"It's snowing! It's snowing!" squeal the unfortunate freshmen from Cali, stirring from their drunken stupors to frolic clumsily in the streets. Little do they know that the hard, suffocated ice pellets squeezed from an avaricious and cheap sky hardly qualify as a proper snowfall. Fools! hiss I from under my six layers of various wool garments, all of them reacting with my Sahara-dry skin to create miniature lightning storms capable of shorting out the infrastructure of the ten smallest nations in Africa. Fools! that they do not see the doom fast approaching, the fat wet flakes that cling lewdly to skin and coat and leaf and road and drown all hope in a seasonally-appropriate heap of fluffy white despair.
Ai, me.
My housemates have been dealing with the increased stress of the semester by baking. I wonder how long it will take them to realize that, as sympathetic as I may seem, I have therefore a vested interest in keeping them in a near-perpetual state of anxiety. In the meantime, I will enjoy their various breads and cakes and continue musing upon things. Like women. Now, so far, we at the Snarling Id have spent a lot of time griping about men: why they suck, how to get them, what kind to get, and what one does with them when one gets them (short answers: Duh, MEN; try not to; the good kind; snuggle and talk about your feelings). But the problem with talking about men is that I am not one. Therefore I do not understand them. I just have to guess.
But I am of the female persuasion, and thus have something of an insider's perspective on chicks, man. And lately I have been pondering girliness. For the benefit of any men in the audience, here, then, are my reflections (completely subjective and prone to controversy, as ever):
Observation 1: WOMEN HAVE FEELINGS. I feel like a lot of people might be surprised by this. Here's how the story of female maturity seems to be told: one day, around age 8, girls wake up and realize they don't like bugs anymore. This is known as the onset of puberty. Girls spend the next decade of their lives going CRAZY trying to deal with this. This particular form of CRAZY is called hormones. It makes girls cry a lot, and meet in bathrooms en masse for mysterious rituals, and only ever talk about how ugly they are, regardless of the fact that (thanks again to hormones) many men find them increasingly pleasant to look at. In fact, girls can be offended by any behavior on a guy's part that would indicate he found them attractive, and then in the next breath decry the world for not loving them enough even though they're fat (even if they aren't really fat). Then, eventually, they seem to settle down. They become slightly more sane and even though they bear psychic scars from their adolescent trauma (as who wouldn't, really), it looks like they're back to normal. Some of them even like bugs again. "Cool," guys think. "Glad all the CRAZY went away."
Except, unfortunately, it didn't. Did our hormones actually level off, like we were told they would? Or did we just get used to them? Or did we develop coping strategies (chocolate, romcoms, pillow-punching, puppy videos on YouTube)? Or a mix of all three? Anyway. I think it's important to remember that even after a lot of the hormone-crazy goes away, many women still have to deal with forces beyond their control dictating how happy they will be on certain weeks. I for one am currently MAD AT THE WORLD for no good reason and also WHERE IS MY CHOCOLATE? WHO MOVED IT? THEY MUST DIE. But in a few days I'll be all, "Bunnies! Cuddles! Homework! Let me nurture you and do all the laundry and stuff!" And THEN I'll turn into a raging tigress who wants chocolate again, but so I can MELT it and SPREAD IT ON EVERY ATTRACTIVE MAN I SEE and then lose interest because OMG CEREBRAL THOUGHTS and then GIRL BONDING and then back to CHOCOLATE RAGE... you get the picture.
Am I going to be the wreck I was in high school? No, thankfully. But I'm going to have the same feelings-cycle going on. And there's nothing I can do to stop it. I can't just skip to the happy-productive-sane-focused weeks and opt out of the rage-tears-lust weeks. I feel like men, perhaps counterintuitively, attach a greater significance to their feelings because their feelings, vestigial and shallow as Hollywood informs us they are, are nonetheless usually tied to some external and identifiable factor. A girl sobbing into her rocky road knows that the only reason she's doing it is because it happens to be the fourth, or the fifteenth, or whatever. It doesn't make her feel less crappy, but it does help her accept that feelings are sometimes just things that happen.
So therefore, we should talk about them, all the time, and never feel the slightest bit awkward about it, no siree bob. Which brings us to point 2...
WOMEN DON'T MAKE SENSE
Women communicate through subtleties. We drop hints, we modulate tones of voice, we use body language, and, yes, just like you suspect, even though we're unfailingly polite and hug all the time, we all secretly hate each other. (We also have secret mudwrestling meetings that you don't know about, where we wear yoga pants and slap each other and squeal and grunt a lot. All your friends go, they just don't tell you because they don't want to share.)
A lot of guys seem to operate under the impression that we do this consciously, because, I don't know, we're bored or something. Our ginormous brains grow weary of the taedium of modern life, which we all mastered years ago (during the CRAZY; you missed out on that too) and so we invented this Byzantine system of communication that makes our lives harder because that's how we roll.
Well, actually, that's not how it works. Women are genuinely mystified by male forthrightness. Just recently, I wanted to send a message to a male friend. I carefully assessed every facet of our history, what I knew of him, the time of day, and the connotations of each word. The message that I sent was, in essence, and after much deliberation, something like this:
Me: Want to hang out sometime?
Now, there were 3 responses I expected. One was, "I'm busy," which would mean, "I'm not a horrible person who hates you but I really don't want to hang out with you, please stop asking." One was, "Yes, I'm hanging out with Bethann and Stuart on Saturday, you should come," which means, "I don't want to hurt your feelings and it would be inconvenient if we were not on friendly terms, but I'd really rather not know you exist." And one was, "Yes, why don't we go throw rocks at squirrels on the thirtieth? Shall I pick you up or will you find transportation?" This would have meant, "Sure. I'd like to hang out."
The message I got instead was, again, paraphrased and essentially, thus:
He: Sure. I'd like to hang out.
This, and I am not kidding, mystified me. "What does he mean?" I wailed. "Why isn't he following the rules? How am I even supposed to take that?"
I continued in this vein until one of my male friends stumped over, glanced at our correspondence, and said, "He's just saying he wants to hang out with you."
Thereafter followed a long conversation, here elided in the interests of sanity, in which my friend attempted to convince me that when a boy says, "Sure," what he means is "Sure." It ended with my male friend asking the heavens why girls had to overanalyze everything. The answer: for the same reasons boys have to ignore nuance and subtlety in favor of actually saying what they're thinking.
So, no. We're not cleverer than boys and showing off because we're bored/dicks. We just naturally express ourselves by what we don't say, and naively assume that everyone else works the same way. Does it make sense? Absolutely not. But don't judge.
Observation #3: WOMEN HAVE BODY ISSUES
And they don't go away, and no, we're not crazy. This is an anecdote I've been wanting to share with my sistahs out there fighting the good fight for a long time, and it goes like this: for several years, I was mildly dissatisfied with my appearance, specifically centering around ten or so pounds that were certainly not unhealthy, but not exactly cosmetic. Then around the middle of my sophomore year I got very busy and stressed and forgot to eat and the ten pounds went away. And I said (once I had slowed down enough to notice), "Yay, I have hipbones! Just like the models on TV"
And then I realized: While being lighter meant my stomach was flatter, it also meant my chest was flatter. My thighs had shrunk, but so had my stash of junk in the trunk. So I did what any redblooded American girl would do: I ate more cheese. And lo and behold, I started filling out my shirts a little better...but of course, my hipbones got camouflaged again...and so on and so forth. A similar story with my skin: it's less oily, therefore less pimply, now, but it's also therefore drier and more fragile (and 'fragile skin' sounds very delicate and Victorian until you realize that all it means is more cuts, so more scabs, so the only 'Victorian' we've got going on here is a Frankenstein's monster aesthetic). Point being: THERE IS ALWAYS A TRADEOFF and NONE OF US WILL EVER HAVE THE BODY WE WANT. This causes us a certain amount of angst -- not crippling, and certainly not immediately indiciative of a full-blown eating disorder, but something that exists. Even when girls get comfortable with their bodies and actually generally like how they look, there will usually be something that causes a little hitch of regret in their satisfied sighs, a rueful tinge to their vampy smiles.
Is this a tragic example of how society has flattened the erotic aesthetic so that only one averaged-out set of proportions is acceptable? Yes. Is it actually, when you think about it, kind of more sexy that your svelte girlfriend has no butt, or that your busty wench doesn't like wearing skinny jeans, because that's what makes her yours and not just a generic someone? I think so. BUT: is it understandable for an objectively good-looking girl to feel a little regret that she can never have everything going for her at once and has to pick (say) between the size 4 jeans and the anything-bigger-than-an-A-cup bra? I'd have to say so. It at least makes a certain sense to me.
Observation 4: WOMEN ARE POWERFUL
And when I say powerful, I mean full of powers, as in, dark and secret and slightly mystic powers, as in, yes, we've all made demonic pacts, RUN NOW before we brainwash you with our Crazy.
Now, recent posts have dwelt upon the nature of male chivalry, and I stand by that. I will argue that men should be proper men and take responsibility for their lives and their mating habits until the cows come home. And I certainly understand the impulse that instinctively withdraws in horror from any man of whom a besotted woman might say, "Oh, I just know he can change...."
But let's face it: girls change guys all the time. There are certain things girls insist upon (like, for example, an at least elementary familiarity with Feelingese and an appreciation for subtleties). And because of our dark powers (like the ability to converse with the Saran Wrap demons and walk in heels), boorish guys eventually learn to shape up at least some of the time. (The clever guys recognized the usefulness of women years ago and made alliance with them during the Great Craziness). This is where your general run-of-the-mill feminist intellectuals and I part ways. Should women be respected as human beings capable of thoughtideas and suchlike? Indubitably. But female power doesn't always have to look like male power. I think, if anything, it's a little bit sexist to suggest that just because a woman gets a man to do something by making him think it was his idea rather than ordering him outright makes her a submissive terrorized powerless victim. I think specifically female power could actually be a necessary component (not the only one, mind you) in making relationships work.
I wish I could end this with something witty, but it's really late, and I have to read things. So I will say goodnight, and remember to hug the ladies in your life (after first ascertaining, in an appropriately roundabout fashion, if their feelings would render them amenable to such an embrace).
Girl Power.
