Current mood:

bitchy

more trouble
And now I just got into trouble in feminist for being sexist for the first time ever.

What the hell is wrong with me.

All I said was that women can be vicious and mean and competitive, and anyone who denies that is willfully blind. And that women often find ways to obstruct clear communication.

To wit:

Yeah, see, I can relate to this. Anyone who says that women are not aggressive or not vicious or not competitive is totally, willfully blind. I prefer the company of men and likeminded women. Men are easier to deal with because I feel I have an easier time being blunt with them and telling them where they've fucked up. Women, on the other hand, have some kind of inexplicable danger about them that makes you want to back away. Women are impossible to read, always bobbing and weaving and lying.

I am taking a pretty huge swipe at the idea that says "If women ruled the world, we'd have world peace." Um, NO. That is a patronizing thing to say and believe.

I guess I was painting all women with a broad brush? I think I was calling female socialization on its bullshit. Women are taught to be passive-aggressive, I think. You're supposed to be nice and accommodating to everyone and make sure everyone is happy and having a good time and always available and always the one to handle emotional issues in a relationship because women, ya know, always so emotional and nurturing and the universal female urge (never a male urge) to make families and hearth and home and blah blah FUCKING BLAH.

So you learn to be passive-aggressive to beat the others and protect yourself and avoid being policed for being unwomanly. I feel like the majority of women do not initially trust one another unless they are serious gender outlaws who recognize that in each other. And I see groups of women talking together on the T or something, and they're all being faux genuine with each other and going through the etiquette and false shows of self-disclosure and smiling and "OH HIIIIIIIIIIII! HOW ARE YOU???? :-D" And then my bullshit meter starts to flash and play the Death March really loudly and I see poison in that smarmy little grin of hers while she is studying my thighs in order to decide how much to either hate me or feel like she is better than me. And yeah, I am studying her thighs too, because I fucking hate my thighs.

Do you know how it feels for every girl to study every other girl's plate or lack thereof at lunch time, and then gossip hard and fast about exactly what so-and-so ate or did not eat and then launch into a discussion of how her clothes fit on her and how her butt looks and how she is such a fat bitch? Do you know how it is to compete with every other girl to see who can go the longest without eating anything, or who can lose the most weight the fastest? Or who can get laid the most or have the most clothes or drink the hardest or snort the longest, fattest line? Or spread rumors that are very hard to disprove?

In warrior societies like ancient Greece, where the potential to harm one another is great and immediate, there evolves an elaborate system of etiquette to control human interactions. A lot of it is just ritual to mollify one another. Truly good manners are not about this, they are about kindness and getting on a good rapport with people and being considerate and a basic level of interest in your fellow human, a certain benefit-of-the-doubt ethos.

Girl culture etiquette is more about baiting one another in a cultural pressure cooker and seeing the reaction in order to judge. It's not about kindness, more about making a fake display of self-disclosure while trying to dupe the other into true self-disclosure, then gathering ammunition for later. It's about finding where you stand and redefining where you stand by searching for weaknesses/footholds. It's about a vested interest in exerting control over the communication, the double-speak and mind-games that are hallmarks of passive-aggressive behavior. Girls fight with words, and we all know that words are much, much worse than sticks and stones.

This doesn't happen all the time. Some relationships do not start out like this. Some people manage to become genuine friends in the process of this. But in girl culture, this type of behavior is, at some level, a fact of life.

Time to do some more crunches, I guess.