All Women Hate Each Other

"I think all women secretly hate each other."

— Jerry Lawler, Monday Night Raw

In many stories, it seems women can't be friends (or aren't very good friends) because they tend to be bitchy towards each other. Sometimes a female protagonist has no more than one or two female friends, but she can't seem to make any more because they're either Alpha Bitches or there's something about the protagonist that rubs other females the wrong way. In the worst cases, she has no female friends at all and has a mutual hatred for every female character she encounters. This is also common in sororities.

A Sub-Trope of Women Are Delicate; specifically, the "irrational" aspect of delicate, whereas they can't even stand each other.

It's sometimes used to justify Territorial Smurfette. See also Not Like Other Girls, where it's considered a good thing for one girl to be unlike her female peers; and One of the Boys, which is the natural outcome in a world where this is the rule.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Agravity Boys has a chapter where three of the main four titular boys are genderbent. While they bicker with each other and get on each other's nerves as men, they're ultimately able to work out a game plan and get something done; contrast to how they are as girls, where they are not only unable to get anything done without Chris (the only one who didn't genderbend), but constantly snipe at each other and bicker worse only to make up one cry later.
• Yuusha Gojo Kumiai Kouryuugata Keijiban: One of the forum posters is a girl who was shanghaied into an adventuring party with four noble and clergy women. The party members are all classist jerkasses towards each other, hate the girl the most because she's a commoner, and spend the entire adventure making each other's lives hell. The other forum members only invoke a spell to send her home after she reveals her gender to the thread; before then, they assumed she was The One Guy humble-bragging about being surrounded by hot girls and that their ire was Belligerent Sexual Tension. This is notable compared to the other Adventure Duo that appears in her universe, a waitress and the male priest who defied mind controlling her, whom had a much more pleasant relationship.

Comic Books

• Superman/Wonder Woman: This trope is lampshaded by Circe in the first page of issue #14.
  What is it with women? With men I know what to expect. An initial spurt of bravura teamed in the end with cowardice. Even the best of men are driven by—at most—two or three desires. Easily manipulated. Like putty, but with too much hair. But women... women are as baffling and as dangerous to each other as we are to man. You can make no predictions on what we will do next, who we might crush... Who we might love.
• Thorgal: In one story, Thorgal finds himself traveling with a Hot Witch named Salouma, a young girl named Lehla, and a Rus bodyguard named Petrov. Lehla asks Petrov what he thinks of Salouma (who's been making advances towards Thorgal), and he replies "If there's one thing I've learned, it's to never tell a woman what you think of another woman".

Fan Works

• The Black Sheep Dog Series: This trope is discussed in one of Lucretia's monologues while she's thinking ill of her father and his "deep and profoundly offensive view that all women must, by the nature of their strange, feminine minds, secretly hate the others." Lucretia herself secretly agrees with his notions, although she considers herself and Walburga to be different from "those spiteful cats".
• The Warhammer 40,000 fanfic The Cold Shoulder System: Not one Sororitas in The Order of the Ermine Mantle can stand the others.

Films — Live-Action

• Mean Girls: Deconstructed. All of the girls in the school are revealed to have said cruel things about each other, and all of them have felt victimized by the same sort of comments because teenage girls are so insecure and vulnerable. The protagonist realizes in the middle of a Maths contest thing that mocking her opponent's homely appearance won't help her win the tournament. During the scene in the gymnasium discussing the reaction to the Burn Book, Ms. Norbury tells the girls that calling each other horrible names just makes it okay for guys to do the same to them.

Literature

• The Dresden Files: Discussed. Harry narrates in one book that women have a complex series of criteria and mental calculations they go through when they meet one another to decide whether to take an instant dislike.
  "Men have a similar system, but it's binary: 'Does he have beer? If yes, will he share with me?'"
• The Laundry Files: In The Apocalypse Codex, Mo O'Brien meets Ramona Random, a woman with whom Mo's husband Bob had worked closely with while they were dating in The Jennifer Morgue, at a diplomatic function. Mo takes an instant dislike to Ramona because of their history, but Ramona intuits that Mo is lashing out partly because her marriage is under strain from their jobs and the two end up spending the evening having a very pleasant talk.
• Star Risk, Ltd.: M'chel Riss and Jasmine King are both attractive blonde women, and when they first meet each other Riss's narration comments that she would find it very easy to hate Jasmine. As it turns out, they hit it off pretty quickly.

Live-Action TV

• 30 Rock: This trope is discussed in "TGS Hates Women". When TGS With Tracy Jordan is accused of being misogynistic, Liz decides to hire a female comedian named Abby Flynn as a new staff writer. Abby's childish personality and flirtatious behavior makes her very popular among the men, but draw the ire of Liz and Jenna, the former viewing Abby's behavior as an embarrassment to women and the latter seeing Abby as competition for men's attention. Liz insists that she is not jealous of Abby and frequently points out how women are often pitted against each other to win men's approval.
• The Big Bang Theory:
  • When Raj's sister Priya dates Leonard, she and Penny have an icy relationship. Penny still secretly harbors feelings for Leonard, and Priya acts condescendingly towards her and even tries to get Leonard to stop seeing her.
  • When Penny meets Raj's girlfriend Emily, she finds that Emily acts distant towards her. She later finds out it's because Raj told Emily about the time he and Penny shared a bed, even though nothing happened. (Raj: "In my defense, I'm telling everybody.") In the end, they seem to patch things up, but after Penny sees Emily out, after the door closes they both say to themselves "I hate her."
• Crazy Ex-Girlfriend:
  • In the second episode, Paula assumes Rebecca secretly hates Josh's girlfriend Valencia, insisting that women of "equal sexual viability" all have to hate each other no matter what. Rebecca shuts this down, but she does clearly harbor resentment towards Valencia, which is explored throughout the rest of the season.
  • Valencia herself doesn't have female friends because she sees all other women as competition or jealous of her. This concept is lampooned in one of her songs, "Women Gotta Stick Together", which is a faux-female-empowerment song that's actually about tearing other women down. By season two, she's realized this and genuinely becomes friends with Heather and Rebecca.
  Women gotta stick together
  And tell each other the truth
  The truth is you're all fat sluts
  And that's called sisterhood.
• Fate: The Winx Saga: In contrast to the original animated series where they were almost instantly friends, the girls are much more antagonistic towards each other, particularly Stella and Bloom who are in a love triangle with Stella's boyfriend Skye. Stella and Bloom's relationships with their mothers is also much more troubled. For the girls, at least, this is eventually subverted as they become Fire-Forged Friends.
• Friends: Ross drunkenly lets slip that his girlfriend Charlie didn't like Rachel when they first met. Charlie tries to apologize and Rachel says it's okay, girls usually don't like her.
• Game of Thrones: Female characters rarely demonstrate anything remotely approaching trust or friendship towards one another, especially after season 4. Among other things, Osha and Meera squabble over their hunting prowess and quickly escalate to death threats; the Waif is immediately hostile towards Arya for no explained reason, even demonstrating glee at the chance to murder her (something that should be impossible for one of the Faceless Men); the Sand Snakes childishly bicker among themselves and regard each other with barely-restrained irritation; Arya's already prickly relationship with Sansa escalates to utterly psychopathic threats of violence (and would have ended with one of them dead if Bran hadn't ended the feud in a deleted scene); finally, Sansa not only distrusts Daenerys but treats her with open hostility beyond the realms of reason. And the less is said about Cersei, the better. Subverted with Olenna Tyrell and Brienne of Tarth; against all expectations, the former treats the latter with respect and decency.
• How I Met Your Mother: Lily thinks she's going to be leaving the country for a year, and worries for Robin, as Lily is Robin's only female friend. Robin says she doesn't get along with other women. At Lily's insistence, Robin talks to a woman crying at the bar. It turns out the two of them have a lot in common, and she could supplant Lily as Robin's best female friend. Lily then gets jealous and sabotages the budding friendship.
• It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: Deandra doesn't really have close friends, only Artemis whom she hangs around with to make herself look prettier when trolling bars, and "the Waitress" who she only uses in her cruel manipulations. Meanwhile, Charlie, Mac, and Dennis are often locked in battles and rivalries to prove who is a better friend to whom.
• Married... with Children:
  • The episode "The House That Peg Lost" brings this trope out in a vivid illustration, as an activity during Kelly's slumber party involves one of the girls leaving the room for a moment, during which the other girls gossip about and badmouth her behind her back, only to feign friendliness once she returns to the room. Then even that thin layer of pretend friendship is torn apart after Bud reveals (or helps to reveal) some incriminating facts about the girls' dating records, especially Kelly's, which leads to Cat Fight lasting through the rest of the slumber party time.
  • Not said by Al Bundy but attributed to him: "Don't try to understand women. Women understand other women, and they hate each other."
• New In Town: John Mulaney thought that his female friends get along, but they just naturally butt heads. He reasons that maybe women can be friends, but if they're not together by choice, they will default to cattiness. The stereotype is directly referenced when he says that a group of women coming together for, say, a heist would devolve into passive-aggressive snipes.
• Reboot (2022): Reed calls out Bree for sabotaging their young, pretty, charming costar Timberly's acting out of envy. She retorts that she came up in a Hollywood where women were cutthroat towards each other and cites examples of female costars who sabotaged her. Reed responds that she's now just perpetuating the same cycle of abuse and misogyny, prompting her to make up with Timberly.
• Seinfeld: Elaine Benes is hardly ever seen interacting with other women rather than Jerry, George, and Kramer, and when she is it is often not in a positive way. She even mentions that she has a hard time making friends with women because they tend not to like her.
• The White Lotus: Daphne says that she doesn't have any female friends because she believes the women in her social circle to be backstabbing bitches. She's telling this to Harper, who has been talking badly of her behind her back the entire trip.

Theatre

• The Importance of Being Earnest: Jack says that his ward Cecily and his fiance Gwendolyn will be "calling each other sister" before the day is out. Algernon snarks that, "Women never call each other sister before they've called each other a lot of other things first." He's proven right when Gwendolyn and Cecily get into a verbal catfight later.
• Teased, but ultimately subverted, in Six. The titular six wives of Henry VIII all decide to have an afterlife competition over who's the better of them, and while all of them are trying to assert that they're not simply "ex-wives", some pick catty fights with each other throughout the show. It's only at the end when it's implied their cattiness was just an act, and that the competition wasn't serious.

Video Games

• Explicitly defied in Hatsune Miku: Colorful Stage!. One of the four main groups, the all-girl MORE MORE JUMP!, has the original song "Newly Edgy Idols" which discusses this trope. One singer laments that girls' friendships are often considered "as thin as a slice of ham", so their aim is to show the world how close and supportive they all are of each other to the point where that "slice" is as big as a steak. The MMJ members themselves are all incredibly good friends.

Web Animation

• Red vs. Blue: Tucker says "Chicks can't share anything, not even an apartment."

Webcomics

• Looking for Group: When the party takes passage on a ship run by a female captain, she's the first woman they've really interacted with other than the one who's defined by her relationship to the male lead. The two women are about to meet—and the next strip reports that this trope happened for no reason that the men can figure out. The punchline essentially is "wimmenz is crazy."

Web Videos

• History of Power Rangers: The first episode for Power Rangers in Space has Linkara noting that the women of the United Alliance of Evil all seem to hate each other, leading to a Cat Fight introducing the new antagonist of the season, Astronema.
• The Devil Is a Part-Timer Abridged: None of the female cast gets along, barring Rika who harbors lust for Emi. Chiho loathes Emi and Suzuno for being threats to her relationship with Mao, Suzuno is Ax-Crazy and wants to kill pretty much everyone, and Emi just finds both of them annoying. Yet they keep up the act of friendship, largely to further their own agendas.

Western Animation

• 6teen: "Fish and Make Up", where Nikki and Caitlin hate each other:
  Jude: Why can't we all just be friends again?
  Jen: It's complicated.
  Wyatt: You mean, chicks are complicated.
  Jen: No we're not!
  Wyatt and Jones: Yes you are!
• Fairly Oddparents: Wanda doesn't have that many female friends (except for two). Having an idiot for a husband probably didn't help much either. Some of the more beautiful women hate her because she's plain, AND the Chick Magnet Juandissimo is pining over her.
• Family Guy:
  • Lois Griffin seems to have a problem trying to make friends with women. As she said in "And Then There Were Fewer" when she tried to be friends with Diane Simmons. She thought she made friends with the new female newscaster, but she turns out to be a former classmate of Lois who held a grudge against her for humiliating her (as Lois was an evil cheerleader). Her only female friend seems to be Bonnie. Even she called Lois a "slut" when word got out that she once starred in a porn film.
  • In "Forget Me Not", Stewie puts several characters in a simulation with amnesia. When Peter, Brian, Quagmire and Joe encounter each other, the four were able to get along in the beginning before things went downhill. In contrast, Meg, Lois and Bonnie quickly start scratching and pulling each others' hair, and weren't able to leave the hospital.
  • In "Friends Without Benefits", Meg claims female friends are terrible and always give each other phony compliments. Cue a Cutaway Gag where two women make extremely passive aggressive comments towards one another, while a man is able to give a normal and genuine compliment to his friend.
    Chorus: Men! We know how to be friends!
  • In the parody of Return of the Jedi Leia takes an instant disliking to Mon Mothma, presumably for no other reason than this trope.
    Han Solo (Peter): Hey check it out, it's another chick. The only other chick in the galaxy.
    Leia (Lois): I don't like her.
• Futurama: In "The Butterjunk Effect", Fry, Leela, Amy and Kif go on a double-date. Leela and Amy only talk passive-aggressively to one another, Fry jokingly regarding it as being like a cat-fight. They respond by saying that women always talk like this to one another and that they would know that something was actually wrong when they start talking normally to each other.
• Gravity Falls: Lampshaded when after witnessing Robbie challenge his bitter rival Dipper to a fight, Mabel asks why they can't just hate each other in silence "like girls do." After their fight gets out of hand, Dipper and Robbie agree to do just that.
• Justice League: This was something of a recurring pattern among the female relationships on the show initially, although it typically ends up subverted.
  • Wonder Woman and Hawkgirl were originally the only two female members of the League. Their relationship is not exactly a friendly one with Hawkgirl viewing Diana as a snob while Diana dislikes Shayera's boorish nature. Things only got worse between them when it was revealed that Shayera was The Mole for the Thanagarians. They later became good friends after traversing Tartarus together.
  • Black Canary and Huntress didn't get off to a good start when they first met due to Huntress wanting to kill a mob boss Black Canary was helping the feds protect so he could turn over evidence against his associates. They teamed up in a later episode and gained respect and begrudging affection for each other.
  • Hawkgirl and Vixen also had a tense relationship due to the latter dating John Stewart after he and Shayera broke up due to her role in the Thanagarian invasion. The two eventually become friends of sorts, including gossiping and laughing about John's habits, though Shayera wasn't above playing pranks on Vixen like making her think she'd poisoned her water.
  • "Chaos At The Earth's Core" has a team of Leaguers consisting of John Stewart, S.T.R.I.P.E. Supergirl and Stargirl. Throughout the episode, Stargirl is jealous of Supergirl's popularity and thinks she only got into the League due to her connection to Superman. When she sees how vulnerable Supergirl is when her powers start fading, Stargirl realizes how petty her attitude towards Supergirl is.
• The Loud House: In "Brawl in the Family", the Loud sisters assert that Sibling Rivalry is meaner and pettier when it's two sisters fighting. This mentality, however, isn't present for most of the series.
• The Simpsons: Marge doesn't have that many female friends. Most even shun her, mostly because of Homer's stupidity. One time, she tried to have some women over, but Homer came in with a skunk. She used to be part of a group of women called the Springfield Investorettes (which includes Helen, Maude, Agnes, Luann, and Edna) who voted her out for being a wet blanket.
• Total Drama:
  • Discussed by Bridgette in the Island episode "Brunch Of Disgustingness", where she is uneasy about being the only girl from the Killer Bass moving in with the four girls from the Screaming Gophers and fearing the stereotype where when living together, guys get along really well while the girls are always at each other's throats. Her fears are made real when Bridgette is caught in the middle of a fight between Gwen and Leshawna on one side and Heather and Lindsay on the other, while the guys from both teams are seen partying with each other. The girls temporarily stop fighting when Eva returns, being too scared of invoking her wrath and going back to it once she is eliminated again.
  • The fighting amongst the girls continues in Action where they argue about who gets what bed in the first episode, as well as various other incidents throughout the rest of the competition, while the guys are still seen getting along fine with each other.

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