
Post-AIDS panic, sexual anxiety seems to center around, like, emotional user’s manuals. Obvs better than AIDS panic buuuuuut this is in its own way extraordinarily boring. Guess what? I have totally liked a guy and not written him back for two months because I just didn’t. But other times you feel like texting right away because your joke is just *smooch* and needs immediate transmission. If a girl cares a lot about when you text her back, that sucks, UNLESS you say you’ll call and don’t, because in that case, you shouldn’t have said “I’ll call you.” That is just regular logic. But seriously, the next time you are like “Why” about this just throw some glitter in the air and spin around three times while it falls slowly into your hair and wonder about something more interesting.
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No, it’s not appropriate! You stupid bitch. What? No! Here is why books and TV are dumb: I never understand why any of the women do anything they do. Like why would you have sex for any reason other than if you don’t do it with this particular person, your pussy will vacate your body and move in with someone else—even on the couch in the basement—because it is mad at you? Trading sex or using it is the WOOOORST and that includes relating to men you aren’t specifically interested in via pussy instead of via, like, heart-plus-brain or whatever “friendship” is.ALSO: “Comfort” isn’t sex. Sex is awkward and manic and transcendent and challenging and absurd. “Comfort” is human attention, a next-level hot chocolate preparation, many hours of listening in a real way.I feel like some girls are more willing to like eye-rollingly fuck a dude than do the sometimes genuinely hard work of being nice.Why are girls so complicit in enforcing the systems that bind them to insecurity, self-doubt, and shame?
Because when you are the sucker in an eternally established power dynamic, it is a lot easier to take a lil’ nap than be showing up cocked and pissy every day. Here is what my friend Gchatted yesterday: “I don’t want sisterhood sometimes. I just want to be a regular lady.” The idea of onus is really interesting, like, being complicit isn’t some shady on-purpose sociopath thing, it is just the least resistance.
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Boys dressing awesome or not-awesome is a serious point of contention in the girl community. But socks and sandals is beyond matters of relative style, in that as a look it demonstrates an aggressive disregard for even the most forgiving mores of fashion. Super, super bad fashion demonstrates an arrogance about yourself that is more off-putting than the visual effect of your grungy, thick-cotton toes. Nobody really cares if you dress boring or dress cool, but people really care if the way you dress yourself is an active fuck-you-ening.What's with girls booking dates and then rescheduling the day of? It's all fine after that but the first one is like a test. It’s like they’re thinking “If I last minute change it up, are you still gonna buy me coffee?" Has happened to a lot of my friends lately.
Thing One: This—cancelling—is just a NBD thing with a generation of Muppet Babies whose defining, all-time-historical selfishness and smartphone-as-life-conduit doesn’t understand changing plans even at the very last minute as having any non-pH-neutral aspect of morality or even manners. And I think that’s half-right: Maybe this is revolutionary to boys, but when you are expected to show up always doing some kind of LEWK and having some kind of sunnily girlpropriate mood-mien, and instead are wearing a pillowcase hat and nothing else while you search for house keys in the pockets of every conceivable jacket and coat—since we have to have 16 of them—cancelling is very often an objectively better choice than showing up, way acidic or way alkaline, to entertain a boy at a bar. So maybe STFU about it.
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She is Black Ops-ing you. She doesn’t want to be friends anymore (or, and this is a teensy-weense “or,” she is legitimately too busy or preoccupied or stressy to rehash your stuff right now) and is doing you the semi-maybe-favor of not engaging you in a knockdown-drag-out-emotional-battle-royale about it. Leave her alone, I think, and I know that will make your heart go blue because you like her (or even like-like-like her), but if you’re running a long game you’ll def want her to come to you, when she’s ready. Your Black Ops will be an unexpected hard-to-get-ness.
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Are we Crystal Pepsi about how there is no Empirical Girl? No catechism, no “always”es. Based on my undulating posses of girl-things, I can tell you that some are zero-sum never-againers about post-relationship hookups, and some have sexual lives that revolve around the singleness of their exes. Obviously everyone approves of “F buddies” even though that and nothing is a good term for it.Girlsplain Kitty Pryde!
I dunno, but we spell our names the same so we are whatever the “Kathryn” version of “Eskimo Brothers” is. No, actually I do know. (I doono.) Affectless embarrassment-rap is a theoretically great and useful genre because it is predicated on just total, gutting literalism. More specifically, girl is like a bedroom-community Princess Superstar. Approved! [Signs it, stamps it, seals it.]I'd like to know why it bothers me when men refer to women as "females," despite, genetically speaking, being correct.
That’s racist.Previously – Girlsplaining: Part IFollow Kate on Twitter @KateCarraway