The enemy that lives within us

On the war women wage against themselves, and what current transits have to say about it.

What happened and what it reveals

If you haven't heard of Kristin Cabot yet, the summary is this: she was filmed at a Coldplay concert in an intimate moment with her boss. The video became the most-watched of 2025. What followed were over fifty death threats, her address leaked on a radio station, paparazzi chasing her for weeks, and a group of adult women surrounding her car at her teenage son's workplace, shouting at her while the boy watched.

The boss, CEO Andy Byron, resigned quietly. He wasn't harassed. He didn't have his body dissected online. He didn't have his children terrorized. He simply moved on to the next chapter.

It turns out Kristin was already separated from her husband, living in separate homes, and planning an amicable divorce. Her husband was at the same concert that night, with someone else. He supported her then and he supports her now.

None of that mattered.

And what disturbed Kristin Cabot most, by her own account, was that the majority of the cruel reactions came from women.

It shouldn't surprise us. And the fact that it still does says exactly what we need to examine.

A Venus Friday to talk about what no one wants to talk about

Today is Friday, the day of Venus. And precisely for this reason, I am going to talk about something that is not easy to say, that makes you lose followers, that triggers immediate defenses, and for that very reason is rarely spoken with the clarity it deserves.

I am going to talk about internalized misogyny. About the patriarchy buried so deep within each of us that, without conscious and deliberate work, what will continue to exist is denial, reactivity, or pretending you don't even know what is being discussed.

It is not a comfortable topic. It is not a topic that generates easy likes or feels good in the immediate term. It is a topic that touches a collective wound that the feminine has carried for generations and that continues to manifest in ways that should deeply disturb us, starting with how we treat other women when they stumble in public.

I have already lost more than 56 people from the newsletter alone for talking about this. And I tell you in all honesty: they were probably exactly the people who most needed to keep reading and to work on themselves regarding this topic. Because the first reaction to a mirror showing something we don't want to see is rarely gratitude. It is flight.

If you stayed, thank you. What follows is for you.

It’s not the first time. It won't be the last.

Janet Jackson didn't rip off her own costume at the Super Bowl. Justin Timberlake did. She was banned from radio stations and criticized for years. He won two Grammys in the same week.

Monica Lewinsky was a 22-year-old intern. Bill Clinton was the President of the United States. She became a laughingstock for a generation, with the harshest judgments coming from women. He kept his presidency, his foundation, his legacy.

Britney Spears was publicly humiliated by her ex-boyfriend on every American talk show, criticized by women, and stripped of her own legal autonomy for over a decade. He made movies and won awards.

The pattern is not accidental. It is systematic and systemic. And what keeps it active is not just men, I'm sorry to say. It is us. Women doing the work the system needs us to do to keep itself functioning and alive and well.

If that triggered a defensive reaction in you, hold onto that reaction. It is information. We will come back to it later.

The psychology beneath the behavior

When one woman attacks another woman with an intensity that wouldn't match the same behavior in a man, what is really happening is not moral judgment. It is wound activation.

Internalized misogyny is not a conscious choice. It is the result of decades of absorbing a culture that teaches, in explicit and implicit ways, that women are less trustworthy, less stable, and less worthy of the benefit of the doubt than men. We internalize this message before we have any critical capacity to question it. And then we reinforce it against each other with a ferocity we rarely direct at the system that installed it.

Beneath internalized misogyny is often something simpler and more painful: unresolved emotional need. The woman who attacks another woman for what she wears, for whom she loves, for how she appears in the world, is rarely talking about the other. She is talking about herself. About the parts that were suppressed because they were "too much"—too free, too visible, too incompatible with what she was taught a respectable woman should be.

What was not allowed in herself, the desire that was shamed, the freedom that was punished, the visibility that was silenced, is projected outward as judgment of the other who possesses it or appears to. It is not envy in the simple sense. It is the echo of a wound that hasn't been looked at directly yet.

When love was scarce in childhood, when approval was conditional, when identity was built on comparison instead of intrinsic value, the adult who emerges has a nervous system calibrated for competition where there could be alliance. For attack where there could be recognition. For the destruction of another woman where there could be the question: what is this situation showing me about what I haven't yet resolved in myself?

Research confirms what evolutionary psychology has long described. Women react with greater aggression toward other women who appear sexually available or socially visible, precisely because the system has taught them that another woman's freedom is a threat to their own position. This is not an inherent trait of the feminine. It is the result of centuries of imposed scarcity: of love, of resources, of recognition, of space to exist fully.

The patriarchy that lives within us

This is the hardest part. And that is precisely why it is rarely spoken with honesty.

The patriarchy doesn't need active men to perpetuate itself. It has at its disposal too many women who perform its maintenance. Who punish other women for exceeding the limits of what is acceptable. Who reinforce the rules of respectability that the system created exactly to keep women subordinate, distracted by one another, and unable to turn collectively against what oppresses them.

Every time a woman attacks another woman for how she appears, for who she sleeps with, for how much space she occupies, for being too visible, too sexual, too free, too successful, or anything else, she is doing for free the work the system needs done. She is being the guard of the boundaries that keep all women in the place they were assigned.

And the most disturbing thing is that they do this thinking they are on the right side. That they are defending values. That they are protecting something. When in reality, they are protecting the system that oppresses them just as much as the woman they are attacking.

Men, who compete for power, money, and status every day of their lives, have discovered something we haven't collectively discovered yet: publicly attacking another man is a losing strategy. They protect the group because they realized that protecting the group protects the individual. When one of them is under attack, they close ranks and wait for it to pass.

We don't do that. And until we do, we will continue to fight over crumbs while they remain seated at the table.

What Venus in Taurus and Mars in Aries have to say about this moment

It is not accidental that this topic is so active precisely now.

Venus is in Taurus, in its home sign. Mars is in Aries, also in its home sign. The two personal planets that govern the feminine and masculine in their most archetypal expression are both in their most characteristic and intense form simultaneously.

This configuration amplifies everything to do with the war of the sexes, with dysfunctions in gender roles, with the tension between what the feminine is in its most genuine nature and what it has been taught to be in order to survive in a culture that has domesticated, controlled, and divided it against itself.

Venus in Taurus in its most integrated expression is the feminine that knows its own value without needing to prove it through the destruction of another. That has sufficient internal resources not to experience another woman's freedom as a threat to its own security. That can occupy its space completely without needing to reduce another's space to make its own seem larger.

In its shadow, Venus in Taurus is the feminine that uses traditional values as a weapon of judgment. That uses respectability as a criterion for exclusion. That protects its position through the control of other women's freedom.

The square of Venus in Taurus to Pluto in Aquarius that happened recently exposed exactly this: the values one professes versus the values one practices. The inconsistencies between what one claims to defend and what concrete choices reveal one defends in practice. Pluto has no mercy for hypocrisy. And what was exposed in this period, both collectively and individually, is exactly this tension between the feminine one proclaims and the feminine one lives.

Mars in Aries in its shadow is the force that turns inward against the group because the true system of oppression seems too large to be confronted directly. It is easier to destroy another woman than to confront the system that taught us to do so. It is safer to attack someone who stumbled than to question why a woman's stumble is punished in a way that a man's stumble never is.

The feminine's war with itself

What the story of Kristin Cabot, and Janet Jackson, and Monica Lewinsky, and Britney Spears have in common is not just the injustice of the double standard. It is the revelation of something about the state of the collective feminine that needs to be named without euphemisms.

The women who attacked Kristin Cabot in the parking lot were not monsters. They were women with unintegrated wounds, with unexamined internalized patriarchy, with emotional need that found in the destruction of another woman a channel of expression that the system made available and culturally sanctioned.

This does not absolve them at all of their behavior. But we need to look at responsibility and understanding the causes coexisting. But without understanding the causes, the response to the problem always stays on the surface: condemning the behavior without examining what has been producing it for decades. And what produces it will not disappear through condemnation.

What will start to change this pattern is the work each of us does internally. About what we were taught to believe about the feminine. About what another woman's freedom triggers in us and why. About the parts of us that were suppressed and that project themselves as judgment of those who have them or appear to.

It is asking, before clicking, commenting, sharing, or joining the group surrounding another woman's car: would men be judged in the same way? And if they wouldn't, what does that asymmetry tell me about the system I am serving at this moment?

And it is asking the hardest question: what is it that I, specifically, haven't resolved that makes me need to destroy this particular woman?

We could be Kristin Cabot. Any one of us. Fifteen seconds is all it takes for a woman's life to be destroyed by the court of public opinion, of which other women are often the fiercest judges.

Consciousness is the first obligation. Once the pattern is seen, it cannot be ignored again. And once it cannot be ignored, continuing to participate in it is a choice.

We deserve better than this. All of us. Including those who don't know it yet.

If this topic resonates with something you are working on internally regarding the feminine, about the patterns you inherited and no longer want to perpetuate, this is exactly the type of work we do in the Moonlovers Community.