"Oh, you all know at least one. Who knows, maybe you are one. A girl who hates other girls. A girl who says, “All my friends are guys.” A girl who generalizes about other girls, calling them “bitches” and “superficial” and “annoying,” and using all of those things to justify to other people why you don’t have female friends. Here’s a newsflash, cupcake: maybe you don’t have female friends because you’re a jerk and not very pleasant to be around."
—Self-Fulfilling Prophecies: The “I Hate Other Girls” Trap
So, I’ve been thinking about [E] Rachel’s post for a while, because I think I’m one of those girls who doesn’t really get along with girls. I mean, that’s not really true, Sam and Nicole and Kate and Carmen are my closest friends. But if you put me in a random social situation – say the wedding of one of my husbands fraternity brothers, which seems to be a social setting I find myself in a lot. I am wearing something which is not black (because my mother taught me it’s bad luck to wear black at a wedding) and that is making me grumpy. I’m a hard person to befriend anyway, there are so many layers of stuff I am not going to tell you – that I’m bi, that my boyfriend died of an overdose when I was 24, that I used to do heroin, that I used to shoot heroin, that I used to shoot meth – and I’m terrible at small talk. The only context in which I seem to have social polish is when I’m surrounded by scientists, and then only by comparison, because hanging out with scientists is a pretty alienating experience, because there is no room for my messy life.
Almost all of Tobias’s friends from college are guys, and they all have thin, blandly beautiful girlfriends or wives. They are always very polite, but we have nothing to talk about, and inevitably it’s the guys whose life experience is more like mine – having gone to a good college, being a scientist or an engineer, trying to figure out how to lead a normal life after have been a huge fuck up in college and beyond. Or maybe I can only really engage with people if we’re flirting.
At one wedding, I went up to one guy’s new girlfriend, and said, “Welcome to being one of the Betties." Everyone looked at me like I was crazy until I explained that all the guys had a super tight bond and that the women were always on the outside, and everyone pretty much had to agree. As a woman, it is expected that I will make friends with the other women, no matter how little we have in common, because there is something unseemly about getting along with a man better than you get along with his wife.
I’m sure there are plenty of women that I have a lot in common with (though possibly not the women at those weddings), but it’s hard to break through the social constructions of femininity to where the meat is.
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