Enough with the Girl Talk

Julie Burchill has had it with women. She has had it with girl talk and with whiny expressions of deep emotions. She prefers the company of men. You know, toxic men, the variety we are all supposed to be rejecting, like one Donald Trump or our supposed autocratic enemies.

Dare we mention that more and more schools across America are teaching boys that there is something radically wrong with them for being boys.

Manliness has gotten a bad name. True enough, Jerry Seinfeld misses the old fashioned manliness, but the new model for a good relationship does not involve anything manly. It feels a lot closer to what occurs among girls. None dare call it a coven.

After all, in the new therapeutically correct description of a good relationship, we find a surfeit of girl talk and deep feelings. Our culture is being girlified at a rapid clip, so it feels right to quote Burchill, to the effect that relationships between women leave a great deal to be desired. I yield to her expertise in the field.

And they do so even for a woman like Burchill, who has considerable feminist sympathies. 

She writes:

I’m an utter rad-fem and completely accept that men do most of the damage in this world. I’ve made my own living since I was 17 and never sought a man to support me.

Yet I’ve been married – three times – since I was 18; I’m 64 now and I’ve never been single. As a child, I never dreamt of being a bride or a wife – rather, of being a divorcee – so I can only conclude that I have the marrying habit for the simple reason that it means I always have a male best mate on tap.

What does she like about men? Glad you asked:

What is it about the company of men I prefer? I like the way they have reserved friendships, so far from the exhaustingly emotional ones women go in for. I once said to my third husband: “If Sam had a drink with Alex and they didn’t invite you, would you be hurt?” He looked at me as if I was insane!

And you recall the current mania requires us to preface any discussion of women with the phrase, strong, empowered. It is obviously a vapid piece of nonsense, but still women do it. And they think it is meaningful. Some feminists even think that it makes them stronger and more empowered:

Men don’t give each other mindless pep talks; over the past two decades too many broads have strode around announcing that they are “strong women”, automatically winning a round of applause and shouts of “You go, girl!” from their friends.

If a man announced that he was a “strong man”, his mates would want to see him prove it by pulling a tractor along with his teeth.

Men are less inclined to see all of their relationships in terms of therapy. They do not psycho analyze their everyday interactions, measuring the emotional valence. They do not tell you to get in touch with your feelings or to pour them out all over the kitchen table:

Any man who went around obsessing over the minutiae of daily interaction with his peer group, the way some women do, would immediately be identified by his mates as a raving nutter and exiled forthwith. When a man wants to relax, he will slob out. Or he will pursue a hobby – anything from building models to watching sport.

When men get together they form teams. They put on uniforms, follow rules and compete. Women who get together to form groups with other women rarely have the same purposeful connection:

I don’t mind women from a distance, or one on one (having said that, my least satisfactory romantic relationship was with a woman – all those feelings!) but there’s something about most women in groups (unless they’re high-spirited hen parties, which are appealingly loud and “male”) that give me the “ick”, as the Love Islanders say.

When I first heard about the phenomenon of “menstrual synchrony”, I felt something like revulsion.

Lest you jump to the wrong conclusion, Burchill strongly opposes the presence of men in the women’s locker room. She opposes allowing male beings to compete in women’s sports.

Despite this, I’m a great supporter of single-sex spaces. I fully believe that women have a right to gather together without men shoving their way in, be it in book clubs or on lesbian dating sites. Just don’t invite me, that’s all.

Now if only female athletes would begin to boycott events where they are being forced to compete against males, they would really be strong and empowered. As for the presence of males in female locker rooms, why not film the males and put the pictures up on Pornhub.

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