As part of my post-a-day campaign, and because I'm copying Jo, I joined up with NaBloPoMo. I dug back through and found a lot of prompts that I thought were interesting, but this one jumped out at me.
Two teenage girls are slugging it out in a parking lot. What do you do?
What do I do? I tell you what I do, and what I'd tell anyone else to do as well. Call the cops, and stand very far away. Why, you ask? Because there's nothing more vicious than a teenage girl in a fight. With boys, it's all dominance displays, chest bumping, trying to get the other one to back down. Girls, on the other hand, just f$%king go at it. Fists and feet fly. Heads get pounded into the street. That old stereotype about slapfighting and barely touching each other is wrong. That's how sissies fight. Girls actually do a lot of damage.
When I was seventeen, I was mugged on my high school campus. By a girl. Yeah, she was a lot bigger than I was, and there were a couple of guys with her, but she was the leader, and she did all the work. The police found my purse and my license under a trash bin in the park a year later, but for those dozen months I was sure she was carrying it around, about to come find me if she got bored. "I'm gonna GET you, bitch," she'd snarled in my ear. Terrifying.
A couple of years later, I was home visiting from college and stopped in to see some of my teachers. My chemistry teacher came into the teachers' lounge, and I saw that he had an eye patch. He'd tried to break up a girl fight in the halls, and one of the girls knifed him in the eye. He lost an eye, readers! He tried to break up a fight between two teenage girls, and now he's half-blind.
The question gets more interesting the more I think about it. Here's a followup question. Two teenage BOYS are slugging it out in a parking lot. What do you do? Ask the question of women you know, then ask the men. See if their responses are any different. See if chivalry plays a role. I'd bet that most of the men will say to break up the girls and let the boys keep fighting. If a man gives you that response, reach over without warning and box the man in the ear and say, "Stop underestimating girls. They'll f$%k you up."
I'd call the cops, regardless of who is slugging it out. It's not OK to hit other people.
ReplyDeleteThe thing I find interesting about girls fighting, though... I think it's a problem how girls are socialized nowadays. Look at magazines, movies, etc. -- girls often don't have friends, they have "frenemies" -- and if they do have friends (defined by the media as girls with whom a girl goes shopping or talks about boys) those friends are likely to turn into bitter enemies the second a cute boy shows up. Oh, and in the movies/on TV, girls fight over boys all the time, because hey, having a boyfriend is incredibly important. No wonder we live in a world of girl fights, frenemies, mean girls, etc.
I'm with Batty - I think I would call the cops, regardless of the gender (especially if these were teenagers or older). There have been some scary stories of fights between girls in Philly.
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