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RANTS
What DO women want?
[I recieved this as an e-mail a while back from my girlfriend when we first started dating. Maybe it was a hint? (HA!) Anyway, this is what gave me the idea for this page. It's only appropriate that it be the first one. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!]
I received a letter from an old friend of mine today, and it got me going. She was approached in the bar and told, "You have such beautiful eyes." My friend is like me, unfortunately, and said, "What color are they?" The guy couldn't answer. I've had some experiences recently and some not-so-recently that coincide with my friend's complaint, and...off we go...buckle up...I haven't had a good, solid rant in a while.
I say "unfortunately" about my friend being a woman like me because women like me don't automatically believe men when they say things like this, and it would be a lot easier if we could. We've spent our lives cultivating our brains, our skills, our personalities, because we were not cute as children. We were often tomboys, fat, really smart, or just plain odd - and made fun of. We weren't cheerleaders most of the time. We didn't have mothers who taught us how to wear makeup, do our hair, and be frilly. We usually didn't date much, and when we did, we often dated entirely the wrong types of boys, then the wrong types of men. We aren't cute, we aren't fluff, we aren't popular, and we often aren't feminine. We can be "one of the guys" a little too easily most of the time, and we feel more comfortable in the company of male friends than we do around other women. We don't feel comfortable around men we don't know, because we are afraid that they'll pick up on our big secret. The big secret is: We don't know how. We don't know how to flirt. We don't know how to be cute and perky. We are lacking the gene, the training, the ingrained knowledge that seems to come naturally to the perky women out there.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking perky women. I have a few perky friends. Granted, they annoy the crap out of me a lot of the time, but I don't hate them. Yes, women like me often feel the urge to sneak into the homes of the perky women and replace their shampoo with Nair, but we don't actually hate them. We envy them. We want to date. We want to be wanted and desired. We want to feel feminine, we want to be cute, we want to be perky. We want men to whisper sweet nothings in our ear (whatever sweet nothings are - women like me don't know - but we'd like to find out). We want men to hold our hands, open doors for us, touch the small of our backs when walking across a room with us. We want men to call us "My girl" or "Honey" or "Sweet Pea." (Well, maybe not "Sweet Pea," but you get the idea.) We want all of these things and more. We want to feel feminine, to walk with that swishing motion that we just can't seem to create. We want to feel comfortable in mixed crowds. We want to be treated like girls. We want... We want...
Unfortunately, when women like me do receive some of these things that we want, we don't take them at face value like the perky women do. When a man looks at a woman like me and says, "You have beautiful eyes," we want them to prove it by knowing the color. When a man looks at a woman like me and calls her "My girl," we automatically respond with the words, "I'm not a possession," even though we really liked hearing that. When men ask us to dance, we feel that we can't say yes, because we don't know how to dance like the perky women do, so we say no...and watch the purses of our perky friends. When men approach us, we wonder if they actually have their eyes on our perky friend we came with, the one who is currently dancing with 5 (count 'em! 5!) men on the dance floor. We second guess ourselves and end up causing a lot of confusion in the process. We don't feel that we are attractive, so we always wonder about the motives of men that ask for our phone numbers. (Gee, maybe he's looking for a good contractor.)
We watch our perky friends dance and laugh and flirt and giggle, and we go home alone...again...with the carefully folded pieces of paper with our phone numbers written on them still carefully folded in the back pockets of our not-cute-enough jeans.
However: Women like me don't have broken hearts quite as often. We look before we leap, so we don't fall quite as hard. We realize that there are shithead men out there who will use the words every woman wants to hear for the sole purpose of chalking up another mark on the wall above their headboards. We console our perky friends when their hearts are broken...again and again...and again... We listen to our perky friends as they tabulate the number of men they have kissed, fornicated, or "serviced," and we gasp in shock because our numbers are still in the single digits. We drive our perky friends to the clinic for testing after we explain that, "no, that discharge is not normal..." and we console them yet again as they take the antibiotics, pull out their phone books, and call...and call...and call...wondering how many weekends back they'll have to go...
And then women like me realize that...hey...we don't really want to be perky. We wouldn't mind being wanted and needed and loved, we wouldn't mind some attention...but...we just don't have it in us to be perky, and that's OK. There are redeeming qualities to being a woman like me.
Women like me don't wear a lot of makeup. We often don't own curling irons or blow driers. (Hair gel? What is that? Mousse? I'll take chocolate.) We spend a lot less money on our upkeep, and for some reason, we often seem to last longer. Women like me who are now 60, 70, 80 years of age fare much better than the perky women who spent years hiding behind a mask of brown runny gook and multi-colored powders. You don't want to see what's underneath the layers of artificial beauty caked on that 50-year-old perky woman's face, believe you me.
And women like me cultivate interests that don't fade with time, as the beauty of the perky woman will eventually do. We paint, we write, we draw, we teach, we sculpt... We are the women who hold the heads of the perky women as they vomit in the bathroom after drinking too many daquiris. We are the women who balance our own checkbooks (and usually correctly), pay our own bills (on time when we can), and carry out our own garbage. We are strong, we are resilient, and we will survive. And we will provide a shoulder for the perky women to lean on when times get rough. And sometimes...in some places...and in some ways...the perky women envy us, too.
Are you wondering what happened to my friend with the unknown color of beautiful eyes? Don't worry about her. She has a very special man in her life who just so happened to be in the men's room at that moment. He knows that they are blue.
(Written by Karen Bowman and included here on 12-18-01)
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