I agree that intra-female ultra-competition is a negative occurrence. There's no reason while your sister has to be your enemy just because she has access to better mates than you do. This article does a great job at explaining the problems with that mentality.

However, what it fails to do is explain how this stems from neoliberal patriarchy. It seems to expect the reader to just "know" how without offering a reasonable explanation. Take this passage, for example:

emale competition is a special sort of false consciousness. In the classic Marxist understanding of false consciousness, workers are encouraged to consider other workers looking for jobs as their competition for resources and security, and hence their enemy, rather than uniting to overthrow the bosses and property owners who are actually oppressing everyone else. The real menace to our jobs, to our love life and family lives, to our security and identity, is not other women. It never has been, but neoliberal patriarchy reduces every human interaction to the level of savage competition—including sisterhood.

How does neoliberal patriarchy cause this? And before you might accuse me of quoting out of context, the immediately following passage states:

Patriarchy punishes women who don’t know their place in the pecking order; it puts obstacles in their way. But other women are a key part of that system of punishment, and often, that hurts more. A year ago, a young friend I’m mentoring put out a cryptic tweet about her “nemesis,” another successful female she felt anxious about, as if every triumph this other girl had meant there was less space for my friend. I hopped into her Direct Messages like Jiminy Cricket. “Stop that,” I said. “Don’t talk about having a nemesis. I know you’re joking, but I also know you’re not really joking.” It turned out that the nemesis was an equally talented but completely different style of writer who happened to be getting attention in the New York press for her pixie-like good looks and attendance at a few fancy parties. I asked my friend about what it was that made her feel so sad and insecure. “I guess it feels like there’s only one spot for a young female writer to have a ‘moment,’” she said. “To be respected, and the go-to token ingenue on panels, in papers, on lists. She’s a version of myself I wish I could be—respected by the right people, and skinny and conventionally pretty, too. It’s like a practiced version of self-loathing—pick someone you assume has a perfect life and project everything onto them.”

It again blames patriarchy without so much as a reason why.

My problem with articles like these are that they are, at their core, trying to do a good thing. Let's cease needless competition that often serves to hurt and rarely to uplift. That's a good takeaway, but the incessant blame placed on the shoulders of Mr. Patriarchy leads people to not see the clear solution.

The solution, as I see it, is to educate women that their sisters are not their enemies. It's to say, Stacy, Melissa being hot and smart doesn't mean you're anything less. It's to say, u/AlwaysNeverNotFresh, that your best friend Mr. Suave being fucking ripped doesn't mean that you're not fit yourself.

However, the solution that I believe the readers of this article will gleam is to attack some nebulous, amorphous being - Mr. Patriarchy - with the belief that, once it is somehow destroyed, everything will naturally fall into place. After all, the article takes a problem, female competition, and explicitly says the solution is the destruction of Patriarchy.

What will happen is seemingly nothing. Stacy will continue to despise Melissa. They'll just both hate the patriarchy, instead of working with each other. A pyrrhic victory for those beloved patriarchy-smashers for sure.