Jul 28, 2004
The goodness of being a girl.
You have hips that you can use to help carry things when they get unwieldy or heavy. Sometimes people will stand up for you on a bus or a train. No one worries that you are about to chop at them with a knife you are hiding in your pants pocket. Vanity is your birthright. Merchants will cut you a deal without your having to ask, just "for your courtesy." Nobody thinks you're a killjoy for not wanting to join in the impromptu game of touch football that just cropped up. You can fan yourself with a piece of paper or a magazine without looking like a gaylord. You can bat your eyelashes when asking for help and you will make a customer service person's day. Even if it's a girl that's helping you. You can charm your way out of a traffic ticket. You can wear whatever shoes you want with whatever socks you want or with no socks at all or with two pair on each foot. You can be just friends. If you don't hurry when you cross the street, people don't mind so much. You can buy anything you want, and no one will look at you funny. Even dildos. You can ask for multiple tastes at the ice cream counter, and the scoop-wielder will be happy to serve you. Unless you're fat. If you're fat, all of the above is null and void. You can get away with thinking you're fat. But if you actually are clinically fat, the world -- which was once your oyster -- clamps shut, catching the hem of your chocolate milk-stained sweatpants in the process and forcing you to tug awkwardly, tear your clothing, and skulk off in the other direction, telling yourself that oysters were never so much to begin with. Too much guts in the middle. Not nearly so nice as a good clam or shrimp.
When you're a girl, you can paint your dog's toenails without getting funny looks from the neighbors. You can blame everything on your hormones. Even bank robbery. You can wear fashions of bygone eras and be admired, unlike boys, who look dumb when they dress up like Confederate soldiers or President Lincoln. You can have a cat. You can cry at the movies. You can buy flowers for no reason. You can drink cocktails that are neither clear nor amber-colored. You can open a boutique with a frou-frou double entendre name and no one will throw a brick through the window. You can drive a pastel car. You can sell cosmetics for a living. And if you listen to all the grade school hype, you can be a bank president or a fireman or a lady astronaut or a trapezist or a school teacher or a doctor or a doctor's helper or a train engineer or a parole officer or a game show contestant or a grandmother or a political activist or a bear tamer or a tattooed freak or a photographer or a newspaper reporter or a landscape artist or an administrator or a bus driver or a mail carrier or a judge or a jewelry designer or a divorcee or a movie star or even president of the United States of America. One thing I think you can't do is eat a really staggering number of hot dogs in one sitting without making everyone frown. And this is especially true if you're fat.
Also, when you're a girl, you can post pictures of yourself on the Internet. See?
 Labels: photos
posted by Mary Forrest at 7:37 PM | Back to Monoblog
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