At 14 years old, I was a fanatic feminist, as fanatic as one can be at 14 about anything. I owned plastic Dr. Martins, read Sassy magazine and spewed off the facts I knew about wage inequality and bride burning at any opportunity. I was a sister. I was a fighter.

And now, I'm not.

It's not, as one of my more sensitive male friends suggested, because I learned to cook. Nor do I disagree with my radical adolescent ideals. But somewhere between here and 14, my need for fanaticism waned and my priorities shifted.

While I ditched my plastic shoes for some incredibly un-liberating Kenneth Cole kitten heels, I was OK with that, believing that I still possessed the politics if not the passion. But last year, I had a very disturbing revelation.

I hated girls.

I was all for women, the theoretical socio-political group of which I was a member and whose advancement and rights had been my entire girlhood purpose. I loved my girlfriends who had seen me through that stage and many others.

But girls — the ones who walked ahead of me to class, the ones I bumped into at frat parties, the ones who used to date my boyfriends — I couldn't take. I was passing judgment on girls I didn't know, calling names at girls I had just met and criticizing girls I was friendly with.

I also realized, unfortunately, I wasn't alone. In fact, I was just as hated — and by girls I barely knew.

A girl who dated my boyfriend, I was told, was talking smack about me. A girl who dated one of my male friends was talking smack about me as well. It seemed all the girls I knew were out for, basically, each other.

Girls who were thinner than us were anorexic. Girls who competed with us for power were bitches. And when our boyfriends lingered too long in conversation with a girl at a party, it wasn't his wandering eye that angered us, but the man-stealing tricks of the slut he was talking to.

We make assumptions. We assume the worst.

And in doing so, we make things worse for ourselves.

We were being catty. We were making unfair generalizations. But we were also speaking from experience, because the fact was that many of us were throwing up, starving ourselves and compulsively exercising.

The reasons for that are varied and complex, but I can't say we weren't comparing ourselves to one another. Sure, we were thin, but we were miserable because there was always some girl who was thinner, and because no matter how much weight we lost we still didn't feel better.

Something was wrong.

Some of us were being downright cutthroat when another girl encroached on our claim to power — more so then if it had been from a guy. It was vicious. It was exhausting. And we couldn't quite explain why we were doing it.

While we knew it was wrong, there was something almost empowering about getting some male attention, especially in front of another woman, even though that empowerment was empty and short-lived. But there was always next weekend, which would inevitably start out with friends helping us pick clothes to make his old girlfriend jealous.

When I say "we," I don't mean this attitude is dominant at all times among all women. The ill will we harbor towards other women occurs in varying degrees and can increase or decrease in a person at various times — in some women it doesn't happen at all. By using "we," I also don't mean to imply that this misogyny among us is uniting. In fact, it tears us apart.

Sesame Street and our teachers taught us that Girls Rule. We could do anything we wanted because we were smart, creative and talented.

At the same time, we learned from the jokes made about women on prime time TV, from the amount of time and attention teachers spent on boys, that girls were stupid, untrustworthy and inferior. Sure, we can do anything we want, but these other chicks?

They don't really know what they're doing.

When we get to the classroom or the boardroom or the social arena, we can't help but recognize that there are fewer women in prestigious positions. There are no official quotas as to how many spots are open for women, there is no acknowledgement of preferential treatment towards men, but based on what we see and what we have learned we instantly start competing with women for the few spots we think have been endowed to us.

Other women become our outlet for the frustrations we face in society, and by beating these women we try to make up for the fact that we, in the year 2000, still aren't quite so equal as they say we are. We spend all our time trying to be thinner then one another instead of questioning on why we need to be so damn thin in the first place. We squabble for the few positions allotted to us instead of working together to create more.

Instead of working together, we set out to beat each other, and in the process, we all lose.