Musings
an Online Journal of Sorts
By Alyce Wilson
Most of my friends are guys. This has been a trend since high school.
I was beginning to wonder if I was normal until I spoke to a few female friends who told me they, too, have mostly guy friends. Which didn't entirely surprise me, considering they were my friends and all.
I've been trying to figure out why this is the case. Something a female friend said made sense: "Women are catty." Whether it's nature or nature, it tends to be true with many women.
In elementary school and junior high, I was betrayed time and again by female friends. In some cases, they decided I wasn't "cool" enough, so they abandoned me in their search for popularity, sometimes turning on me and mercilessly picking on me.
In other cases, they threw me over in pursuit of a guy.
So I learned to be more selective of the female friends I chose, and to grow close only to those who seemed to have eluded the "cattiness" gene.
Another problem with female friends is that maintaining a friendship with them is a lot like dating: you have to "court" them, in a sense, by coming up with special things to do together. It's too much damn work!
And whether it was the way I was brought up or something inherent in my personality, I never got excited about "normal" girl things like horses or makeup. I never liked swapping outfits (they're my clothes!); I hate putting up my hair.
In short, I've never been a "girlie girl" and I find them boring.
So my closest female friends have been like me: somewhat unconventional, independent thinkers with a sense of humor. I would rather hang out with Janeane Garafolo than with Julia Roberts. Janeane and I would probably make fun of Julia.
Guy friends don't make you court them. You call them up or you don't, and they don't take offense. They are also far more likely to want to talk about movies and politics than about, say, pedicures.
The only time it's not fun being one of the guys is when they start checking out women. And no matter what kind of guys you hang around, even if they're non-conventional like most of my guy friends, this eventually happens. If you hang around with the guys long enough, they forget you're not actually one of them. The best solution, I've found, is to start loudly remarking on the waiter's cute butt.
Of course, we women can be much worse in a similar situation. Stick a man alone in a room full of women and he'll soon hear about every bad thing about men: "present company excepted, of course." I think it has something to do with asserting our power in a male dominated world. Or maybe because we hope he'll go back and tell all the other guys, "They're onto us! We've got to change!"
Close female friends are the best for talking about personal matters. For example, they understand when you tell them you feel bloated and that you just ate a pint of ice cream while crying over your college pictures. Guys don't know how to react; they get all uncomfortable and turn red and make a joke to change the subject. Sometimes it's fun to mention personal things to them just for this reaction.
I accidentally watched a couple of minutes of "The Other Half" last week while in between my 8-minute abs tape and my kickboxing aerobics tape. They were saying they didn't understand women who had mostly guy friends, and they assumed there must be something pathological behind it, some secret Freudian motive.
Clearly, none of the guys on "The View" would qualify to be one of my guy friends. They sounded almost like "girlie girls." I bet they braid each other's hair during the commercial breaks.
Seriously, there's nothing more annoying to me than people who conform to outdated gender stereotypes. Just like the women I hang out with don't spend all their time talking about hair and makeup, the guys I befriend don't spend their days worrying about who's going to win the Super Bowl.
If they ever do start talking about such things, I just ask them if I look bloated and they get all nervous and change the subject.
Moral:
Gender
stereotypes are overrated.
Copyright 2003 by Alyce Wilson
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