You know, as much as I sometimes kvetch about being a girl, it’s really fun sometimes.
I was thinking that as I was wandering around my house this morning in my adorably cute pink flowered boxer shorts and white t-shirt. I have a wonderful soft curvy body. I like my hips. I like the way that my shirt falls into my waist and sits in a little puff on my hips. I like my breasts, even though I wish they’d be perkier and stand at attention like the pinup girls on the sides of 1940’s b-52 Bombers. I like shaving my legs, even though I cut myself sometimes. I like having smooth legs. I like Body Shop’s Body Butter. It makes me all soft and sweet, even though I feel like a Butterball turkey when I’m greasing myself up with it. And it smells like mango ass, but that goes away after awhile.
I like the fact that I have really lovely sheets and a lovely white 350 thread-count duvet cover on my wonderful down comforter. I like the fact that my bed is a bit like sleeping in a cloud.
I like matching my underwear to my clothes. I like painting my fingernails and growing them long. I like the fact that I don’t have to if I don’t want to, but I have a choice.
I don’t know if I would be able to do those things if I were a guy. Buying Body Butter would be right out. So would buying $40 worth of candles that smell like the ocean.
I like men. I like men a lot. It’s my mother’s fault, really. She collects men. It’s her hobby. She works in men the way artists work in oils or clay. (I think I stole that line from somewhere, because it sounds too good to be mine, but it fits perfectly.) She’s a Marilyn Monroe type. She never broke up with a man (and believe me, it was always she that did the breaking up) until she was certain she had a replacement, like a tire you know is about to go flat. She never buys herself a drink. Even at 50, she still has men following her around like lost puppies’ they’re just older men, lower down in the barrel. I suspect that at age 75, she’ll have retirees trotting around the bingo hall, offering to buy her a new bingo dabber.
That was for you, bingoguy.
And she is really beautiful. Or was at one point. Now she has this aging movie star quality’ oozing with grace and charm, through a thin veil of slightly crepey skin and gray roots. She still never has to pay for a drink. I think I learned how to act around men from watching her. As the men never really lasted overly long, she was always in the ‘Falling in Love’ stage with them. Or the cold, distant ‘I have someone new’ phase. I was twenty before I understood that men were just people, not mystical, not princes, just people.
But I still love men.
I like how they think. I like to laugh about men things with them. I like football. I love how they don’t worry about what other people will think. I love how they just take control of things and not worry about seeming pushy. I don’t play girl games (unless the Uterus is taking over, that is). They seem to like me back. All of my very best friends are men, with few exceptions (and one of the exceptions is a lesbian, so that says what exactly?). And the few girl friends I have are unusual for girls too. We’re the tomboys. We can’t stand the bitches. They can’t stand us. We don’t feel at ease at a Tupperware party. We cook because we feel like it and not pride ourselves over our tasty Hamburger TaterTot casserole. We like boy music. We like boy books. We don’t read romance novels.
But I think that in some ways, I’m just Marilyn Monroe’s daughter in a different form. I’m in no way a classical beauty. I’m not even cute. But at the same time, one time, a girly girl called me ‘catnip for men’. So perhaps I’m a little skewed. I never really had a moral problem with the fact that I used to date two men at once in college. Perhaps I should have had a problem with that. Maybe that says something about me. Esteban once told me that girly girls don’t like me because I refuse to play their games and men still find my opinions interesting. Honestly, I don’t play their games because I would lose at them’ badly. My mother never had women friends, really, either. My college roommates, Kassandra, looked like a mix between Marilyn Monroe and Madonna. In the middle of her junior year in college (I’ll do the math for you here’ she’d been in school two and a half years) I was her 13th roommate and the only one who lasted longer than 8 weeks. And I still write to her and talk with her all the time. She gives me copywriting assignments for her design firm. We understand each other. Maybe our only difference is that I am the very last person the guys in the bars will look at and she is the very first. This weekend, over lunch with Belle, I remembered Kass’ 21st birthday. She had invited 11 different men out to dinner to celebrate it. All 11 thought that they were her date that night. They all got there and found 10 other men, all vying for her attention. (On a side note: she’s actually married to one of them) I suppose that girly girls don’t like people like her because it pisses them off that she can get away with it.
And maybe it should piss me off too. I probably couldn’t get away with it. I don’t have the body or the cuteness going for me. It’s just personality and attitude. And maybe my hooters, but that really doesn’t seem to count for all that much. Any chick with $2500 can buy herself a way better pair than mine, if she hasn’t already got nice perky ones to start with.
But I still like being a girl. I think that the genetic propensity I have to be the Marilyn Monroe type overrides the fact that I don’t fit the societally predetermined body type. I was just miscast, that’s all. The role called for a bombshell sex goddess and they cast the Funny Fat Girl instead.
But I’m going with that. I’m ok with that, I guess.
Because I’m a girl and sometimes I can make up the rules as I go along.
