Tell me more, tell me more

As a general rule, I hate other females.  Girls have this habit of assuming a kind of clannish cameraderie that is incredibly superficial, and will dissolve at the first sign that an attractive guy shows any interest at all in one of them and decidedly not in the other.  Some will even claim that a guy would never come between them, but as so eloquently put in the Andrew’s Sister’s song: Lord help the mister who comes between me and my sister and Lord help the sister who comes between me and my man. 

Women are instinctively catty.  From an anthropological viewpoint, it makes perfect sense.  From the beginning of history there have been societies that have been polygamous, and in those situations a woman would have to compete with other women to be chosen to be someone’s wife, and then she would have to compete with the other women in the house to become the favorite wife.  In monogamous societies, women have to compete even more for the attractive male, since they are being chosen to be the only wife.

What is worse is that we stress the idea that women have to be this competetive to be happy.  In fairy tales, we are constantly given the impression that the only way to be happy is to find an attractive guy, and so long as you have that, it doesn’t matter whether you have friends or family anymore.  Cinderella, the Little Mermaid, and the legend of Robin Hood are great examples of this.  In each one, the herione quits the sphere in which she is born for the one that her true love exists in.  Depending on the version of the Little Mermaid you’re reading, she even dies over her desire to be with her man. 

When did we decide that “true love” was more important than friendship?  When did it become ok to screw over a gal-pal?  Some guys from my childhood had a saying: Bros before Hos.  It sometimes played out that way, and the one time it did not, it ruined their friendship.  On the whole though, I think guys are better at working this kind of stuff out than girls are.  Either that, or they just don’t care as much.  Or quite possibly, being more interested in the physical part and really not in the emotional part, makes it easier to maintain the friendship, because the girl doesn’t mean all that much, herself.  In any case, there seems to be less backbiting in guys’ friendships than in girls’.  On the whole, I prefer being friends with guys.   

I think one way to avoid the cat-factor in female relationships is to have a “double dating” kind of relationship, where it’s a set couples who are friends, rather than just the women.  If you can manage to cut out the competition for the attractive guy, I think it’s possible for women to really be friends, but it is also possible that the “tell me more, tell me more” conundrum is just unsolvable.