Why Boys Are Better Than Girls

Ed. Note: This entry may piss you off, especially if you’re a woman. That’s okay, you’re entitled to your opinion. But this is my journal and if you can’t express your disagreement in an articulate and respectful fashion, then resign yourself to being deleted and subsequently blocked. Thanks.

I’m being facetious with the title, but there’s a reason. To wit, this excerpt from an article by California lawyer Kelly Valen in the New York Times’ ‘Modern Love’ column…

“My life’s greatest sorrow stems from my inability to feel close to other women. At 41, I’ve cautiously cultivated a few cherished female friendships. But generally I feel a kind of skittish distrust and discomfort when dealing with most women, particularly women in packs.

Recently I was forced to confront the genesis of my distrust when I found myself face to face with a certain someone from my past, a past I thought I had filed away long ago, or, more precisely, buried on the ocean floor in a padlocked steamer trunk wrapped in layers of industrial-strength chain.”

She goes on to describe the source of her trauma…

“It happened after a fraternity barn dance. All I knew about my date was that he was festively inclined and physically stunning. My sisters considered him a catch. I felt lucky.

After the usual alcoholic overindulgence, I followed him upstairs, where I soon passed out on his sofa. There, I assumed the starring role in a garden-variety “ledge party,” my deflowering on display for anyone desiring a peek.

Ledge parties, for those of you who didn’t attend party-school universities, featured fraternity boys luring their unsuspecting companions to a lair of choice, where they engineered some semblance of sex for the viewing enjoyment of their voyeuristic brethren, who watched from the window’s ledge. Unlike typical fraternity houses, these were contemporary buildings with plate glass windows and wide ledges that formed perfect viewing platforms.

I suspect mine was one of the duller productions, but, alas, I remember none of it. I learned later that some sympathetic brothers had objected to the spectacle and pulled me from the wreckage, which, to me, was remarkable. […] Apparently the fraternal code of ethics only approved of the performances when the girls were conscious (albeit still unaware they were being watched).

[…]

Among my sorority sisters, the fallout began as whispered gossip. Then, after momentum of my condemnation built to a crescendo, they confronted me directly, en masse, like a torch-wielding mob. Branding the incident my fault, they said I deserved my fate and further complained that I had brought shame upon them all. They laughed at me, gossiped some more, then distanced themselves. I was dirty to them — and dirtier to myself. […] At 18, I had bought into the talk of sisterly solidarity. I adhered to their customs and mores, relied on them for nurturing and intimacy, trusted them.And they not only failed to support me in crisis, they collectively kicked me as I lay in the gutter, judged me from under a veil of hypocrisy, then cast me out, leper-style. Their betrayal cut so deep that it has left me anxious and cowering to this day.

For the last 20-odd years, I’ve slapped Band-Aids on my wounds while avoiding any kind of group female intimacy. I begged off on baby groups when my children were born and haven’t been able to bear book clubs, the charity circuit, women’s fitness classes or the country club scene. Even finding myself among a group of cheering and chatting mothers at my children’s sporting events can trigger that familiar anxiety.

But to my enduring wonder, I have never felt the same anxiety about men. To be sure, their violence and misogynistic rituals stole my innocence and triggered the demons of shame and repression that shackle me still.

Yet their actions, however crude and criminal, ultimately hurt me far less than the judgments, connivance and betrayal of women. The men in my drama acknowledged wrongdoing, apologized, showed remorse. Punishment, however minor, was meted out. They did not blame me, and they shouldn’t have. But the women shouldn’t have, either, and they did.

In the two decades since, I’ve been a full-time lawyer, a working mother and a stay-at-home mother. In each role, I’ve found my fears about women’s covert competition and aggression to be frequently validated: the gossip, the comparisons, the withering critiques of career and mothering choices. We women swim in shark-infested waters of our own design. Often we don’t have a clue where we stand with one another — socially, as mothers, as colleagues — because we’re at once allies and foes.

I want to remain optimistic. After all, here I am with three daughters. What am I to teach them? Cautionary tales about men’s harmful proclivities abound. But how do we help our girls navigate the duplicitous female maze? How do we ensure that they behave authentically, respect humanity over fleeting alliances, and squash the nasty tribal instincts that can inflict lifelong distress?

I don’t know. I’m afraid I never will.”

It’s a long article and it contradicts rather than supports the title, but I’m getting to that. Let’s put aside the rape for a moment — I know, I know, how could I? Because while I can acknowledge the tragedy and indignity of the incident, I can’t relate and I admit it. Also, we all know theboys were wrong and probably 99% of us would agree they should be punished, but what about the girls?

I’m not going to sit in judgment of the actions of the writer’s sorority sisters; that’s not my department. I can, however, deeply relate to her distrust of women, especially when they’re travelling in packs. It’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately as I struggle to keep some of my friendships alive, and struggle harder still with the decision in some cases to pull the plug.

I have always known the sting of feminine betrayal, from the first time the girls in my kindergarten class ganged up on me under the jungle gym, to my standoff with the entire seventh grade, to my absolute refusal to fall in line with the whiny, disgruntled bitches at my last corporate job. I don’t remember most of the whys but you can bet your last tube of Great Lash I remember every who – Elizabeth, Jodi, Traci, Jessica, Karen, Nicole, Donna, Carlye, Tanya, Tania, Tonia (is it something in the name…?), Melissa, Krissy, Tina, Jenny, Kim…the list could go on for paragraphs.

It wasn’t the same story every time. Sometimes they’d get together, collectively decide I was somehow unworthy of their friendship and execute me in some humiliating manner; other times one single woman would do an equal amount of damage all by herself. Sometimes they lied, connived, laid traps and gossiped. Other times they tried to steal a boyfriend, or accused me of trying to steal theirs. Still more often they passed judgment or flaked out on me one too many times, whereupon I simply decided the friendship wasn’t worth putting up with all the drama. There was one chick who even demanded I remain friends with her, simply on the merits that she ‘found me first.’ I’m convinced these are the women the phrase, “what the fuck?” was designed for.

I don’t get it, really. The cattiness would almost make sense if I were really pretty or really smart or really thin or w

hatever, but the truth is, I’m not really anything, unless you count mistrustful and emotionally retarded. So why do most of the women I meet and tentatively befriend turn out to be such almighty basket cases?

I would venture to blame my judgment, first and foremost. In fact, in talking to one of my very, very few close female friends last week, we discovered that of the women we meet, it’s usually the ones we hit it off with immediately that do the most damage, while the ones we don’t initially like prove to be lifelong buddies. Take Char, who is like my big sister and with whom I’ve never, in the five years we’ve been friends, had a moment’s drama. The first time I saw her was at a staff meeting where she was very forcefully insisting that somethingsomething had to be “hacked off” by the legal department and somethingsomething “hacked off” again. Scary, really. It took weeks for me to stop feeling like a cat in a roomful of rocking chairs around her, but I can pinpoint the exact moment I relaxed. We had just finished watching The Divine Secrets of the YaYa Sisterhood and were talking about our own mother-related issues across the relative safety of the distance between the living room and the kitchen. We both got a little emotional (though, true to form, she was less obvious about it) and the bond was immediate and, I believe, permanent. From that point on, we made it our business to treat our friendship as a living, breathing, fragile thing — in part, I think, because we both had a history packed with the lasting imprint of betrayal only a woman’s instinct can inflict. It took a long time, but she gave me every reason to believe she would not lie to me, gossip about me, sell me out or steal my man and I did everything in my power to give her the same assurance.

To this day, she’s one of only a very few who ever have.

Not every other woman I’ve ever met has passed out of my life a flaming wreck of shrieking diva carnage. Sometimes they just got offended because I didn’t call or email or text often enough. Sometimes we drifted apart because they got married or pregnant or promoted to a more demanding job. Sometimes they gave my beloved cat away to a shelter without telling me then dropped out of sight before I could properly express my anger and disappointment at them. And then, other times, they designed one great, big, theatrical, messy exit from which I felt lucky to extricate myself with life and limbs more or less intact.

Each of those dramatic exits has a story as unique as the woman they center around, but the thing they have in common is that in nearly every case I was relieved to see her go. After all these years, all the lost friendships, I have to ask myself, why? Am I too hard on my own gender, setting my standards for female companionship so high as to almost ensure my own disappointment? Probably. I know I don’t expect as much of my guy friends as I do of my girl friends, which is probably some form of female chauvinism, but the stark truth is that I believe when it comes to sisterhood, women know better. Maybe that’s unfair. Maybe men and women are equally clueless regarding the rules of friendship, but somehow I kind of doubt it.

I think my girlfriends know – as I do – that when you like and respect someone, you honor your commitments to them. You endeavor to communicate with honesty and compassion, rather than fling nasty barbs passed off as candor. You are loyal, putting on at least an outward show of solidarity, leaving your disagreements to be hashed over in private. You give a little sometimes, give a lot other times, and generally treat one another the way you want to be treated. If you can’t or don’t want to do these things, then you’re not friends. I believe it’s that simple.

I don’t think my standard for friendship is unreasonable, and if it is, I still stand by it. It’s my choice, right? I mean, I’m 33 for the love of god. I no longer want to be barraged by petty whining and self-inflicted pseudo-crises. I’m not interested in hearing endless details about who’s cute and who’s not and who’s cheating on who and what Lindsay Lohan did and what Britney wore (these topics aren’t off-limits, but I don’t want to talk about them exclusively and ad infinitum). Nor do I have the patience to pretend to support someone who gravitates to the same shitty boyfriend/fiancé/husband/boss/job over and over without learning anything in the process, or refuses to do anything to help herself ever. My free time is deeply precious to me, and I abso-fucking-lutely refuse to spend it on or with a woman (or a man, let’s be honest) who does not respect herself or anyone else.

I am so over the need to have a ton of people in my life I call ‘friends’ but don’t really feel all that ‘friendly’ toward. Nor do I expect my friends to be perfect or never disappoint, because that’s a standard I can’t uphold. But I would rather have one or two friends – men or women — on whose character I can absolutely rely than a MySpace page full of people just waiting to become another entertaining psycho-bitch story I’ll tell my brother-in-law over beers at Christmas.

Because I post here, I don’t really have anything to post here. I might try someday anyway. . I don’t accept notes, but that doesn’t mean you can’t comment.