Psychologically Soft??

While lounging around on my fainting sofa this afternoon, alternating between doses of smelling salts and laudanum, imagine my surprise when I was rather rudely interrupted by a blog post that suggests, “Girls are Psychologically Soft.”

You don’t say??? Also, peel me a grape will you, and hand me the chocolate bon bons?

Obviously this is a matter that requires some serious thought, as I am somewhat torn between a desire to promote that very beneficial idea of how women are possessed by psychological softness, versus a faint twinge of guilt that seems to suggest it is my duty to rid the world of all its foolish deceptions. Every last one.

Alas, a rabbit hole has appeared here on Easy Street, one that has left me contemplating the nature of Steel Magnolias versus what should perhaps be called “Iron Poppies.” To tell you the truth, I rather favor the humble nasturtium that springs forth from the cracks in a baked California freeway or in my darker moments…. the parasitic nature of an orchid feasting off a rotted log.

Oh, speak to me of fragile flowers wilting in the sunlight…

If I thought for one moment that girls being smaller, weaker, and psychologically softer, would somehow translate into the idea that life (and men) should show us even greater kindness and charity, you have no idea how often I would play the girl-card. Sadly, it is seldom true however. Something always seems to get lost in translation. In some odd quirk of human nature, “small, soft and weak” tends to just register as, “oh look, perfectly legitimate and morally acceptable…….prey.”

Don’t ask me to explain it, human behavior just is what it is, and as this blogger so clearly implied, “girls are psychologically soft,” therefore…..feel free to exploit the crap out of them. He’s a charming specimen, let me tell you, as in some people have a screw loose, but this one done lost two bolts and Teh Stupid has come spilling out.

I am torn between a desire to mercifully try to scoop it up before anyone sees it….and the urge to look away politely, like one might do when someone’s zipper is down. You may not be embarrassed. I however, am embarrassed for you.

In my most gracious and charitable state however, I realize that there may be two different worlds going on here, that perhaps my hysterical cackling over the very suggestion of psychologically mushy females has something to do with the fact that that is just so not my world. My fainting couch and laudanum are not real, nor has it ever been real for anyone in my family. We are far more likely to have been slopping for the lady of the house….or for the pigs.

Somewhere in the midst of dying in childbirth, child sexual abuse, dead babies, heroin addictions, run away men, and indentured servitude, the women in my family all seem to have gotten their “psychologically soft card” revoked, not unlike our credit cards often are today.

I used to think this was a bad thing, that I somehow got dealt the short end of the stick. I don’t anymore, it turns out this was the very inoculation we all needed and not unlike a vaccine, it seems to have steered off that terrible contagion called, Teh Stupid.

Only one suffering from a terminal case of Teh Stupid would be so unobservant as to even suggest that girls are psychologically soft, although if you should wish to hold that view for the purposes of treating us with extra gentleness and charity, that would be most lovely.

If not, at least make yourself useful, pass the bon bons and peel me a grape.