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Girls will be boys
Display_melodramatic boys
Marc Junker

 


Aug 13, 2009 02:48 PM

Have you ever seen a 120-pound girl tackle a bouncer?

Picture this: a cute blond with messy dreadlocks smeared across her forehead. She’s dressed for the bar and reeks like booze. She flies through the air at a surly bouncer twice her size.

“I’ll kill you,” she yells.

With one fluid motion, the bouncer catches the flailing girl in mid-air and dumps her to the ground. He pins her face to the concrete with his knee.

“Calm down,” he says. “Calm down.”

The girl continues to writhe and kick, eventually twisting into a position where she can clamp her teeth on the poor guy’s knee.

“She’s biting me,” the bouncer announces matter-of-factly, a stunned look on his face. “This girl is biting me.”

After convincing her friends to drag this girl home, the bouncer shakes his head and walks back into the bar chuckling to himself.

“I think I’m in love,” I say to my friend Lisa, as I sit down at our table.

“Why are you so attracted to fucked up girls?” she asks.

I honestly don’t know.

There’s been a lot written about girls’ attraction to the proverbial bad boy. But what about when the genders are switched?

It seems to me like these days more of my girlfriends have become hard-drinking, promiscuous versions of the rebel boys of yester-year. Meanwhile it seems like us guys are turning a little, well, female.

I remember the media creating a huge fuss when girls overtook boys in elementary school work. These days, an increasing number of women are taking over traditionally-male careers. I have female friends working as accountants, forestfire fighters, doctors and lawyers. And that’s the way it should be.

But what about men’s bad habits?

More and more, I hear of girlfriends dumping their over-attentive or too-serious boyfriends to maintain their independence and freedom. They drink until they black out, they get into fistfights, they’re scared of settling down. Girls are picking up all the neuroses and vices of their male counterparts.

And babies? Forget it.

“I’m never having kids,” three young women repeated to me verbatim over the course of one afternoon. Granted, we were lifeguarding a pool of 13-year-old shit disturbers who couldn’t seem to follow simple rules and seemed intent on torturing us — but still.

A friend of mine turned down a marriage proposal the day before she left for an eight-month trip to Australia and Southeast Asia. Her boyfriend, an attentive older dude who was hopelessly in love with her, took her to a chalet in Whistler and sank down to one knee.

“Put that away,” she said.

Within weeks, she was partying hard and having a beach threesome in Oz. Every week I’d get a Facebook message about some new boy she’d met. The messages usually incorporated phrases like “living it up” and “best sex of my life.”

Last summer, I briefly dated a girl who told me she would “never” consider having kids and that she viewed marriage as a humiliating defeat.

Though I pretended to be chill and casual, I was the one crying when she disappeared to Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and a random assortment of other countries.Sometimes I feel like one of those army wives left behind while her husband fights overseas. Most of the women in my life have little or no use for a man. They have careers, a rockin’ social life, ambitions. Why screw it up?

If I ever have a daughter, I’m happy I’ll be introducing her to a world that doesn’t automatically condemn her to a domestic life as some guy’s slave, but gives her an opportunity to live her life however she wants to.

Even if that involves getting into street fights with bouncers.

Sam V wrote:

I think what's more impressive than promiscuous women who get in bar fights and don't have a maternal bone in their body (like boys?) are the ones who do double/triple time running a household and maintaining a strong career and social life. I don't think men need to be submissive (like girls?) to find space in a world with strong women. But I do appreciate that the gender dichotomy is becoming increasingly less relevant.

Good article, Will.

Aug 14 at 03:54 PM
Caitlyn McNamara wrote:

Will...

Do you think we Canadians have reached a place where it is acceptable for girls to act like boys? I’m interested in your opinion, but I completely disagree. I think the world is in as threatening a state of sexual disharmony as ever. I don’t think the solution is as easy as girls acting like boys. Fairness is not equality--people are not all alike and so to say that girls acting like boys is in any way proof of anything, I can only agree that it’s proof of an ongoing struggle. Are people really free to act like themselves?

In my experience, as an under represented female in male-dominant labour work, I’ve realized I can conduct myself in one of two ways: (1) play the girl card, flirt my pants off, do anything to please including allowing the men to do the real work or (2) work my pants off and deny my emotional tendencies and physical limitations. Choose “1” and you’re lazy—you only got the job to fulfill a gender quota; choose “2” and you’re a butch bitch—the outsider no one understands. Choose a number, any number, but beware... it’s lose-lose.

I agree that many girls are adequately armed and completely capable of efficiently and productively fulfilling the vocational responsibilities required of male dominant positions. I said it. But I disagree that we’ve reached a place where people, regardless of gender, are free to behave as they wish. We are still so completely caught up in gender identification. Why can’t behaviour just be behaviour? Can’t it just stand alone? Why, despite recognition that women and men are more similar in their humanity than different, and despite the political embrace of gender equality, are behaviours still perceived as male or female? The girl chews tobacco, she’s butch. The guy doesn’t chew tobacco, he’s a pussy. At a psychological level, here in our Canadian neighbourhoods, this double standard does still permeate perception. You know my conclusion.

Aug 20 at 08:25 PM
Rufus T. Pupkin the 3rd wrote:

I have to agree. Same thing happened to me, but in reverse. I was making a comment on a woman's blog (all the comments were by women) and when I said things like: 'LOL', 'OMG', hugs, etc etc, I was treated as though I were not a real man, like some kind of a wuss, because only women are allowed to say 'LOL' and so on and so forth.

Aug 22 at 11:34 PM






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