Girl Bias

My best friend is a gay man. And I tell him all the time he has a girl bias. He thinks anything a woman does is fantastic. He loves women. If he comes to really love a friend who is a man, I think it surprises him—he finds it almost exotic. And deep down, he’d probably like them better if they were women. A woman can be a sociopathic bitch and he’ll find the part of her that’s actually a kick ass bitch, you know? He allows women to do and say things he’d never tolerate in a man. If the woman does it with style and looks fierce, then forget about it. Some famous women can do no wrong, like Janet and we all know Janet’s done Plenty. Wrong.

Or most recently, he and I are having a vicious disagreement about the merits and gifts of Fergie from the B.E.P. He’ll throw shit out like “but she used to be a meth addict” like it’s points for Fergie. I’ll say shit like “VIP Cause you know I gotta shine, I’m fergie ferg and me love you long time” back as counterpoint. That song is wack dude, and you have a girl bias.

One of his favorite movies of all time is not the movie so much as the performance of Isabelle Huppert in La Pianiste. There is a real endless depth to how much you love women when you love that. Girl bias, big time. I’m not mad at it insofar as it serves me, but I gotta call a spade a girlophile.

I tend to have a boy bias that works exactly the opposite. I even have boy envy. Thank god I had a son—now he can be my idol and I don’t have to apologize. I too sit and worship at the altar of the failed male ego, and consider every flaw to be just a crooked embellishment in a beautifully disorderly soul. Sean Penn’s wife merely hints that life with him may be terribly complicated, and I envy her. Then I worship Sean, but I also often wish I were Sean. “Wish I was born a boy” I say, as cure to all my ills. And in full on borderline retarded heterosexist mode I elaborate: I would be callous and detached, I would have a truncated emotional vocabulary, I would have no fear of running away from people and things, I would fuck up often but always think I was the bomb. I would have vices that women would swoon over and a really dope metabolism that would allow me to get a hot body from just doing push ups. I would always excell because expectations of me would be terribly low—and if I failed and bit my bottom lip like Bill Clinton does, I would be forgiven instantly. I consider all that shit to be simple, cleaner, easier, lighter on your feet. With women it’s all complicated, messy, harder and heavy on your shoulders; I wish I was born a boy, I say.

In my current state of disarray though, the womaness of me is very acute. It is part of what feels alienating and foreign, to a degree; I generally feel like less than a woman, like I don’t quite have the attributes (which probably is why I have the envy/bias, ‘cause I think I’d make a better man than the woman I make). I can’t really explain why, though I can speculate--but I have needed to hear from the women in my life and I have gone to them knowing they would know what to say and to the last one, they have come through with shining colors. About this business of him having a girlfriend, they have had this exact concoction of one part empathy, half a part sobriety, two parts witness on my behalf, and one last half part outrage. They’ve had the right looks, the right tone when they’ve left voice-mails, the right words when they’ve written e-mails. They’ve said watershed day-breaking type things without much thought, they’ve had insight and clarity and a profound understanding of who I am and what this is like for me. And my gay man best friend has had insights as well, of course, but foremost among them I would venture is that I would need to hear from my women-friends.

Oh you know, someone told me that when you’re grieving things get opened that were otherwise closed. One way to say this is that you get teary eyed and sentimental over nothing. Another way is that your standard filters that decide what you’re going to buy and what you’re going to call bullshit are down, because your whole system is down. It’s like emotional imunedeficiency and you are suddenly much more susceptible to invasions by emotions and signs you would generally be immune to. In this case, I am susceptible to regaining an almost romantic sense of my place among my women friends, irrespective of how often I see them on a daily and how complicated my relationships with them may have been. Some contaminants are good contaminants. Right now as I am hyper-aware generally, I am hyper-aware of the extensive quality and variety of great women friends that I have and that love me and that get me.

At work too I have been embraced by a community of mothers, who actually don’t all know the drama ensuing—they just know what it’s like to be a mother and to be a mother on your own. And to be a young mother. And it’s the same sort of capacity for just delivering to me what I need, without much to say about it, with a subtlety but directness of purpose that almost makes your breath stop—because there is no way that you are alone in the world if someone knows exactly what you need when you need it. The feeling of what is getting passed to me is the information and resources that they have paid a price to get—their veteran insights, the problem solving solutions they have honed. And what goes unsaid is that we know that the sole purpose of adversity has been so we’d have a way to make it easier for the next one. In this case, I’m the next one. It just connects.

One of my great girlfriends said to me yesterday, you should pay attention to how people who are not assholes treat you and how also men who are not assholes treat their women. You should observe that so you can understand that it is very real. And it’s not hard to come by and not amazing and not out of the ordinary. It is what it is, it is what considerate people who care about each other do.

Below, some excerpts of some shit that illustrates what I mean. Out of context, some of it reads as harsh but none of it was out of context. All of it gave context where there was none before.

From my friend N, a voicemail:
I know you said not to call so sorry to call. I don’t need any details I just wanted to say three things:

1. what the fuck?!
2. totally understandable reaction on your part
3. what the fuck?!
And one more thing: sometimes I like when life makes decisions “for me” cause that makes it easier.

From my friend S, via e-mail:
There is a large possibility that he will never change and never get his shit together in life which you know. That means that you would never ever be happy with him, despite how much you love each other, and your life if he were really in it full time would always be
one of emotional distress and frustration. Therefore weighing the 2 types
of emotional distress: him in your life as partner vs. him having
a new girl in his life, the second is better, as eventually, no matter how shitty it feels in the moment, you will get past it. Having him as your partner, is a situation that can never be worked out smoothly, unless he changes, which he has shown himself incapable of up till
now. Getting used to the idea that the status quo is changing is something you can work out, and getting used to shitty changes, you have proved yourself an expert in over your life.

From my friend A, live phonecall:
You don’t have to say anything; I’m not gonna grill you. I just wanted to tell you that I’m going to be in town around October 7 and will see you. And maybe you can come back with us (for the weekend). And that I love you.

From my other friend A, phonecall:
You need to make a list of all the fucked up things he did to you over the seven years. Because when it hurts and you get confused and start thinking you lost something that was good enough or someone that treated you like you deserve to be treated, you need to look at that list for perspective.

From my friend A, who is in Africa:
You have to know you got the best part of him, the part that wanted to be a better person and the part that made your son. This part of him is the bad part, that is resigned to fail himself and fail everybody else and you don’t want this part.

From my friend K, the most critical aspect was that she visited me on the night I found out, with wine and weed and slept over. She told me that she remembered the time when her relationship was horrible but the feeling, the love was so unparalleled in her life, she felt she should and would take all the blows that came with keeping that feeling, mostly because she was terrified she would never have that again if she lost it. Today she has a good relationship with the same man but she said now they both understand that he could mess up enough to make her leave and if she did, she would never fear he had been the best she could get. And she said all that very casually and very easy. And we know she didn’t come to that conclusion very easily.

And she also said something like “You can’t get depressed and start eating and getting nasty and feeling ugly. And when you’re in the gym you’re not dwelling inside your own head. It’s important that you feel hot right now” Actually, now that I think about it, that was part of ALL my girlfriends’ responses. I think I totally have a girl bias now.