Posted on 03/06/2006 9:51:00 PM PST by tbird5
It happens to the best of women. Here's Rosalind Wiseman, who has spent her entire working life teaching girls to treat each other decently. The script for the movie Mean Girls was based on her 2002 best-selling Queen Bees & Wannabes, a book that helps parents understand the drama and danger in the adolescent girl world. She knows the minefields that lie in gossip, jealousy, disloyalty and cruel judgments, and offers solid prescriptions for changing bad behaviour.
Yet despite her experience, she recently found herself sizing up two mothers who came to see her.
In her view, the women paid too much attention to their appearance, especially their hair. They seemed catty in their conversation, were micromanaging their kids' lives, and were silly.
"All these things came into my head. Why? They are antithetical to what I teach and believe," Wiseman says. "I was still judging these women."
Where does this nastiness come from?
Wiseman thinks it exists because it's supposed to exist. Being nasty to each other is one of the unspoken rules about how girls and women are supposed to behave; one of the rigidly enforced North American standards of what constitutes femininity.
"It's everything you know but haven't been sat down and taught," as Wiseman puts it.
When she judged the two women so harshly, it was as if she was acting out one of the observations she made in her book that girls and women can be their own worst enemies.
(Excerpt) Read more at thestar.com ...
ALL the freakin' TIME!!
Are you on duty right now? What time is it?
Some men are scared of witty women.
You got it! I laugh when people go on and on about how men are different. They are, but only in the way they express their nastiness. I've worked in many male dominated places, and wow - men can put some of the cattiest women to shame.
And professionally, when a woman acts like a man would, she if often not respected anyway.
I consider myself lucky - my close female friends are all good people.
Every young man in America should read and study this book.
Those would generally be homos and metrosexuals...but you're right!
Agree totally.
'Women spend ten years changing their husbands and then complain they're not the men they married'.
It's 12: 17 a.m. and I should be in bed. A couple of my co-workers (GOOD guys - LOL) made me go to the bar with them. (Yes, they twisted my arm real hard.) We had a couple of beers and I came back to my office to shut down my computer and I got into this. LOL
Yes, a lot of men are terrified by strong women.
You know what I say to them about that? Deal with it. ;-)
Do you remember the guy whose wife cheated on him and he calls all women lying b*tches ever since? I wish I remembered his FReeper Name - but that guy was horribly bitter over a single event.
Sad.
I only said catty things about the ex after she slammed my head into a solid oak door.
Woooohoooo!! Applauding RockinRight for his comment in post #225.
Hoyce Gracie fan here from the old UFC...
RockinRight, prepare to be bombarded with kisses...
smooch.!
Women from Central America, South America, Asia, Eastern Europe are just wonderful. Oh, and there's about a billion of them. LOL. American women suck.
OK!
My closest female friends, with the exception of Hap whom I met before I got here, are on FR.
Well, yes but that's not what I meant. Men just express themselves differently, but the end is the same - blood in the streets. The game of Man can be a blood sport.
I'm just going to sit back and enjoy our fine Freeper babes ripping you a new one after that comment...
Getting interesting again...
I'm going to bed now because it's very late on this side of the world. But, y'all have a little fun with him, OK?
Good night!
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