Sisterhood
One of the things I overhear quite often among women in their 20s is that they don’t have many female friends. This makes me sad beyond belief, especially since it’s usually delivered in a somewhat boastful tone, as in, “Yeah, I don’t hang out with chicks. Bitches are crazy.” (Approving smirk from dude she’s talking to.)
Allow me to wax philosophical here. I am not opposed, in the slightest, to male-female friendships, which I think are awesome and rewarding. Some of my favorite people in the world are male (my brother, JR, Joss Whedon). There’s also something to be said for redefining relationships between opposite-gender heterosexual people when the assumption is always that if a guy befriends a girl, there’s an ulterior motive involved. One of the major reasons I was attracted to my last boyfriend was the fact that he was friends with a bunch of girls–that is, he saw them as interesting human beings and not simply sex objects. So, I am all for male-female relationships that extend beyond or do not involve the insert-bawdy-euphemism-for-sex. My issue is when these friendships/relationships occur to the exclusion of young women also having female friends, which seems very common among my generation.
Admittedly, part of the reason it makes me sad is because I have many close female friends who are such a huge part of my life and much more important to me than a (male) significant other will ever be. I can’t imagine not having that, and I wish all my lady peers could experience the same closeness with other girls. I feel I can speak on this subject with authority because not only am I a female, I have either lived, worked, or attended school in majority-female environments for the past eight years (with some brief and often horrifying spells in male-dominated ones, a.k.a. the Brooklyn Child Advocacy Center). Through my observations of the female species, two scenarios often present themselves overwhelmingly when girl-friendless girls explain why they don’t hang out with “chicks”.
Scenario 1: She has never felt particularly close with any girls in her immediate social circle. This often happens with girls who are drawn to activities and/or hobbies that are classically male-dominated, like comic books, video games, and rolling one’s own joint. Often it seems as though girls interested in such things have to prove their set-apartedness from the rest of the female pack to truly earn the respect of the male circle in which she’s involved. It’s obvious even from the outside what sort of things you are expected to do if you want to be one of the guys, since (personal experience here) most men interested in things like independent music*, Socialism**, and graphic novels*** honestly do not believe chicks can speak knowledgeably about such things.
Scenario 2: She used to have a really close female friend or perhaps more, but then she was burned. Like, really bad. It usually involves a guy: the friend might have “stolen” her boyfriend, or snickered to her 8th grade crush that she’d just bled through her jeans, or got really drunk on New Year’s Eve and tried to stab her with a pair of scissors. There’s always betrayal in some way, which makes the rift all the more unrepairable and thus the girl ever more wary of forming female friendships in the future.
And it’s true. Most women have been betrayed, or sold out, at some point, by a female friend–or even a female institution, such as the women’s movement, which notoriously silenced and continues to silence feministas/women of color. The reason why it’s so awful, so much more awful than when men have falling-outs with their male friends, is because there’s a special kind of betrayal that takes place in communities where people have been historically oppressed. Who stands to gain when women fight with each other? It only reinforces the patriarchy and male domination. Likewise, who is elevated when there is black-on-brown or black-on-black, etc., violence? Whites. Who is elevated when poor and working-class people grumble about each other and vote against their own interests? The elite ruling classes.
Among the many awful things about domestic violence, one of the awfullest in my opinion is the classic, across-the-board, time-honored abusive tactic of separating women from each other. It happens among white women from rural Missouri who live in trailer parks and black and Puerto Rican women from New York who live in the projects, and although I can’t speak extensively about the upper classes I am sure it happens there too. In poor communities, women of all races get really good at pooling their resources, sharing everything from childcare responsibilities to food stamps, and often form familial-type friendships. (Sidenote: in fact, “sister” is commonly used in various communities to refer either to a sibling, cousin, other blood or step-relative, or a really good friend who is no relation at all. When I got to social work school I learned that there is a fancy term for this called “fictive kin”.) In New York, the battered women’s shelter where I worked often housed a majority of very young women–I think the average age at one point was 19. While the youthfulness of our specific program was due to a variety of factors including the lack of economic opportunities for women of color in the city, especially young mothers, the younger women nearly always had the worst attitude when it came to female friendships. Many of them didn’t want to come to support group because they didn’t want to hang around with a bunch of other bitches, who “can’t be trusted” as I heard over and over again. Sure enough, many of them had been burned in the past, whether by a negligent mother or a girl friend who slept with their guy. One girl told me that she did have two close female friends, but she never let them know who she was dating or when her TANF check had come because, again, she felt they couldn’t be trusted. I asked her who looked out for her when she went around with these older men, and she shrugged her shoulders. Nobody. She kept to herself.
The implication here is not that if you spurn female friendship, you will automatically end up in a domestic violence shelter because you won’t have anybody to say, “You better get away from that asshole.” However, there’s a really good reason why abusive partners tend to isolate their victims from family and close friends. I think abusers implicitly understand that something powerful can happen when girls have a space to themselves, and they are afraid of it. So, if you are a girl without any close female friends…you might stop and ask yourself why that is the case. What are you losing by distancing yourself from the company of women?
*Music: It is a well-known fact, recently cited in Stuff White People Like (one of my favorite blogs) that nearly every white male of this generation can play a thing or two on the guitar and prides himself on a vast collection of records or defines himself by the amount of gigabytes on his hard drive devoted to mp3s. It is particularly ruffling to these young fellows when they cannot impress the female object of their affections with the superiority of their musical knowledge. I cannot tell you how many guys I dated in college whose interest in me was probably piqued by my rather bitching taste in music. Most of them then felt emasculated because my CD collection was larger than theirs or else they had never been in the presence of someone who once got a job by filling in the blanks to a shouted Black Flag lyric. In fact, I’m still irked every time I think about a particular young man, whom, after chatting about music while working together one night, decided to check out a new band I recommended. Two months later, when that band was touring in our area and had gotten to be popular as the next up-and-coming thing, he presented me with a burned copy of their CD (which I already HAD), saying, “You should really check them out!” He then refused to believe me when I reminded him that he’d already heard about them…from me. Typical.
**As a person who identifies with the Marxist-feminist analysis of things and defines my political affiliations as raving pinko hellcat/democratic Socialist, I have abstained from attending countless meetings/rallies/events due to the sausage fests that such things often are. Once, while I was waiting for my drink to be called at a coffee shop in New York, I was perusing a local zine created by a radical Socialist collective. A guy with thick black glasses actually approached me and began asking me questions about why I was looking at the zine, as if to imply that my interest couldn’t possibly be genuine. I briefly considered dumping my coffee on him, but I didn’t want to pay for another one.
***Graphic novels and comics are often second only to indie music as the trump card that dudes often use to assert their superiority over us females, who labor throughout this mortal coil unaware of the exquisite pleasures men experienced after the first X-Men and The Dark Knight. I went to see the movie adaptation of one of the Hellboy comics recently. On the way to the theatre I asked to have the premise of the comic explained to me, as I don’t generally bother with the overwhelmingly patriarchal claptrap of the mainstream graphics world. One of the guys I was riding in the car with said, “I’m surprised, I thought you were really into that stuff.” I replied, “I am, I’ve just never read Hellboy or Batman or any of that boring shit.” “Who do you like, then?” I rattled off such names as Jessica Abel, Alison Bechdel, Alan Moore, and Ariel Shrag–fairly well-known artists and writers. Of course, he had not heard of any of the female authors, and only remembered who Alan Moore was because he’d seen V for Vendetta. His response was thus: “Oh, OK. Those kinds of comics.” What the fucking fuck does that mean???
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.