I'm a Boomer and used to believe that intense female competition was a bit anachronistic. My own mother was fiercely competitive, and it frightened me. I assumed that a lot of it had to do with her generation being conditioned that way, along with limited professional and personal options for women. But after decades of observation, it seems like there isn't a whole lot of empathy and 'sisterhood' in the younger generations, although most of them don't have the level of desperation about limited opportunities.

I was always homely and socially inept, so I was able to cancel myself out of the social competition, but I did observe it. It's easy to be an observer when you fade into the background. Obviously, most competition is based primarily on looks, and what's interesting about that is that it's not the men who 'police' women's looks, it's other women.