From Her Perspective
Are Girls Really Crazy?
Recently, my fiancé and I were driving somewhere (I actually can’t remember where, but it probably wasn’t interesting so back off) and listening to the radio. It was my turn to choose the station, so I tuned into one of the crappy pop stations and Carrie Underwood’s “Before He Cheats” came on. I was psyched, as I am both a very talented singer and big fan of the song. So I sang loudly and proudly and when it was over, he was looking at me as though I had nine heads.
“What the f$ck is this? This song is insane,” he said incredulously.
“What are you talking about? Carrie totally gets it. People feel this way all the time,” I answered. His face dropped. Suddenly, I realized he didn’t feel this way all the time. Of course, I haven’t felt this way since we started seeing each other, but in my teens and early (fine, and later) twenties I wanted to lose my shit over some awful thing that a guy did to me pretty much on a weekly basis. I knew my girlfriends had felt the same way, too. But it had never occurred to me (mostly because single guys and girls can’t actually be friends so I never had the chance to ask) that the less-fair sex wasn’t as all-consumed by this psychotic rage that befalls all females on a regular basis. In fact, they probably weren’t consumed by it at all.
So knowing that I was going to look like a freak and probably be summarily dumped, I pressed on. I asked him if he had ever felt like doing the things that Carrie sings about, and he thought and thought and finally decided that maybe one time he had felt that way. But when I asked him about it, he admitted he couldn’t really remember. Couldn’t remember!? Obviously, this meant he was lying and actually didn’t ever want to do anything nuts. I can still remember very, very clearly when I was in college and my roommate went after my boyfriend when I was out of the country. When I saw her next, I dragged her out onto the sidewalk and beat the shit out of her. Who did she think she was, messing with my man? Looking back, I realize this may sound a little crazy, but there is no accounting for sanity when it comes to women being scorned, even at that young age. But anyway, I digress.
On that car ride, I did a lot of thinking. What must it have been like to not spend so much time obsessing and getting so angry about all of the thoughtless, stupid things people you were interested in did? Would I have had more hobbies? Would I have done better at my job? Fine, probably not. But why is this behavior the norm for girls everywhere? You really only hear about guys exhibiting this behavior on the news, because when a guy goes after a girl like that, it’s a criminal situation. But a girl can torture a guy, calling him at all hours of the night, thinking about him incessantly, making his life miserable if he chooses not to ask her out again, and it’s no big deal. So what does this mean? Are girls really crazy?
Clearly, it is generally accepted in society that this is so. Girls love songs like “Before He Cheats”. There are thousands of them. My personal favorite is Joan Jett’s “I Hate Myself for Loving You”. But you know what’s funny? My all-time favorite song is Biz Markie’s “Just a Friend.” You already know this, but it’s about a guy who gets cheated on by a chick with 9-10 pants and a very big bra. But it’s not crazy, he’s just sad. You can hear the sorrow in his voice with every “oh, snap” and pathetic, guttural cry. He doesn’t try to get her back, or even get back at her, he just moves on.
In real life (though of course Biz’s pain was very, very real), you see girls crying in the bar all the time about how a guy wronged them, but you never see guys doing anything like that. If you did, wouldn’t it be so weird? But I guess that just as it never occurs to girls not to behave this way, it doesn’t occur to guys to behave this way. Maybe it’s the way they’re brought up, maybe it’s because society pushes guys to tamp down their feelings and not fly off the handle over everything, whereas girls are more than encouraged to be as crazy as they feel like. Maybe it’s ingrained in our genetic makeup, like our love for shoes. Maybe we are told so often that we’re not good enough in most aspects of our lives through television, magazines, and the basic pop-cultural notion that if you don’t have fake boobs, fake blond hair and act like a porn star, you’re a piece of shit. And when a normal guy intimates that this is true, we reach a breaking point. It’s not like we’re ever too far from that point, anyway. The littlest thing can set us off.
So now that I’ve had time to think about this, do I have any definitive answers? Nope. I still don’t know for sure why guys are cool about everything and girls aren’t. Maybe you have some better insight; I’m more than willing to hear about it. Of course, I will probably end up bawling my head off, figuring out where you live and confronting you in person about why I am so inadequate and you are so perfect, but that’s okay, right? RIGHT?! I’m teasing, of course. I’ll just write about your small penis in the next issue.