Reason #20

On Wednesdays we wear pink.

Substack, my old friend, you have been busy!

Over the last few months, I’ve found myself drifting away from scrolling social media (Dear Blue Handle Publishing, I swear I’ll get back to marketing marketing marketing soon!!) and spend free moments during my day reading one incredible Substack article after another. Can you blame me? With the nuttiness in the US right now, this has become a joyful respite from agenda driven news outlets and angry angry Instagram, Facebook, and X. My hats off to the freelance journalists here that have been able to write eloquently about the pros and cons of all current government matters on both sides of the fence. And they can laugh about it all, too. (Sorry PC police, you are not welcome in this space)

That’s my plug for The Free Press! Sign up and read away! But be forewarned…no one is sacred, no one is immune. They are brutally honest and FACTUAL. Just as G*d intended journalists to be!

Now for another shameless plug…MINE!

If you’ve been following Why I’m Not Writing from the get go, you know that Substack became my unedited playground while I worked through some shitty writers block. It worked! And when I needed a break from a project…it worked again. And again. And again! Today’s Substack (unedited as always!) is being written during a little three week “summer break” I’ve granted myself because Butterfly Pinned is OFFICIALLY out of my hands, fully edited…then pulled back again for rewrites because of excellent advice from new friends, Kim and Christine, at a Chanticleer Review conference…then re-edited after that…then pulled back again for rewrites because of some more excellent feedback from my friends and beta readers Jenilee, Hilary and Kasey…then re-edited again…and is now finally being formatted by my editor and will hit the shelves May of ‘25!!

(Don’t worry about marking your calendars.I’ll be reminding you.)

(A lot.)

While I won’t discuss the book in its entirety, I will talk about one of the main themes: female friendships. (Disclaimer: it morphed into an entirely different monster during the years since its inception, growing from a form of literary social commentary into a dark dark psychological thriller, so please don’t take this post as plot giveaway. Thank you Danielle Egan-Miller!!) The idea that sunk its claws into my brain and wouldn’t let go is how different male/male friendships are from female/female friendships. Girls have no problem saying “I love you” right to our friend’s face. We don’t think anything of holding each other’s hands. We hug. We kiss. We splay our hearts open and ask our friends to dissect and examine. And while you might find a man here or there that’s physically gregarious and, at moments, unnervingly tender, in most cases, it’s a fist bump and “Yo, bro.”

We women are wired differently. We’re nurturers. We’re gatherers. We’re peacemakers. We’re sugar and spice and everything nice.

Know what else we can be?

Stone cold bitches.

Go ahead…gasp and clutch your pearls but stick with me on this one. While on the surface it sounds like a diss…and let’s be honest, certain aspects (lots of aspects) of our misogynistic society have molded this view…I mean it as a compliment. I embrace it. I encourage it. Before I start receiving the hate mail, (ummm…Free Press, got my back?!?!) let me explain.

I have a theory. (And it’s JUST a theory…no science to back me up, no musings from scholars, just me and my constantly wandering noggin.) At the end of the day, despite our prefrontal lobe and working thumbs, we are animals. *cue Circle of Life* We have evolved over time but we still hold on to many of our ancestor’s survival tactics such as our fight/flight response, the moments when your subconscious senses take over and hair stands up on your neck, “gut” feelings, etc, etc. I personally believe that’s why you can see such a huge difference early on between little boys and girls. I’m not talking about boys playing with toy trucks and girls playing with dolls. I’m talking about boys HITTING you with toy trucks. Men are physically built to fight. Much more so than women. They are bigger, they are stronger. (Leslie, do not go down the road of men in women’s athletics, do not go down the road of men in women’s athletics, do NOT go down the road…breathe, breathe, breathe) Men are physically built to battle. Women are physically built to carry offspring.

If I’m speaking in animal kingdom terms, that means the male species is wired to go out and physically protect, fighting with their bodies, while women need to PROTECT that vessel that allows the human race to carry forth. Which means, no punchy punchy. But we still needed a survival skill. So, what did women bring to the table for protection? Calculating mental prowess.

There are countless women I could point to in history that demonstrate a cunning mind can work as powerfully as brute force. (And in as many instances they used that cunning to have men do the actual fighting for them…see? SMART!) Cleopatra VII, Princess Theodora, Catherine the Great, Elizabeth I, Margaret Ann Buckley, Irene Sandler…the list goes on and on. But you don’t have to look any further than your local middle school or high school to see females honing their mental survival skills.

Yes, I’m talking about Mean Girls. As young girls, we’re taught to be sweet. We’re taught to be pliable. We’re supposed to be “pleasers’. And that right there is why Mean Girls are almost untouchable. Because as nice girls, we aren’t supposed to bite back when bitten. For anyone not jiving with the meaning of Mean Girl (if you haven’t seen the brilliant movie Mean Girls by Tina Fey or read the even more brilliant book the movie was based on, Queen Bees and Wannabes by Rosalind Wiseman…please stop reading this now and go read the book and see the movie!) it boils down to a girl who has discovered she is intelligent, strong, and opinionated…and decides to use this gift to her advantage. By manipulation. This is where the animal instinct comes in. As the “breeder” of the species, women tend to look for quality over quantity. (Guys have a gazillion sperm ~ throw those little swimmers around like confetti!!) So, how is one to ensure she earns the prized quality dude? She must shove all other competitors below her, smoosh their faces in the mud, and offer herself up on a silver platter for that high school quarterback. (by the way, have any of you older folks gone to see what the old quarterback is up to? Not always the prettiest sight…give me a late bloomer who didn’t peak at 18 any day of the week!)

Vilify this all you want, feminists, but facts are facts. That’s how adolescence works. I have both boys and girl, I’ve seen it in action. Boys duke it out and ten minutes later they’re playing XBox together and passing around a bag of Doritos like nothing happened. But girls? Girls hunt to emotionally kill. You’d be hard pressed to find an adult woman who doesn’t have some sort of emotional scar left by another girl who was out for annihilate. Do you shy away from wearing the color red because you think it brings out the blotchiness in your skin? A girl in 6th grade probably told you that. And she probably said it in a VERY sweet and innocent tone, so all you could do was wonder why you were cursed to be born a girl the ugliest skin known to man since the dawn of history. Meanwhile, she’s pointing out this flaw to every other girl in the school just to make sure her dagger didn’t miss your tender preteen heart. We’ve all had those swift and painful verbal right hooks knock us between the eyes. I had a horrific bout with a Mean Girl (several Mean Girls if I’m more specific) when I was in 8th grade.

And it’s all outlined in my new book!! (SHAMELESS PLUG #2) It’s fictionalized, of course, but BARELY. These girls went for the jugular. And it worked! I went from carelessly bebopping through life, listening to I Wanna Dance with Somebody, to hiding under a hoodie at home or in the theater, wishing a tsunami would hit North Kansas City and sweep me underwater and lodge me under a rock. After years and years of therapy (not just because of this one excruciating experience…I had a whole Rubik’s Cube floating around in me to sort out) and also after exorcising my Mean Girl tormentors on paper (DID I MENTION MY NEW BOOK COMES OUT IN MAY?!), I can look back and think quite calmly, “Hmmm, girls be bitches.”

Sadly, it doesn’t stop with high school. Maybe you survived those already angsty teen years unscathed to find yourself at the receiving end of a Mean Girl in the workplace, Junior League, or spin class. We get belittled by a coworker in front of the boss. We get called out in front of the whole yoga studio for letting our tummies sag AGAIN. Marsha doesn’t like the type of chocolate chips you used for the class cookies because they’re not organic or fair trade and you should be ashamed of yourself for not being more socially aware of the world you’re bringing your child up in. It feels mean, it feels attacking, it feels uncalled for. But really, it’s just survival of the fittest.

I was lucky enough to grow up in a VERY strong matriarchal family. My great grandmother, my grandmother, my mother…they were all iron willed, intelligent, creative (cunning) women who taught me to go after any dream I could dream up. Maybe to a fault. The other day, Hubs said, “If your own mother couldn’t tame you, I guess I can’t either.” To which I replied, “Why would you want to?” He looked at me with his huge, well-known, shit eating grin, “I DON’T want to!” Nice save there, Bubba. I’m happy to report Hubs is still alive.

There’s been a movement the last few years that, I won’t lie, grates on my nerves more than just a little. It’s the Yas Queen, Boss Bitch movement…it’s even more aggravating than when women are conspiring against each other. At least with a Mean Girl, like it or not, a natural learning phenomenon occurs. You get the target put on your back (aka bullied) and you grow stronger…even when you don’t know you are. You start growing thick skin. (Which we need MUCH more of these days!) You learn that words really do NOT kill you. Instead, you learn the POWER of words. This Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants Towards Every Woman on the Planet thing is WEIRD to me. I mean, what does it even mean? Does that mean all women everywhere on this planet are intelligent, witty, logical, creative, focused, driven, graceful, forceful, intuitive, etc, etc…? That’s just stupid. Because, no. No one group of people is EVERYTHING, ALL THE TIME! We’re all human beings. We’re all individuals. Even my sister and I who came from the same womb are as different as two could be. She is the Mother Teresa to…well, as my mother has put it in the past…my pit bull persona. (The dog, not the singer) (Also, I take it as a compliment)

When I say the “Slay Girl!”culture is like nails on a chalkboard, it’s the umbrella use of the term and the intention…isn’t it kind of hypocritical? I am a feminist. (In that, if I choose to be a stay at home mom, great. If I choose to devote all my time to work I’m passionate about, great. Children? Wonderful! A house full of cats instead of diapers? Wonderful! BUT I GET TO CHOOSE.) I understand the immense struggle women have had to be where we are. To vote. For fair pay. For EQUAL pay. And I understand there are still many high mountains to climb. But while we’re pushing for “equality” (more on that in a minute) aren’t we eliminating our chances to soar by saying “You are the Boss Bitch! And YOU are the Boss Bitch! And you! And YOU!” ? If we’re all Boss Bitches…then who has really made it to the top? And striving for the top…the pursuit of excellence…THERE is where the equality conundrum lies.

I believe in equal opportunity, not equal outcome.

I don’t want to live in a world (or country, hint hint) where there is no room to push yourself to be excellent. I don’t want a student who works hard enough to earn an A to have to get a C to make up for the students who will only get F’s. (We’ve all heard this analogy at this point)

I wasn’t initially going to talk about politics here (being that you can NOT get away from it all right now)…but it’s actually relevant to this topic.

I’ve been inundated, as of late, with a push for VP Harris, not because of her political views or policies (does she have any??? Maybe one day when she actually answers an interview question we’ll know), not because of her record (*crickets*), and not because of her popularity in her own party (remember, she didn’t even make it to Iowa in 2020)(and now she’s the anointed one? WTF?)…but because she’s a woman. To me, this is beyond degrading. The equivalent to a pity vote. How about backing a candidate because she or he is the BEST PERSON FOR THE JOB?? This is not Mean Girl talk, this is being a realist.

Equal opportunity, not equal outcome.

Please don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying women should scratch each others eyes out and deny the OTHER instinctual side of our selves…which is to be kind. Women raising up women ALSO goes back to our survival. Strong women make a strong village. I am highly aware of how blessed I am to have the mind blowingly stupendous women around me that I do. They are my tribe. We are there to cheer for each other in times of joy and, more importantly, we are there to console each other in the depths of despair. We nurture each others’ endeavors and aren’t afraid to KINDLY call each other out if we witness actions or emotions going astray. THAT type of sisterhood isn’t only a gift, it’s VITAL. The women who are strong enough to stand when you can’t, that can be there for one another and help each other maneuver through the world, are the ones who have learned from being the victim of Mean Girlness (or were one themselves in their previous life) and have honed and fine tuned those cunning cat-like skills for the GOOD of female-kind.

This is why I embrace the fact that I do have a Mean Girl in me. And I’m grateful for the knowledge that, with age and wisdom, I know I don’t have to use it for evil but it still serves a purpose and I need to hold onto it. It’s what keeps me from being a shrinking violet. It’s what gives me the confidence to go after the goals I set in life. It’s what allows me to go deep with MYSELF and to be honest with what I find. It’s what keeps me unafraid. I want my daughter to embrace the Mean Girl power that she also contains within her. I want her to know her agency is hers and hers alone… and that is is powerful. Mean Girlness, when harnessed for positivity, is about being firm in your beliefs but intelligent enough to listen and consider other views. It’s about thinking outside of the box even when it’s uncomfortable. It’s about pushing back when you need to and being smart enough to give a little when you know it will resolve an issue. It’s about having your own individual wants and needs and not being apologetic about them. And don’t we all function better as a whole society when we bring our most fulfilled self forward?

Lastly…I want to thank everyone who reached out this last week after our darling cat, Little Girl, passed away. (aka lost a fight with a fox) She was a love. She would drink coffee out of my mug every morning and then proceed to attack the dogs playfully for an hour after. (Catnip has nothing on caffeine!) She would take daily walks through the woods with me. She was intelligent. She was a hunter. She was fierce. She was a force. And she was an absolute joy to have in our lives. All this to say…

Little Girl was one badass bitch.