My friend Gina Barreca is one smart and funny woman. She is an English professor at the University of Connecticut and a feminist scholar who has written eight books, including They Used to Call Me Snow White, But Then I Drifted. A columnist at the Hartford Courant, she is also editor of Make Mine a Double (Why Women Like Us Like to Drink), an anthology that features an essay by moi.
Today she has a column about female friendship that I thought was especially interesting. She ponders why women are so eager to share bad news with their friends but less likely to gush. In it she writes:
“Women expect our best friends to be there in times of misery. We want to be able to contact our friends 24 hours a day, as if they were the fire department or QVC.
“We expect our pals to soothe, comfort and heal; basically, good friends are Neosporin for the soul.
“They’ll respond when we break up with somebody, when a kid asks for bail or when a beloved pet dies. They don’t shrug it off, tsk-tsk, or say they’ll ring back later. They show up with wine, cash or a shovel.
“So why is it that we don’t always trust our best friends with good news? Why is it often harder to announce, “I got a fabulous raise!” than it is to confess, “I took a cut in pay!”
“Why is it that women lead conversations, even (or perhaps especially) with those closest to us by rattling off our current insecurities and vulnerabilities?
“If you want to get into argument with a woman, just tell her she looks good, because she’s going to explain to you for the next 45 minutes why you’re wrong. She will contradict you if you give a compliment. She might actually punch you in the jaw if you say something genuinely flattering about one of her achievements.”