Gilrs will be girls…won’t they?

Last Sunday, I decided to take advantage of the first signs of summer and take a trip to the park with my son and his friend. The park was packed full of like minded souls taking advantage of the hot sun and my young charges were happily playing on the swings and throwing stones at each other when a commotion on the far side of the children’s area grabbed our attention.

A group of youths were the cause of the uproar and in the centre two teenage lads were trading blows like they were on Saturday Fight Night!, at least, I thought it was 2 boys. Upon closer inspection I realised that one of the ‘boys’ was in fact a girl, but she was giving it all she got. The fight was split up by one of her friends and she took the opportunity to spit in the face of her male aggressor, before being urged to go in the other direction. The excitement over, everybody got back to what they were doing and pretty soon all was forgotten.

Had I just witnessed the new face of feminity?

Don’t get me wrong, I am not the kind of person that believes that women belong in the kitchen, or indeed that there is a particular way in which men and women should act, but what I have noticed lately is a shift in the way that some females behave. Girls now are following in the footsteps of their male classroom counterparts when it comes to violence and straightforwardness. The rise of the ‘pornification’ of women in the media, has been matched by the rise of the laddette. The beer swilling, foul mouthed females who lurk until closing time in bars and clubs around the City, always ready to down a pint or two as quickly as possible and too eager to lay you out flat on your back if you say the wrong thing or stare for too long in their direction.

Just what is going on?

But maybe I am being unfair. Am I basing my opinion on what a woman should act like on an age old stereotype put in place by men way before my time? Am I indeed sexist in my approach and beliefs that it is normal for a woman to act demure and ‘princessly’, not being expected to paint a fence or change the wheel of a car, but will always look better in an apron or dressed to the nines in clothes created more for the male gaze than for any type of physical practicality? I admit that I came up in this male dominated world therefore hold some male dominated views and yet there still seemed something wrong with seeing a girl trade blows against a boy. In my opinion the boy should have known better, if that had been my son hitting a girl, I would have been more than disappointed. (But then again, if a girl was acting like a boy and started a fight against my son, I can’t say wholeheartedly that I would be angry with him if he gave her a bitch-slap!) .

You see to me if you act in a certain way, then you can’t really blame anyone for treating you in a certain way. It may just be that this rise in more masculine femininity has come on the back of a more feminine masculinity. Men are spending more and more on cosmetics and stuff to make you look and smell pretty than anytime before in history. Now, its certainly not the first time that men have dared to care for their appearance but the last time it wasn’t met by an equal shift by women in the opposite direction. In the past, when women were held further down than they are today, men were allowed to play whatever roles they wanted to, often donning ridiculous wigs, and horrific makeup, and looking like 17th century pimps! Today things seem to be changing but unfortunately the good is mixed with the not so good, encompassing behaviour like I witnessed in the park.

Logically thinking I suppose what we should see is a middle line where men and women act more or less the same, where women can stand on equal terms with a man, receiving an equal amount of acknowledgement. Maybe that is the effect of a changing world, maybe this is what this world needs to redress the huge imbalance that has occurred since time immemorial and so perhaps, maybe we are just going to have to get used to it. Now, I don’t think that we will see a blanket transformation of harder female types appearing on the horizon like zombies out of a Dario Argento film, it will be more a gradual thing taken up only by those who are eager to do so.

And so, as long as there are women out there happy to play the ‘stereotype’ that I have come to know and love, everything, in my world at least, will be copasetic!