheers to these changes. They've often taken the "but we're victims too" role when they label a movie such as Thelma and Louise "male bashing," acting insulted in the midst of the constant barrage of exploitation and demeaning of women in cinema. They've often tried to minimize women's efforts to redefine their own positions or to value women's self-evaluations without men's opinions or presence. They've acted like abandoned children when women have gone off by themselves to change their own lives. They've refused to understand the depth and reality of women's anger (at times acted out on men) toward a system that still finds men in the highest positions of authority. In our culture, where lesbians still receive the double negatives that threaten women and homosexuals, the greatest putdown of women has increasingly come to be labeling them "dykes" and "lesbos." Now that women are getting close in order to change the system of valuation, women's getting close to their own sex is more of a threat, and more feared. Homophobia toward and in women is on the rise, because homophobia keeps everyone in their masculine and feminine roles. As "the fear of getting close to one's own gender," homophobia's function is to keep people apart. If women can fight each other to see who best embodies the victim role that's necessary to get the ideal man as society defines him, they'll always separate from each other for a man. They'll never ultimately value themselves and each other. They'll continue to devalue women's approval of each other. They'll continue to internalize the "beating themselves up" when there's no other woman around to judge them. The effect of this aspect of the culture's sexism and homophobia on lesbian relationships is serious and seldom seriously examined. There's just something wrong with lesbians, lesbians tell each other, when it's not about sexual orientation and all about the cultural training of women to be dependent upon men. Unless healing, awareness, counseling and support break the patterns, think of the results of the internalization of sexism and homophobia for lesbian relationships:
None of this has to be. None of this has to do with being a lesbian. None of this is asked for, deserved, or built into lesbians or any women. All of this has to do with the constant conditioning of women from the moment they were wrapped in a pink blanket, not a blue one.
All of this is learned, and all of it can be unlearned, if women continue to take the lead in their own healing. Men can be allies and good listeners. But women have proven time and again that they're powerful enough to overcome any obstacles and change what's hurting anyone. Lesbians and all women, after all, are really beautiful, whole people. 
Robert N. Minor's newest book is Gay and Healthy in a Sick Society (HumanityWorks!, 2003). His 2001 book Scared Straight: Why It's So Hard to Accept Gay People and Why It's So Hard to Be Human, was a finalist for both a Lambda Literary and the Independent Publisher Book Awards. He is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Kansas and may be reached www.fairnessproject.org .
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But times have changed. Women are changing. Women's closeness is no more seen as cute little quilting, charity fund raising, children-centered, or tea parties. Women have been getting close to threaten the sexism, take back the night, demand control of their own bodies and reproductive choices, demand equal pay for equal work, end the "boys will be boys" harassment, and tell men that they expect them to drop the hyper-macho mask and act like full human beings.