It’s Always the Same Story

There is so much going on in the world right now.

And yet, this past week has been dominated by headlines and breakdowns of a feud between an influencer and a podcaster.

And I’m not above any of it.  I went down the rabbit holes too, refreshing pages and looking for updates like it actually mattered.  None of it felt right. It wasn’t even about the drama itself.  I didn’t really care what actually happened.

It was the compulsive pull of watching it unfold.  Seeing successful people, especially women, who seem untouchable start to crack.  Proof that their lives are not as perfect as they make them out to seem.

And still, I caught myself waiting for them to fall.

Is that jealousy?  A lack of confidence?  Fear of inadequacy?  Probably all of the above.

But regardless of my own reaction, there was a larger pattern at play.

A tale as old as time.
Women being pitted against each other.
For our entertainment.  As a scapegoat.  A distraction.  Something easy to consume.

This is nothing new.

From Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, whose professional competition was turned into a lasting feud,
to Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan, whose complex and highly publicized scandal was flattened into a simple villain versus victim storyline,
to Selena Gomez and Hailey Bieber, where two women became the focus, and we completely lost the plot.

It follows the same script.
And we fall for it. Every time.

One woman is dissected while the other is defended. Everyone has an opinion, and it escalates quickly. People come out of the woodwork with takes, ‘evidence,’ and old stories, all suddenly treated like fact.
It becomes a spectacle. A breakdown of character. And then it repeats.

No one is safe. Or maybe more accurately, no woman is.

This isn’t about who’s right. That’s not the point.

The point is how easily it becomes something we watch instead of question.
Because when women are set against each other, complexity disappears. One is right, one is wrong. One is likable, one is despised.

It’s simple, safe, and easy to engage with.
It asks nothing from us.
And that’s exactly why it works.

At a certain point, it stops feeling accidental.

Because that pattern doesn’t stay online.
It shows up at work too.
What gets attention isn’t always what matters most. It’s what’s easiest to respond to. The cleanest way to assign blame.

And when it comes to women, the line is even narrower.

A woman in a leadership role gets labeled “difficult” or “toxic,” and the conversation rarely moves past that. It spreads quickly. Narratives form, and reputations shift in real time, driven more by what spreads easily than what’s actually true.

If she is direct, she is aggressive. If she sets boundaries, she is hard to work with. If she is successful, how she got there gets questioned.

And that becomes the whole story.

It doesn’t move into anything deeper, the structure she is operating in, the expectations placed on her or the decisions she is navigating.

Because just like online, it is easier to reduce her to a story than it is to understand what is actually happening.

It’s easier to judge her than understand her.
Easier to turn her into something to analyze
than someone to actually hear.

Attention stays where it’s comfortable.
And the things that actually matter stay harder to reach.

What holds our attention isn’t what matters.
It’s what asks the least from us.

And we take the bait. Every damn time.