9 Words Women Use

9 WORDS WOMEN USE

(1) Fine: This is the word women use to end an argument when they are right and you need to shut up.
(2) Five Minutes:  If she is getting dressed, this means a half an hour. Five minutes is only five minutes if you have just been given five more minutes to watch the game before helping around the house.
(3) Nothing: This is the calm before the storm.  This means Something, and you should be on your toes. Arguments that begin with Nothing usually end in Fine.  
(4) Go Ahead: This is a dare, not permission. Don't Do It!    
(5) Loud Sigh: This is actually a word, but is a non-verbal statement often misunderstood by men. A loud sigh means she thinks you are an idiot and wonders why she is wasting her time standing here and arguing with you about Nothing.   (Refer back to # 3 for the meaning of Nothing.)
(6) That's Okay: This is one of the most dangerous statements a women can make to a man.  That's okay means she wants to think long and hard before deciding how and when you will pay for your mistake.  
(7) Thanks: A woman is thanking you, do not question, or Faint. Just say 'you're welcome'. (I want to add in a clause here - This is true, unless she says 'Thanks a lot' - that is PURE sarcasm and she is not thanking you at all.  DO NOT say 'you're welcome' ... that will bring on a 'whatever').
(8) Whatever: Is a women's way of saying ____ YOU!
(9) Don't worry about it, I got it: Another dangerous statement, meaning this is something that a woman has told a man to do several times, but is now doing it herself. This will later result in a man asking 'What's wrong?' For the woman's response refer to # 3.

* Send this to the men you know, to warn them about arguments they can avoid if they remember the terminology.
* Send this to all the women you know to give them a good laugh, cause they know it's true

This is an email that a cousin-by-marriage emailed to me and about 15 other female family members.  This is supposed to be funny.  It's supposed to be a lighthearted joke.

But I'm having trouble taking it as such.  Becuase the reason it's considered funny is because it's widely accepted to be true.

And I find that disturbing.

When people read this email, they will laugh and nod their heads and go about their lives acting precisely in this manner.  I think it's a sad state of society when clearly unfair, biased, sexist behaviour is looked at, acknowledged, laughed at, and accepted.  We encourage absolutely deplorable behaviour under the guise of "gender roles", as if people can't help acting horribly to each other because our genitals make us do it. 

These 9 words that women supposedly use (and I've heard it plenty from men too) are examples of how we do not communicate with the people we claim to love, people who are supposed to be "soulmates" and "better halves" and our life partners, blah blah blah.  I'm not talking about people who use sarcasm as humor, I'm talking about passive-aggressive behaviour where one person is emotionally upset over something their partner does and uses sarcasm as a method of hurting the other person in retaliation, or prefers to sulk rather than have an honest discussion about how the two people in question are just not seeing eye-to-eye, or even how one person fears the reaction of another and chooses not to say anything at all.  I whole-heartedly believe that I cannot reasonably expect to get what I want if I do not ask for what I want.  So here are my uses of these words:

1) Fine:  This is the word I use to end an argument because I am OK with the solution or conclusion.
2) Five Minutes:  This amount of time exists in our current space-time continuum as 5 minutes regardless of the activity this statement is attached to.  If I need to build in a cushion or I am unsure about the length, I will say so explicitly.  If I state "5 minutes" and I go over the stated time limit, I apologize.
3) Nothing:  This is the calm.  Period.  This means "nothing" and you can relax, confident that "nothing" really is forthcoming.  Arguments that begin with "nothing" ... no, wait, arguments do not follow "nothing" because there is "nothing" to argue about.
4) Go Ahead:  This is permission, not a dare.  Do it.
5) Loud Sigh: This is not actually a word.  It is a non-verbal statement, but it can mean many different things, usually exasperation from a wide variety of subjects, and it's precise meaning will immediately follow verbally so there is less chance of misunderstanding that could then prolong whatever it is I'm exasperated about.
6) That's Okay: This is one of the safest statements I can make because it means, exactly and only, that something is, get this, OK.
7) Thanks: Since I say this often and I mean it when I say it, there should be no fainting or questioning.  It's only courtesy to thank someone for their time or effort.  "Thanks A Lot" is only sarcastic in a joking sense and obviously sarcastic by the tone of voice.  It's never used as a jibe in an argument.
8) Whatever: this is not my way of saying "fuck you" because I will say "fuck you" when I mean "fuck you".  "Whatever" is usually the first part of a sentence, not a retort.
9) Don't worry about it, I got it: another non-dangerous statement that means exactly what it says. 

So, here's a thought - how about we TALK to our partners and spouses about what's going on in our minds and how we feel about things?   

Mean Girls

http://zen-shooter.livejournal.com/38654.html

This is a rant about an article titled ""Mean Girls": Boozing, Bikinis And Bullying: How The Scandalous Behavior Of Five High School Cheerleaders Rocked A Bedroom Community Near Dallas" (http://www.newsweek.com/id/37993).  I highly recommend people go read this rant whether you choose to follow the link to the original article or not. 

Before you go read the article (if you're going to), come up with a couple of scenarious you think this article could be about.  Go on, I'll wait.

 

Did anyone come up with anything resembling the following:

~5 girls get drunk and beat the shit out of some poor freshman
~5 girls get drunk and kill some student
~5 girls get drunk and beat, kill, or otherwise terrorize a teacher
~5 girls force someone else to get drunk and beat, rape, kill, or otherwise terrorize a teacher or other student
~5 girls get drunk and run around downtown in bikinis propositioning the town priest for prostitution

Anything like this?  Well, let me tell you, if you guessed any of the above, you'd be dead wrong.

Here's what the girls *actually* did:

One of the girls flipped off her teacher.
One of the girls, after being told to get off her cell phone, said to that teacher "shut up, I'm talking to my mom".
One of the girls told her teacher to "pull her panties out of a wad"
The girls stole their gym teacher's cell phone and texted "racy" messages to her husband.
Two girls had a picture of themselves in a bikini sharing an alcoholic beverage.
Several girls had pictures of them in "racy" poses showing "glimpses" of their underwear (keep in mind that these are CHEERLEADERS who wear miniskirts and flip upside down in the air at publicly attended football games)
Several of the girls, in uniform, went into an adult store and posed with candles shaped as penises.

These antics were cause for a $40,000 investigation and for Newsweek to use words like "scandalous" and "rocked a community" and "menace" and for one teacher to say (yes, I quote) "Gang members were nothing compared to these girls".

Now, I grew up in gang-ridden California.  I was in fear of my life if I wore the wrong color or said the wrong thing to the wrong person or even just walked down the wrong street.  And I didn't even live in East L.A.  I find this incredibly offensive, as someone who actually had to fear the gangs, to have these pissant, bratty teenagers compared to, and found excessive of, gangs.

There's no doubt that these kids have an attitude problem.  There's no doubt that they need to be taken down a peg.  But all the mouthing off didn't generate any form of punishment by the school.  The pictures, however, earned them a suspension.

I completely agree that they deserve detention, suspension, expulsion if it gets that far.  But they deserve it for mouthing off to the teachers.  I am COMPLETELY opposed to the school suspending them for behaviour done off school property and not on school time.  How far does the school's authority reach if it can punish a student for something done outside of the school's sphere of influence? 

And really, why is this news?  So a bunch of teenagers have an attitude problem and exhibit poor judgement.  Isn't that sort of the definition of teenager?  This doesn't excuse them.  By all means, punish them, but for fuck's sake, why are these girls villified on the level of the columbine shooters (look at the language of the article and the fact that it was front-fucking-page news) when all they did was act like bratty teenagers?  And punish them for what they actually did wrong by those who actually have the authority in that scope.  Which means the school punishes them for breaking school rules and the parents punish them for breaking their own rules and the law punishes them for breaking legal rules.  So, the school should give them detention for talking back to the teachers, the parents should punish them for doing whatever it is the parents don't want them to do, and the law can cite them for underage drinking (although my sweetie doesn't like this one, since they weren't actually caught drinking, but a picture exists showing them "holding a bottle of booze").  And, damn it, don't waste my time with headline news telling me that teenagers are acting like teenagers, particularly when the way the story is told makes them out to be little Adolf Hitlers running around throwing people into furnaces.  They're bratty, they're not "menaces", and it's not the school's responsibility to punish them for off-campus behaviour.  This shouldn't even deserve the time and attention I put into the blog post about it, except it's a symptom of a larger problem, namely how our society handles issues of sex and children and responsibility.  But zen_shooter has more to say on that, so I'll let him.