Women, competition and conflict: a recipe for sisterhood?

A recent post in a local women’s MTB group about the difficulty in running such groups has had me thinking. I have long been pondering the cost and impost of women’s collective and socially-conditioned difficulties with conflict and competition in settings such as MTB. This train of thought has been on track to derail my ability to think about anything else so I’m unloading* it here. My own experience riding bikes both socially and competitively has obviously been a significant factor in my thinking. I have also been chatting with women in my network who ride and race recreationally and professionally, and I don’t have any answers (yet) but I can observe the following:

Women are not conditioned to be good at conflict. If you’re a woman, think about all the conflict you avoid. If you know a woman, think about all the times they’ve said ‘it’s fine’ when it really hasn’t been fine. Men are ‘assertive’ and women are ‘bossy’. Men can ‘tell it like it is’ but women are ‘bitches’. Troublingly, and to the chagrin of every wave of feminists, while gendered, these perceptions are common from both sexes. Internalised misogyny, anybody? A lot of interest groups are run online and Facebook pages and group chats (i.e. digital/social media) prove to be fertile ground for ‘conflict’. I don’t think it is a stretch to posit that women interpret silence differently than men. Heck, for us even a full stop can be imbued with meaning beyond simple punctuation. If, as women, we see other women’s communication as ‘bitchy’, tension arises and, if my logic follows, we don’t necessarily possess the skills to successfully iron out any misunderstanding in that communication, resulting in conflict. That brings me to my next point:

Women do not have the benefit of social space to process that conflict, which often arises in settings of perceived or actual competition. Often, voicing opinion about others or ourselves is perceived negatively and often equated with bitchiness, while anything which may be self-congratulatory is ‘stuck up’. If we talk about other people’s behaviour, we’re bitching (which is a separate proposition to saying mean things about somebody’s kit or their preference to ride with music or whatever superficial observation for the purpose of self-gratification). We’re not allowed to say ‘what X person said upset me’ or ‘what they post on ig and the way they act in real life are really different and that is confusing and I would like to talk it through’. And before anybody comes at me with tropes like ‘just don’t worry what others think’ or ‘it’s just the internet’ – thank you so much. You’ve just put the entire field of psychology out of business. Self-help book sales have dropped drastically. I’ll only communicate by rotary phone and telegrams from now on. Why didn’t I think of that?! Oh yeah. Because the same conditioning that doesn’t equip us to deal well in conflict has us sharply in tune with the feelings of others, whose needs we are taught to place before our own. It also naively ignores the reality of the world we all inhabit.

What I’m saying is that social conventions tend to frame women talking about experience involving others as gossip, which is thought of negatively, which means we do not have the space to talk about our feelings in situations where we are in conflict or competition, and so we do not get to develop the psychosocial skills to deal with those situations.

I have lived and heard my share of anecdotes from women who ride in elite and recreational fields which are pertinent to this discussion. There’s also plenty of literature about women’s evolutionary instincts for competition which may also be relevant to these ponderings but are a whole other conversation entirely. To bring it back to my first point, women’s conflict is said to be less overt – experiences of being given, or giving, the silent treatment or being iced out come to mind. And maybe this is a by-product of our lizard brains not being equipped to deal with the complexity of human interactions in this new world where we need to be seen to be nice and happy and kind and positive (even if we don’t feel or aren’t nice and happy and kind and positive). Though social media posts after events seem to congratulate everybody who participated, it is possible that in many cases, doing that serves only to validate our performance and how we perceive our sportsmanship will be perceived (so meta, soz). I think as women, we tend to minimise our feelings and experiences because we don’t want to lose social approval by being seen to gossip or expressing negative emotion or, shockingly, applauding our efforts and results. And if we try follow the advice to ‘just don’t worry what others think’, we might instead worry we care too much about what other people think and wonder why it matters so much to us and ask ourselves why we can’t just forget about it, repeatedly, and spiral into thinking we’re deficient because we care about how we’re perceived.

Either way, we’re too busy parsing our experiences to ‘see the good’ or ‘not worry’ so we can find acceptance for that, instead of having the time and space to deal with the vagaries of negative human emotion – conflict and competition – and how to retain our humanity and womanhood while keeping on top of laundry, eating ‘right’, calling back our mothers, working full time – you know, balancing all the demands of modernity.

In my own experience, I have stepped back from running races and participating in group chats. The whole other life I live Monday to Friday (which funds my MTB hobby) often means I do not have the bandwidth to deal with the emotional and practical complexities and demands of doing so. And to be fair, maybe everybody else also doesn’t have the bandwidth. Or the message that went unanswered in the group chat came in at an inopportune moment and nobody got a chance to respond, or it was too late, or they saw the post in between the bazillion other things they had on and then forgot about it because their brains only have space for so many action items and it couldn’t compete with other items on the priority list.

I will also say that I am actively undoing a lot of internalised misogyny with questions like ‘how would I react to that if a man was saying it?’ (sometimes the answer is that I’d react worse – give me the bear). It isn’t easy – I have more than 30 years of conditioning to undo – and can be exhausting (see above reference to priority list) and sometimes I just have to accept that my thinking can be problematic. If I’m lucky, my anxious brain is okay with putting it on the back burner while I go for a solo pedal to clear my head.

And I’d love to end this with a pithy one-liner that wraps the whole thing up, but I’m stumped. I don’t know why women’s MTB groups are hard work. I do wish it wasn’t so – I think we all long for sisterhood and the acceptance and joy that comes with it. But maybe factors of conflict-aversion and competitive psychology are really crucial in understanding why women’s MTB isn’t the inclusive and nurturing space we all want it to be. And maybe acknowledging that is a step toward rides that end in rainbows, puppies and group hugs.

*I am so sorry about this train analogy idk where it came from