Congratulations to the Globe editors who wrote the deeply ironic and multiple-reality reflecting hedline on Leah McLaren’s weekend column:
The new spectator sport: catfights
MEET MY BEST FRENEMY
Leah seems to agree with Mummy Blogger Rebecca Eckler and Louisa McCormack, the author of “Six Weeks To Toxic,”
that toxic female friendships are a major problem.
Tearfree and her readers, on the other hand, believe that most women grow out of toxic friendships when they graduate from high school
Having reflected deeply on this subject over the past few days, Tearfree and her readers are also a little fed-up about the inherently misogynistic nature of the whole toxic female friendship debate. Sure, men may have fewer toxic friendships, but that’s only because men have fewer friends.
As for men being less gossipy and less catty than women, well, that’s just plain wrong. If there is anyone out there who actually doubts this, please go into your e-mail boxes, pull up all the “slap down” messages, note the gender of all senders and recipients, and perform a basic statistical analysis.
If that still doesn’t convince you, check out season four of 24, which Tearfree watched this weekend while she was getting a life. At CTU headquarters, which is not at all unlike Tearfree’s own working environment in academia, men and women backstab and betray each other with complete gender equality.
And finally, if you are a victim of toxic friendships, looking for some commonsensical Tearfree advice, we recommend that next time you’re out having Mojitos and someone starts talking like this, you drink up, pay the waiter, and never, ever go out with that person again. It’s called the Tearfree “Six Seconds to Detox” approach.
3 comments:
Right on, Tearfree. My husband and his friends are as catty as any women I know. Instead of bitching about their rivals' fashion sense, they bitch about what shitty hockey players/crappy lawyers/skank-izers they are. It's just another thing women are made to feel bad about -- in addition to not being thin enough, not being supermodel-esque enough, not having enough money, not raising our children expertly, we must now get down on ourselves for being bitchy. But when men are bitchy, they're just speaking honestly about someone they don't like.
The thing is about those two women whose names I will not mention is that they reek "mean girl". If you are a "mean girl," then you will forever have toxic friendships, both male and female. If you're not into that whole scene, your friendships will be pretty uncomplicated. Mine are. I left behind the "mean girls" --and the mean boys - in high school.
Super color scheme, I like it! Good job. Go on.
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