[Warning: I am making some sweeping generalizations about women in the following post. If sweeping generalizations bother you, you might want to skip this.]
What is it that makes women feel the need to fill every moment with continuous conversation?
To which I answer:
Oh, sweetie, of course it’s because you’re so damn fine, every woman around you wants to have your attention on her at all times.
Ha, no. Of course that’s not what I answer.
But it kind of rhymes… If I were writing a song about why women talk all the time to Exador, I would include “You’re so damn fine, girls want your attention all the fucking time” as a lyric, which, of course, my awesome producer–possibly that cutie, David Banner–would surreptitiously cover so that on the radio it would be “You’re so damn fine, girls want your attention all the [scratch] time” so that all the little girls could giggle and grin both at the thought of the Wayward Boy Scout and at the almost naughtiness of the [scratch] where the ‘fucking’ should be.
Oh, those little girls, sitting around in one of their bedrooms, listening over and over again to my awesome song about the Wayward Boy Scout, dreaming of the day when they might meet a guy so cute and nice and wonderful that they would (like me in the video) dance around on some kind of raised platform with all matter of back-up dancers shimmying behind them in one glorious celebration of how everyone knows how awesome the boy like the Wayward Boy Scout that they are dreaming about is and how everyone thinks it’s so cool that she likes him and so his awesomeness is a little bit her awesomeness and maybe today, when they’re in homeroom, he’ll look over at her and her friend Melissa will say, “Yes, I totally think he likes you” as they dissect it on the phone later and she’ll say “Do you think so?” and Melissa will say “Oh, yeah, totally” and she’ll say “I did see him glancing over at me in Band and yesterday he said ‘Hey’ to me at the bus stop. What do you think that means?” And then she’ll put on my record again and dance around to it some more while she text messages her other friends about how awesome the boy like the Wayward Boy Scout is.
And then, when the boy like the Wayward Boy Scout ends up dating some other girl, she’ll listen to my ballad “How Come Only Married Men Love Me?” and though she’s never been loved by a married man, she will cry into her pillow and imagine that I understand her pain in a way that no one else can, with the exception of Melissa, who she will call after dinner and hash and rehash the whole sordid deal with, yet again.
Because, you see, my friend, what you have here is vestigial Jr. High nonsense. When you’re young and you’re incredibly unsure of yourself and of your interpretations of events, you spend a lot of time with the people closest to you (who, of course, happen to be of your same gender, because, if you could work things out with people of the opposite gender, you wouldn’t be worrying about those boys with your girlfriends) mulling things over and picking them apart and analyzing every detail for great, hidden meaning.
Couple that with a society that doesn’t trust women or, as a matter of course, validate their experiences, and what you end up with is a society of women that don’t trust themselves. They don’t trust that they understand what’s going on in any given situation and so they develop a network of people they trust to let them know if they’re interpreting events correctly.
Here’s the important thing: If something happens to me and I think it sucks, it makes me feel better if I tell someone about it and they agree, ‘gosh, yes, that sucks.’ It makes me feel like, even though that thing sucks, it’s better than my having misinterpreted events and my sitting around being upset about something that doesn’t warrant being upset about. BUT, if I think something sucks and someone I trust says, ‘God, no, I think you’re over-reacting. Look at it this way.’ and I do look at it that way and I see what she or he’s saying, I still feel better because, even though I was wrong, I didn’t confront the person in the situation I thought was sucky and make an ass out of myself.
No matter what, if I tell you about things, and you respond in a manner that makes me feel heard, I feel better.
Being heard makes women feel better.
We yak at you, Wayward Boy Scout because being heard by you is pleasurable to us.
If you don’t like it, become a feminist so that women can be free to learn to trust their own judgment and don’t need validation from you in order to feel free to act.
Also, get me a beer.
Tiny Cat Pants 