There's Nothing Like A Girl...

Saturday night, Jeff and I went to an Australian Rules Football game. Had a great time.

Took the bus over and back. The neighborhood right next to ours is the party/bar district. The bus home was full of 'young people' -- 20-25 years old -- most of them girls. Most were decked out for a Saturday night drink/dance/hook-up marathon. Short skirts. Heaps of cleavage. Thick black eye makeup. Hair that took 1-2 hours to get it to look so artfully shaggy.

A lot of them had also gotten pre-tanked. One woman sitting next to us was guzzling a can of Smirnoff Ice (oooh, vodka in a can!). When she finished it, she very carefully smashed it down between the seats.

The sound on the bus was roughly similar to being locked in a hen house full of chickens...and one hungry fox. That volume, that pitch. The silence was almost deafening when they all got off at the same stop.

As the vodka-sucking woman next to me got ready to get off the bus, I asked her to hand me her can. She looked at me with shock and confusion. The impression I had was that she was so focused on her night ahead, she had filtered out anything that wasn't related to it. She had definitely filtered out the purple-haired middle-aged woman standing next to her; effectively, I didn't exist.

She just....gawped when I asked for the can. I had to ask twice and then explain that I was going to find a trash bin and throw it out for her. She finally dug out the can and handed it to me.

I posted something on Facebook about the experience and, sadly but not surprisingly, the first response was "jealous??". (sigh) That speaks volumes about my "friend". It also invites me to reflect on what it means to be female today.

Jealousy. The assumption, I presume, is that the poster figured they were all "cute" and perky and I, in my middle years, am not. The assumption, I presume, is that I would give my left arm to be 20-something-cute-n-perky again.

I'll admit I'd love to weigh 10 (or 30) kilos less. But what I really don't want to be again is 20-something.

Do you really remember being 20-something? High school and/or college may have been difficult but that was nothing compared to learning to live on your own income and sharing an apartment and trying to find a job and/or launching a career with no idea how it would turn out or what you'd really gotten yourself into.

I remember having to fit into a "grown up" workplace while secretly not being sure how to do that. Being hyper-conscious about whether I was being taken seriously and thinking at the same time that everyone was taking everything too seriously.

I remember never having enough money for all the things and experiences I was "supposed" to have when it seemed like everyone else had enough. I remember wracking up debt, not aware that so was everyone else.

I remember "adulthood" not being quite the freedom-fest I presumed it would be.

I also remember the intense pressure -- biologically and socially -- to mate, to find a partner, to secure the attention of men. I remember how much of my time and energy was sucked up in that vortex of looking and being looked at. Not sure what I was looking for (because that would have required me to have a pretty clear sense of who I was) but looking desperately nonetheless.

So a lot of energy -- way too freakin' much energy -- went in to "do I look right/hot/good enough"? Do I look better than her? Do I look like the ads/the TV? Am I attracting attention? Then not being entirely sure how to handle any attention I got!

I knew I wanted sex but I was unwilling and unable to admit that what I really wanted was intimacy, connection, relationship. I presumed sex would get me that. I had a lot -- a whole lot -- to learn about intimacy.

So, would I want to go back to being a 22-year-old? Hell no!

It's not easy being a woman and it's even harder to be a young woman. The simple truth is that our bodies are treated by your culture and mine as commodities. Our parts are used to buy and sell everything from toothpaste to trucks. Our breasts, our hair, our abdomens, our legs, our butts are all used to attract attention and convince the consumer -- men and women alike -- to part with their cash.

We receive dozens of messages a day about how our bodies are supposed to look -- the magazines in the 7-11 or the grocery store, billboards, TV ads, songs on the radio, newspaper ads and newspaper articles, internet ads and promotions -- it's everywhere. Virtually none of those messages have anything to do with the reality of being a female homo sapiens but everything to do with our bodies as selling devices.

Live up to the standards and we are admired and applauded. Fail to live up and we are chastised, "encouraged" -- strongly -- to change, or ignored.

It's hard enough to deal with that some days as a grown woman who has put a massive amount of time and attention into developing my own center, my own solid sense of self, my own strength, and a clear eye for the bullshit of the advertising world. How can a 20-something cope?

Many of them cope by becoming more like their peers, the boys. Their definition of "strength" is to be just as coarse, just as profane, just as callous and pseudo-hip as the average 20-year-old guy. With (some) apologies to guys, making a 20-year-old guy your role model is not a step up to me. I do know 20-year-old guys that I respect but, on the whole, I find most 20-year-old guys, ah......well......let's just say I'm looking forward to the day when they're no longer 20-year-old guys.

When I was 20-something, the profanity/coarseness/promisciuity did not seem to be so omnipresent. Maybe it's an evolution. I hope it is just a phase and we, as women, keep evolving. Wherever "there" is, we aren't "there" yet.