Thinking about Megan Fox's comment that women don't make very good friends...
I think to an extent, there is some truth to this statement and every lady to an extent agrees with it. Girls don’t always make good friends. They can be bitchy and catty. They can talk about you behind your back. We’ve all had, at some point in our lives, a friend who betrayed us, and chances are, that friend was a girl. I think relationships with men put strains on those friendships — not just because of jealousy over men, but also jealousy over women. We all have friends who’ve dropped off the face of the earth when they’ve gotten boyfriends — sometimes we are that friend — and know the hurt and anger that is associated with being ditched.
Generally speaking, though, I think women are far more complex than men on a social level, and that makes navigating relationships with women far more complicated than navigating a relationship with men. Some women very sincerely have no desire to enmire themselves in such difficult relationships with women which are difficult not because of men or jealousy or anything like that, but rather just because, well, women are women.
That being said, I think female friendships are often the most rewarding because of this complexity, if you can manage to make them work. After leaving college, the people I have remained closest to were the girls I bonded with over bad boyfriends, bad roommates, bad professors, and bad (very bad) dorm food. Those relationships haven’t been without their share of problems, but overwhelmingly, these are the relationships where I found the most support, particularly emotional support, when things were going wrong in my life. For the most part, my male friends really blew in that category, unless I was looking someone to drink away my sorrows with. Not to say they weren’t good friends or even great friends, but unless the crisis involved a flat tire or a cockroach in my bathroom, I relied almost exclusively on my female friends in times of trouble.
While I know there are plenty of women out there who honestly just don’t have any interest in developing female friendships and fit in more easily and more naturally with men, it has been my experience that women who claim they get along better with guys while speaking disparagingly of other women are not those women. These women are, in fact, the reason why so many of the rest of us get a bad wrap. They are the girls who spend most of their time with men:
- Because they feel validated by male attention.
- Because being friends with men provides easy access to potential boyfriends. And,
- Because by claiming they are above female friendships, they are also claiming they are above women and the petty jealousies, back stabbing, and emotional theatrics that women are stereotyped as embodying. The truth is, though, these women are often just as bad as the women they villify — insecure, emotional, jealous, and in a constant struggle to remain the #1 girl for every guy she knows and claims to be friends with. Moreover, they paint other women as their bullies and oppressors to mask their own poor treatment of other women. For these girls, being friends with men is the classic Caroline Bingley move — if you position yourself as being better than all the other women, you’re hoping the guy(s) will buy into it.
If you’re not nice to other women, if you write them off before you even get to know them, and if you treat every woman who comes along as competition for the male attention you crave — well, is it any wonder other women aren’t very nice to you?
Again, not every woman who prefers male friendships is like this. But…when a woman explains her friendships with men by saying women hate her, I have a hard time buying it. There are plenty of beautiful women in the world who manage to be friends, very good friends, with women. There are also plenty of women who are mainly friends with men who rarely find themselves being treated badly by other women. If you find yourself frequently a “victim” of other women’s jealousy or mean-ness, you might want to ask yourself if the problem is solely theirs.
