Thursday, April 07, 2005
Maybe I just have really good taste in people.
And by people I mean friends, not men. I have proven to have pretty horrible taste in men. But my question is: How did women end up with this reputation for being needy, clingy, mysterious, mind-game-playing drama queens? In my admittedly limited experience, it is men who get caught up in over-analyzing things and sending mixed messages and needing to talk about everything and not being able to "deal" or just take things as they come. Sometimes they blame it on being confused and not knowing what they want. I spend most of my time being confused and I have no idea what I really want, but I take that for granted and it doesn’t really bother me. Sometimes they chalk it up to “bad experience” with women or refer to some girl who “really screwed me up.” We all have bad experiences, and yes, some of them are worse than others, but I and most of the women I surround myself with—the other contributors to this blog, my mother—are somehow naturally able to just deal. We get upset and we cry and sometimes we never get over it, but we deal. I don't know who these girls are that give the rest of us a bad name.
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Also, the crazy-ness quotient. These people are not "Crazy" like we might describe a friend, they're fucking nuts. Or, like, if a girl doesn't have any girlfriends and/or the friends suck... RED LIGHT. Girls that have crises every other day, giving the rest of us a bad name.
This from Sunday's Style section. Again, thrilled not to be a man:
"Jim O'Donnell, a professor of business and economics at Huntington University in Indiana, who said his life had been changed by a male friend, urges men to get over their discomfort in socializing one on one because they have much to gain from the emotional support of male friendships. (Women understand this instinctively, which is why there is no female equivalent to the awkward man date; straight women have long met for dinner or a movie without a second thought.)
...Dinner with a friend has not always been so fraught. Before women were considered men's equals, some gender historians say, men routinely confided in and sought advice from one another in ways they did not do with women, even their wives. Then, these scholars say, two things changed during the last century: an increased public awareness of homosexuality created a stigma around male intimacy, and at the same time women began encroaching on traditionally male spheres, causing men to become more defensive about notions of masculinity.
"If men become too close to other men, then they are always vulnerable to this accusation of, 'Oh, you must be gay,' " said Gregory Lehne, a medical psychologist at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine who has studied gender issues. At the same time, he added, "When you have women in the same world and seeking equality with men, then all of a sudden issues emerge in the need to maintain the male sex role."
And thus a simple meal turns into social Stratego. Some men avoid dinner altogether unless the friend is coming from out of town or has a specific problem that he wants advice about. Otherwise, grabbing beers at a bar will do just fine, thank you."
take home point. men are sensitive homophobes. also, i do know some of those girls. they are the ones that come to a halloween in april party dressed in bikinis and grind up on a person's boyfriend. but i won't be dramatic about it. really i won't. deep down, they are my sisters too.
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