Get It, Girls

"The girl and the woman, in their new, individual unfolding, will only in passing be imitators of male behavior and misbehavior and repeaters of male professions. After the uncertainty of such transitions, it will become obvious that women were going through the abundance and variation of those (often ridiculous) disguises just so that they could purify their own essential nature and wash out the deforming influences of the other sex. Women, in whom life lingers and dwells more immediately, more fruitfully, and more confidently, must surely have become riper and more human in their depths than light, easygoing man, who is not pulled down beneath the surface of life by the weight of any bodily fruit and who, arrogant and hasty, undervalues what he thinks he loves. This humanity of woman, carried in her womb through all her suffering and humiliation, will come to light when she has stripped off the conventions of mere femaleness in the transformations of her outward status, and those men who do not yet feel it approaching will be astonished by it. Someday (and even now, especially in the countries of northern Europe, trustworthy signs are already speaking and shining), someday there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but something in itself, something that makes one think not of any complement and limit, but only life and reality: the female human being." Rilke

One of the Guys

College student Jamie Keiles’ story about being a tomboy kind of girl hanging out with her dude friends, and now lady friends. About girls being catty or intimidating, about the appeal of being the girl in the boys’ club, and about people bein’ people aside from gender.

Overcoming the idea that girl was synonymous with catty or dramatic or gossipy was a definite struggle. In the end, though, I came to realize it wasn’t girls that I didn’t want to be friends with; it was people who acted like jerks. Sometimes these people are girls, but lots of times they are boys, too.

The girl friends I have now kick major ass. One sings in an a cappella group. One is the editor of a sex magazine. A bunch of them are involved with a mentorship program that I joined earlier this year (shout out to my WYSE girl gang!!!!). Hanging out with them is different from the time I spent in the boys’ club in that I don’t feel like I constantly need to wreck on my own gender to be cool. If I call someone out for being catty, it isn’t because they’re a girl, it’s because they’re acting like an ass.

1. getitgirls posted this