Do you treat girls differently?

jessiehl
Wed, 19 Jul 2006 05:56:24 +0000

There’s a great scene in the novel A Wrinkle in Time where the protagonist is being shown this crazy dystopia where everyone is the same and does the same things at the same time. When she expresses her horror, she is told something along the lines of “But don’t you see? Here, everybody’s equal.” And she responds, “Like and equal are not the same at all!”

Her sense of “equal” (which is not the same as, say, the mathematical sense) is, I think, the applicable sense of “equal” here. Are men and women alike? No. For that matter, are any two men or any two women alike? Again, no.

I’m a fan of Southern politeness but have never believed that it should only be practiced by guys toward girls - I’m female and I hold doors for both guys and girls all the time. And I try to speak to people of any sort with basic civility. It’s polite.

I don’t mind if people cuss around me. I cuss pretty often myself. I don’t want to hear fart jokes or misogynistic crap - that’s not because I’m female, it’s because I don’t like fart jokes, and if I wanted to hear them, I’d go talk to my eight year-old brother. I don’t think the problem is that guys are too civil to girls, I think it’s that they aren’t civil enough to other guys.

Really, once you get to know and like someone, it makes more sense to treat them according to their individual standards anyway. I have a friend who, if a guy that she’s good friends with playfully slaps her butt as she walks by, will giggle and try to tickle the guy or something like that. So some of our close guy friends will do that occasionally. To her. They know me, and they know that if they did that to me, even in fun, I might turn around and hit them, and at the very least I’d be ****ed off and not react in fun. So they don’t do that. They are treating us as individual human beings, and this pleases me.

Of course, with strangers you don’t know what their individual standards are. In that case I think that the default standard should be “polite and respectful” regardless of the stranger’s sex.