Posted on 03/06/2006 9:51:00 PM PST by tbird5
It happens to the best of women. Here's Rosalind Wiseman, who has spent her entire working life teaching girls to treat each other decently. The script for the movie Mean Girls was based on her 2002 best-selling Queen Bees & Wannabes, a book that helps parents understand the drama and danger in the adolescent girl world. She knows the minefields that lie in gossip, jealousy, disloyalty and cruel judgments, and offers solid prescriptions for changing bad behaviour.
Yet despite her experience, she recently found herself sizing up two mothers who came to see her.
In her view, the women paid too much attention to their appearance, especially their hair. They seemed catty in their conversation, were micromanaging their kids' lives, and were silly.
"All these things came into my head. Why? They are antithetical to what I teach and believe," Wiseman says. "I was still judging these women."
Where does this nastiness come from?
Wiseman thinks it exists because it's supposed to exist. Being nasty to each other is one of the unspoken rules about how girls and women are supposed to behave; one of the rigidly enforced North American standards of what constitutes femininity.
"It's everything you know but haven't been sat down and taught," as Wiseman puts it.
When she judged the two women so harshly, it was as if she was acting out one of the observations she made in her book — that girls and women can be their own worst enemies.
(Excerpt) Read more at thestar.com ...
It isn't a refusal in the strict sense of a determined decision. Rather it is based on the feminine ideal of "not being there" as a finite, defined identity. Only such identities can be responsible because that is how one gets to appear [to oneself at least] as someone. If you are not "someone", there is no question of responsibility or accountability.
Women [especially] are caught in the dynamics of the back and forth of the evidence that they do appear as "someone", "that one", vs. the innate sense that things are just happening, like in a flowing river; and they are not "actors" or "directors" or "agents" causing things to happen. It is much easier to see others as the agents or causes of the problems and difficulties. Seeing oneself as a "subject", a "self", is particularly hard. It is so counter to the innate sense of how things are or should be.
So what else is new here? :)
No comment, other than women use words better than men and we know it ;)
OK, off to destroy another society and even a universe with my sharp tongue.
In this town this seems true of a sizeable segment of the high school girls but doesn't touch the Vietnamese community at all.This generation is not quite the straight A go go academics that their older cousins were but they do not get into the social crap at all. On the other hand many of the boys 15-20 years ago were really into gangs and stuff. That seem to be a fad that has passed now.
This is exactly the reason I always preferred hanging out with guys/men as opposed to girls/women. I'm closing in on 40 and let me tell you, a lot of these women never outgrow that behavior.
Mean Girl ping ;)
Sweetheart, I harbor NO bitterness toward the xx chromosome brigade. Just stating observations from the workplace.
Feminists and their lies are destroying our communities.... As a man I say this, women are the community... stay at home moms and elderly women are the ones who create, nurture, define and pass on the fundamental structures of our culture and communities... they are the ones who do the heavy lifting to keep societies going.
While many of the positions of visible "power" may belong to men, and they may deal with the garbage getting collected, the streets being paved and cleaned and the parks being operations... Women and their actions with each other day to day, particularly the stay at home moms are the backbone.
You don't need to go far to see it, go look at a neighborhood with 1 income 2 parent homes are more the norm vs one where this is not the case.... the difference is night and day.. The schools perform generally better... the community is filled with organizations constantly working to improve things.... etc etc etc...
Feminism and the lies and behaviors it attacks and applauds are for the most part fundamentally at odds with a safe, sane and good society and culture.
So that "sweetheart" isn't meant in any sort of degrading or derisive manner then.
(Busted! ;-) )
Men have abdicated their authentic role of forming and maintaining the structure of the culture. You are only obserfving the aftermath of that abdication. Your comments are not essential but only accidental.
Are you implying that I'm a mean girl? I'll have you know I'm a friggin' little angel! You say anything different and I'll be taking you down hard! :)
I never did buy into all that feminism crap. Maybe coming from a home with a sweet and loving mother was what kept me from believing what all those bitter old feminists were spouting as gospel. I love you mom, you're the best!
I learned from Alexis Carrington.
The Heartless Manifesto
Do really sappy, insipid, "always and forever" love poems make you want to puke? (and that goes for Bon Jovi lyrics too!)
Do you find typical "Women's Magazines" to be either stomach turning or pathetically laughable?
Are you tired of the walking wounded moping around expecting that the world owes them something because they are victims?
Do you find the likes of Michael Bolton and Kenny G. revolting?
Does the sight of an incredibly handsome man turn you off, cause so many of them have room-temperature IQ's, and obnoxious or non-existent personalities?
Are you sick of lazy women who use emotional and sexual manipulation to get what they want instead of using their own brains and muscles?
Are you fed up with women who feel they HAVE to be in a "Relationship" in order to be whole, and will sacrifice their self-esteem and personal growth in order to avoid being on their own?
Are you tired of men and women who are emotional children, and won't accept responsibility for their actions or behavior?
Do you want to SMACK women who play "helpless" just to gain male attention and stroke male egos?
Have you run out of sympathy for your Female friends who continually whine about how awful MEN ARE, but then they keep dating the same kind of ASSHOLES, over and OVER, AND OVER AGAIN!?
Are you fed up with your Male friends who are looking to date a woman with the appearance of a supermodel, and yet they continually whine about how "women don't like nice guys - they only want good-looking assholes"???
Do the words "If you REALLY loved me...." turn your heart to ice??!!!
Do you retch in response to "The Rules", and laugh uproariously at "The Code"?
Have you HAD IT with people telling you that you are TOO LOUD, TOO ASSERTIVE, or TOO OPINIONATED?
Do you wish you had a button that said: "Thank you for sharing, now SHUT UP and quit Whining!" ????
Do you ever get tired of those whiners and their online "journals"? Or the guys who hit on you and you politely decline, and they keep pestering you and pestering you, and pestering you like some obnoxious, festering, pus-filled sore, until you finally have to WHAP them over the head with a VERY LARGE CLUE-BY-FOUR (tm)....?
Do you feel like you might as well "get hung for a sheep as a lamb", because no matter how POLITELY you try to turn down some guy's advances, you invariably get called a "Bitch"?
If you answered YES to all of the above, then Heartless Bitches International wants YOU. Heartless Bitches is now recruiting!
Um, not work safe. :0)
I hate working for women, and I am a woman.
Sorry. Here is a Garbo quote:
"All alike, you men. You only want the satisfaction of being through with us first, that's all. So far I've had the good fortune of beating you to it. So I am heartless."
-- Greta Garbo, from the movie Inspiration (1931)
ROFL!! Sign me up!!
A little defensive aren't we? Article hit too close to home?
That's hilarious. I would have paid money for that too. :-)
uh huh take me down fast eh?
lol darlin my left boot weighs more than you do ;)
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