I love my girls and I know I’m lucky. They are so real, and lots of women aren’t. They say and do what’s expected of good girls and we know we fail miserably at being good. Why moan about how men are when we’re together? We have fun and we talk about important stuff sometimes, but they are not my problem, so why waste our time together discussing problems we can’t solve? If I really need help, I go to my therapist for a touchup, or if I just want to moan, my mom wants to hear it.
Celestina, that’s absolutely it. The rant kind of got out of control. I have friends who are girls. I am, in fact, a girl. I don’t hate women.
The point is that my mother says hanging out with guys instead of girls has somehow skewed my social development and that I’m crass and sarcastic and cold and unfriendly.
I said, FUCK YOU TITWRENCH
OK, again, I don’t swear at my mom.
I just think it’s unfair to blame my apparent personality flaws (that only my mother seems to notice) on my lack of female friends. The chicks I DO hang out with say “twat” a lot…so you can see I’m not getting a lot of ‘feminine cultivation’ there.
oh and p.s…my mom and my sister and I get along very well, but more as three people than as Oprah novel type mother and sisters. We have a good time and laugh and cry and stuff…but I don’t call my sister on the phone at college…ever. I talk to my mom maybe once a week. No biggie…I’m just not a sugar sweet conversationalist.
And yes, perhaps I just haven’t met the right girls…but I’m not going to try and change, and be more girly to please the girls of my family.
jarbaby
Phew. I was getting worried that we wouldn’t get a single jarbabyism in this thread.
I’m a lot like MikeG (including his subscript about being ackward when smitten) in that I get along much better with women in general than men. I’ve had a few good male friends at times, but I tend to have more female friends. I can’t really say why since I like both stereotypical male and female things. Like celestina said, you do what works for you.
Now where’s my dollar?
[[I don’t like to play the reindeer games most women do.]]
Women are shallow, only want to talk about relationships, diets and clothes… You know, if we were black, people would say we suffer from internalized racism. Most of my friends are male, too, but why is it such a common cliche for women to talk about what boring twits all other women are?
Well, I happen to enjoy my girlfriend, thank you very…
Oh. Nevermind.
Testify. I can completely relate. I have two girl friends. They are both as sarcastic, down-to-earth, laid back, and real as all of my guy friends. I have two other girl friends I see a lot, both at work and school. I like them a lot, but they get a little too girly-girly for me sometimes.
Of course, I have an example:
Every Tuesday night, a bunch of my friends from work and I go out to Red Brick Station ($0.99 drafts! I know the bouncer! It’s a beautiful thing!) Anyway, last night a cool girl I had always liked brought three of her girlie-friends. The worst kind. They huffed and puffed and fluffed their hair and played with their fake nails and checked their makeup and rolled their eyes and talked about working out and exercise and diets all fucking night! I found out one was an English major and attempted to have an English-major style conversation with her. She basically gave me the impression that she had never read a book. As soon as my cute guy friend James came over, they acted as ditzy as humanly possible.
Me? I was at another booth as soon as it opened. I told my best dirty jokes with James. I recited Shakespeare and did improv comedy with Ian. Kenny, Mike and I discussed porn and sex toy stores. We all shared a huge strawberry ice cream sundae (after four Italian Surfers, french fries dipped in strawberry ice cream tastes pretty damn good). Bill and I devised a new name for penis (ahem…mushroom on a stick - this was after the Surfers and another two Sex on the Beaches). We all got bawdy and stupid and loud, talked about sex, music, literature, and tv, and had the best time.
Why would I want to be friends with girls?? I give everyone I meet a share fake. I have plenty of female acquaintances at work and school, but when I really want to have fun, I call in the boys.
And I hate talking on the phone. I’m pleased to discover that I’m not the only girl who, as a teenager, did not have a phone wired to her head gear.
Disclaimer: I really hesitated about posting this, because some posters may talk it as a personal attack. It is no such thing, and I am not pretending to know what is going on the in the minds and hearts of individuals I only know thru a message board. Most of the posters here have been quick to point out that they do have female friends, just not as many as male friends. I am attempting to answer JillGat’s bigger question about why the image of the woman who is “one of the guys” is such an appealing picture in our society and why it is something so much of us strive for.
Thank you JillGat. I think you are dead on. I have a couple of thoeries, and of course none of them apply to anybody in particular–there are a lot of reasons why an individual might end up with more friends of the opposite sex than vice versa, but some trends I have seen are:
- Many women are only raised to take male approval seriously. Mothers nag about how you could look better everyday, but Dad makes a point of mentioning how good you look on Prom night. You cry on Mom’s shoulder, you want Dad to be proud of you. The media bombards you with images of what you should look like so that boys will like you. I know many many women who would rather have one man say publically that they are “pretty cool” than to have that same sentiment expressed by a legion of women.
2)As a culture we don’t take women seriously, so it makes sense to want to distance yourself from them. This takes its most disagreeable form when you have a woman and a man bitching together about how silly and useless all other women are. Sure, it feels great when it reinforces the idea that you are somehow different, but it also reinforces all those girly stereotypes in his mind. I think that all the “but most girls are only worried about silly stupid stuff” rant goes into this catagory–it is certainly not true, or not true anymore so than it is for men. But as a society we tend to give the male stupid stuff slightly more credit than the female stupid stuff (being a football freak is seen as a little better than being a hair and nails freak).
- This is the most charitable explaination: let’s assume, overall, that the best-ajusted, well balenced, interesting people are the ones that are comfortable with both sexes (on average), while the most conformist, predictable, innane people tend to be nervous around the opposite sex and hence stick with thier own. This suggests that when a girl says “all my guy friends are funnier, smarter, better ajusted people”, they are pulling from a biass (sic) sample–we never get anywhere near the male equivilant of the really girlie girls, as they are all hunched in thier booth swirling pitchers and talking about tits that they have sucked or whatever.
4)It is fun to be the only girl in a circle of guys-you get to be the center of attention more than you would be otherwise, you get to flirt like crazy since a) you are one of the guys and off limits and b) by flirting with everyone equally you don’t raise expectations or hurt feelings. In some cases (and this varies quite a bit) you get the princesss treatment more than you even realize–always in the front seat of the car, free drinks more often than anyone else, a generally higher respect for hurting your feelings than for hurting other peoples. (I have yet to see the odd girl out in a group of guys get teased for her fat ass, her big thighs, her ugly nose, her smelly twat, etc, even though guys tease each other with similar quips). As the only girl, when guys wrassle you get to wrassle along with them, hitting your hardest, but with the comfort that they will always remember to pull thier punches with you (not all guys wrassle, but among grups that do, this is the rule). Much of the time groups of guys with a pet girl will tend to compliment her way more than anyone else. They flirt back, and if there is an ego booster out there bigger than having 4 guys competing for your attention, I don’t know what it is. You get credit for being good at girlie things–you get to be the font of all wisdom whenever they have questions about “how girls see things”–but if you are below average in some skill the group has, you don’t get shit about it–you don’t have to compete with them, not because guys are less competitive, but because being a girl gives you an out. In other words, if you are GOOD at a guy thing you get full credit (i.e. can out drink them) but if you are bad at a guy thing (No one ever taught you how to throw a ball) it is unremarkable.
(Note: almost all of the above applies to being the only guy in a group of girls, as well, except the wrassling).
-
As far as “guys are more fun” goes, this seems to me to be part of a disturbing trend whereby women are more and more supposed to take over the practical side of life. One difference in my own experience between my guyfriends and my girlfriends is that I have never sat and talked with my guy friends about how to make $50 worth of groceries last 10 days for 2 people. I have never talked with any of my guy friends about how to do taxes. I have never talked with any of my guy friends about how to deal with an asshole landlord. Among my peers, I am seeing this trend more and more where guys are “more fun” to be with becaue they have no responsibilites and hence aren’t interested in talking about how to discharge those responsibilities. This may just be my own biased sample though. The bitching about how girls talk about childrearing really irritated me–there is something wrong with the way men don’t talk about childrearing–why isn’t it an interesting subject for a father?
-
As a society, we really like the Tomboy image–we all want our daughters to be Scout, not Pollyanna. I am certainly sympathetic to the idea of wanting to go beyond the fairly narrow bounderies some parts of our society set for women. But I don’t like the scorn for other women who have choesn to do things differently.
Whoa, I’d be friends with you Manda JO, even if you are a girl!
I consider women who are comfortable in groups of men the very best sort of people. The few I know are witty and intelligent; enough like men to be comfortable companions and different enough to maintain just the tiniest edge of sexual tension which is quite enjoyable.
I don’t really dislike the “girly girl” types, but would never choose one as a companion on a rainy day. We would simply have too little in common to have an interesting conversation and I doubt either one of us would be satisfied.
Anyway, I wish there were more women like jarbabyj in the world.
Testy.
Manda, I found your post very interesting. And I do want to comment on it.
First of all, to both you and JillGat, I think it’s sad, this division among women. But I also think we’ve brought it upon ourselves in an effort to make ourselves stand out as individuals within a ‘generally perceived group’. It seems very childish to me. But I think a lot of cultural or [looking around for Collunsbury] racial groups do this harm to themselves and I don’t know why.
I’ve said a couple times that I would like to know what it’s like to have that cozy, girlfriends feeling that I see in the movies…but I know I’ll never have it, and I don’t really want to waste time on feeling guilty that I’d rather hang out with guys. I don’t think that I’m pushing the movement back or anything…I’m just doing what I feel. I don’t like to vent my feelings to people, and I’ve found that guys don’t expect it. My girlfriends are always saying “how do you FEEL about that?” I don’t know…why do you care? If I’m sad, do you want me to make you sad too? I don’t like to bother people with my problems…what’s the point?
Maybe…I may just be more male than female…although tell that to my cramps next week. 
This part was really interesting to me because I have to tell you that the women who I’m friends with say they like me because I’m not afraid to compliment others while taking compliments well myself. I’ve encountered more than one girl who is visibly shocked when I said,
“You are the most beautiful woman at this party!” or “I think you’re the funniest person I know” and they are equally shocked when someone compliments me and I say,
“Oh thanks! That’s so nice of you.” Instead of coyly tearing myself down.
Women are vicious. Why? Why are we knocking each other and ourselves out to be on top? Who cares? Do you have fun, make money, have a lover, enjoy the spring weather? Than what does it matter?
I may have misinterpreted this paragraph but if not, I disagree with it (for me personally). I don’t hang out with guys to be the center of attention, and very often I’m not (my husband is, dammit, that clown!) I hang out with guys because I don’t know a lot of girls who love sports as much as I do, or metal music, or sitting around quoting the Simpsons. I don’t know a lot of girls who will sit in a dark, smokey bar from 11:30 to 7:00 on Sunday and watch three games of football. I don’t do it to please the guys, to be cute, to be flirty. I do it because I enjoy it. Last year I found a girl friend who likes all of those things and we’re thick as theives within this group of guys.
At first, sure, I got some high eyebrows about my liking traditionally “guy” things…but it fades away when they realize that I’m just like one of them, and by that I mean, a person they can talk to. I don’t field all the chick questions, I don’t give them girlfriend advice, I just have fun with them.
anyhoo, this has turned into an interesting discussion, and I’m glad to see some other women that are like me. I may just send this to my mom.
(but I’ll cut out the swearing parts)
jarbaby
I do, and you’ve just ruined my day by reminding me that it’s another sixteen weeks and four days until the first NFL preseason game, when I can get together with a bunch of guys, a few girls, and a lot of pizza and beer. (XFL and CFL and AFL and NFL Europe don’t count.)
And now you’ve ruined mine. Dammit. Some people wish every day was Christmas. I wish every day was NFL Sunday.
The Bears shall rise again!
jarbaby
Manda JO, I’m gonna pay you about the highest compliment I can: you sound like my mum. And there is no viewpoint I respect more than that.
We still have a long way to go in society towards validation for women. Trying to split the genders in this way doesn’t help. I’ve known plenty of women interested in “guy stuff”. And vice versa.
And in my experience the best groups of all are those split fairly evenly down the middle - male/female and any other split you care to name. This stops the conversation ever getting too stale.
pan
Hrmm…everyone so far has good points here. I esp. like MandyJo’s 1#2 points about where women and men seek approval/acceptance from…i.e. people of either sex look to men for these things, disregarding most of what women say.
Here is an idea flash: Could it be that we are conditioned early on to ‘hear’ positives from males and negatives from females? From my own experience I know I only listened to mother when she was ripping me a new one and I only listened to father when he was building me up and praising me (either to my face or to his friends). Of course, it might ALSO be true to state that individuals hear the positives from those of the sex opposite themself and hear the negatives from those of the same sex. (Briefly considering my brother’s childrearing in the same household…he gravitated to mom and she heaped praises on him whereas dad would dissect him down).
What do yall think?
Also…anyone have any ideas on how I can get my damn close-mouthed, bitter bitch of a mother to start treating me like somebody worth talking to? She doesn’t appear to give a rat’s finkhole for things going on in my life–she never asks about a damn thing and never follows up when I just plain offer her tidbits on my life. She also hates/loathes talking to me about her own life. She is like this huge black hole with her only defining qualities being that she is skimpy of frame, bitter of mind, grudging, and, probably, nordic (not that she will talk about even her ancestry, mind). Hrmm…for that matter, I’d like to get my stepdad to talk to me too. His ‘best’ commentary to me is usually to ask if I 1)have a job yet or 2)am preggers. I guess in his worldview I don’t exist unless I’m doing one or the other.
Yeah…I’m getting a bit bitter myself. Nothing like having family that doesn’t ACT like family.
jarbabyj said:
“oh and p.s…my mom and my sister and I get along very well, but more as three people than as Oprah novel type mother and sisters.”
I wasn’t implying an Oprah-ish [shudder] level of drama involving abuse, rape, or whatever. What I had in mind was the tension that usually exists between mothers and daughters (It also exists between fathers and sons, but we’re talking about women for the moment here.). Generally, mothers view their daughters as extensions of and reflections on themselves. They try to mold their daughters into people that society (both the mother’s and the daughter’s peers) will accept and many times try to mold their daughters into better copies of themselves. I look at my own experiences with my mother. I LOVE her to death and RESPECT her because she’s one of the wisest people I know, but I swear sometimes I just want to smack her upside the head. My mother is VERY feminine, and she raised me to be a lady. I’ve rebelled and continue to rebel because I want to establish my own identity, but I can’t help but notice especially as I get older, I’m still a lot like her. I can’t help but see how much of an effect she’s had on me. I can’t help the fact that I’m very feminine. Even when I’m trying to be lewd, rude, and crude, I realize that I just can’t do it as well as the guys. I’m trying to learn, though! I like girly-girl things, although I don’t do the hair and nails thing to the extreme. I’ve been known go out looking disreputable, and I exult in it!
I’m very comfortable with who I am around men and women, and I’m not looking to impress anyone. I’m not looking for male validation of my looks or anything else to build or maintain my self-esteem on. I enjoy hanging out with my female friends, drinking, complaining about men, and being silly, but that’s not all I do with my female friends.
[celestina steps on her soapbox]
I think I’m really disturbed by all of the stereotypes of women as superficial, girly-girl, airheads that I’ve seen bandied about in this thread. I’ll say again that women are deeper than that, even the ones who engage in girly-girl superficial chatter. When I act silly with my female friends, I’m just taking a break from being serious. But I can and do get serious with my female friends. We can move just as easily from talking about the latest fashions to deconstructing the harm that said fashions do to women’s self esteem.
I am disturbed also by the stereotypes about males that have been bandied about in this thread. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I find it difficult to believe that males just get together and talk about sports or the latest chick they just laid and how big her boobs were, and that’s it. If they do, I’D find that boring, superficial, maley-male, shallow chatter and run screaming from the room. I suspect that when males get together to engage in maley-male chatter, they are taking a break from being serious too. I’d like to think that like me and my female friends they can move from superficial sports or babe/boob talk to serious discussion/analysis of the harm to both male and female self-esteem that the objectification of women does. I personally find sports like football boring and violent. I’m not knocking men or women who do find sports interesting, but I’d like to think that I could establish a solid friendship with males based on more substantive things than sports and boobs. I’m trying to find male friends who can joke with me about fashions and deconstruct them, whom I can joke with about boobs AND consequently analyse the male preoccupation with boobs. I’m trying to find male friends whom I can drink beer with and discuss art, or politics, or child-rearing, or a whole slew of other topics from the mundane to the intellectual. A strong man to me is someone who’s comfortable with himself outside of the gendered masculine bullshit roles society prescribes. Likewise, a strong woman to me is someone who’s comfortable with herself outside of the gendered feminine bullshit roles society prescribes.
Lastly, I take issue with this quotation:
“You know, if we were black, people would say we suffer from internalized racism.”
Why is it that when we think racism, internal or external, and more importantly DEVIANCE we think of black people? Racism is just another word for discrimination, and racism exists in the internal and external workings of just about any culture you can name. Yes, there are internal discriminatory practices within black culture (e.g. the pigmentocracy phenomenon, where women and men who are lighter skinned or have more European features are considered more beautiful); however, these same practices exist in other cultures as well. There are pigmentocracy issues going on Vietnam, Korea, Japan . . ., and these issues are indicative of deeper cultural and class issues that I don’t have the time to discuss here. Likewise there are deviance issues in black culture, but black culture is NO MORE OR LESS deviant than white culture or any other culture out there. I believe the culture we’ve been discussing in this thread is white so the appropriation of black internal culture here as a means of comparison with the OP’s fear of deviancy mitigated by her mother as it operates within white hegemony is not appropriate because we really don’t have a clue about what constitutes internal racism in black culture; I suspect many black people themselves have no clue about what constitutes internal racism in their culture either. I think I’ve said all this to say that there are internally racist/discriminatory and deviance issues going on in white culture in relation to the OP as it regards discriminating against women based on the perception that they are generally superficial, non-intellectual, twats and therefore not worthy of knowing on any kind of deep level AND in looking at women who prefer male friends more than female friends as social deviants–and both view are serious problems–so let’s discuss them in that light and save black internal racism for another thread.
[celestina steps down off her soapbox]
Sorry, I don’t know if that was a rant or what. I’ve been trying to work on my ranting skills. :-)Great thread. I hope we are learning things from it. I certainly am, and I hope the discussion continues.
MandaJO, I really appreciated your analysis of what’s going on in this thread. You sound like a cool person to hang out with. I’d love to go out drinking with you, too. Cheers!
Great post Celestina. Boy do I feel dumb today. I liked this thread for a while, and then I started feeling like crap for what I said. Sometimes I post things without thinking things through and they end up biting my ass.
I don’t want people to think that I hate girls. I don’t want people to think that I think all girly girls are worthless and airheaded and that I’m carrying some “women suck” banner.
My point was (and maybe it wasn’t clear), what the hell is the difference if I feel close enough to three guys to share my inner most thoughts and feelings, or if I feel that way with girls? Aren’t they both people?
My mother and sister seem to think I’m missing out on some mystical, metaphysical, literary novel type relationship…and I’m wondering…why?
jarbaby
I think JillGat’s point was that all of us (of whatever color) have been trained to be sensitive to racial slurs, so when you frame an action in terms of race instead of gender (or sexual orientation or religous beliefs or whatever) the stereotypical nature of it jumps out at you. I think she just picked “black” as the up-until-just-recently largest minority group in America, and the focus of the best orginized civil rights movement–America as a whole began to be sensitive to racial slurs in direct response to the Black Civil Rights movement. Where a member of any other group to say "I can’t stand to spend time with my group, they are all . . … " I would call it internalized prejudice, be that group Blacks, Native Americans, Homosexuals, or Blondes.
I have been thinking about things, and I want to elaborate one point: I truly think that the worst thing a woman with primarily male friends can do is to bitch to those male friends about how you just can’t get along with other women. This serves to validate many sexist stereotypes: “Most women are twits. Hell, One of my best friends is a woman, and she agrees with me!” sort of thing.
jarbabyj, Thanks. You shouldn’t feel stupid about this this thread. I think it’s great. We need to talk about things like this.
MandaJO, thanks for clarifying about JillGat’s quotation.
Hmm, I get mentioned in the strangest places. Hello Celestine et al.
Well, let’s see I can’t resist a comment or two. Who brings a newspaper to neighborhood gatherings? Ehm, well does the Economist count? I get bored easily.
As for understanding men, base instincts combined with random amounts of other things. Locally defined.
Now, the comment which brought me here:
Fallacy of composition. Terrible thing but fundamental to human cognition (for very good reasons, one rather needs it to process data). It’s not clear to me precisely what this comment means, per se, but the arbitrariness of the category in re most fields of behaviour are naturally going to make it problematic for many individuals.
So, on to the rest of the discussion.
We talk about those things. A general consenus is reached within 25 seconds. Then the commercial ends and everybody shuts up cause the game is starting again.