Days like today make me glad I'm a girl. One of the lead headlines on CNN.com is "Mom delivers 16th child, thinking of more." The love she has for her 16 blessings "from the Lord" almost inspires me to have one of my own. I just can't wait to get fat and crave things like pickles and ice cream. I am also looking forward to accomplishing a feat equivalent to pushing a watermelon through a keyhole.
Pregnancy, childbirth and radically imbalanced hormone-driven mood swings are amazing and wonderful life events that men will never be able to experience. Other than the minor, insignificant detail of having a uterus, what distances the girls from the boys?
While sitting in the computer lab at Clark, I decided to use an informal survey to draw extreme and somewhat misleading conclusions about gender differences. Currently, there are 20 people in the lab, 10 girls and 10 boys. All of the boys are wearing either a T-shirt or shorts. Clearly, boys have a genetic predisposition that protects them from the perils of winter weather. Perhaps their hearts work twice as fast at keeping the body warm, or perhaps their brains work twice as slow at reacting to the cold. The data resulting from my survey only proved Lawrence Summers's (President of Harvard) claim that there are differences between girls and boys, and that girls can't help that they suck at things involving numbers: computers, math, physics, paying the bills, etc. After careful brainstorming, I came up with a "number" (That'll show you, Mr. President of Har-TURD) of advantages to being a girl. Besides being able to recognize cold weather and being able to pop out a baby.
1. I have a "Get out of Jail" free card. Women have something called "estrogen" that causes certain things to happen during certain times of the month. As such, I am automatically excused from homework, papers, tests, exercise, and having to follow the law. No police officer will arrest me if I wave a tampon at them. It's almost like a cotton light saber.
2. Science has proven that females have less upper body strength than males. This means great things for me. If I can do a push-up, I'm pretty much in the top 99% of the strongest women in Virginia. At the same time, if my friend's car ever broke down in an intersection and she needed someone to push it up a hill so a UTS bus wouldn't hit it, I can just tell her that it's physically impossible. Silly rabbit, work is for boys.
3. I get to spend college focusing on my looks. Boys are judged on what they major in (Aerospace Engineering: Trekkie; Commerce: Sigma Chi; Spanish: Exotic and erotic) and the classes they take. Girls, like myself, are judged on what we wear to class. Please, who wants a B.S. when you can get an M.R.S.?
4. In the male hierarchy of status, the toughest makes it to the top. The alpha male, like in the animal kingdom, is the best fighter. In the female hierarchy, it's a battle of wits. Like in "Mean Girls," we fight without physically harming one another and hurting our chances of finding a husband. Instead, we choose to notify the public of other girls. "Oh my God, did you hear? She never uses soap. She just splashes a little hot water on herself." Punching is so fetch.
5. It is absolutely acceptable for women to travel in a pack with their friends. Men can't do that unless they're at the "Boys, Bondage and Booze" club. I will always have someone to talk to, even in the bathroom. Especially in the bathroom. You can say anything and no one will judge you. I once told someone, "Girl, that dress is so ugly," to which she responded, "It may be ugly, but you're fat and I can always change." I smiled and told her it was muscle and that I could do a push-up, which was 1,000 times more than what she could do. She congratulated me and we hugged and now we're totally BFF.
In conclusion, I think I've proven my point. I don't have to be good at numbers to succeed in life, Lawrence Summers. Joke's on you.
Winnie's column runs biweekly on Thursdays. She can be reached at winnie@cavalierdaily.com.
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