Are you so severe upon your own sex?

I was planning on writing a blog a few days ago rambling about how I've always been a "guys girl", preferring the company of guys to girls. I have found that I have more to talk about with guys, and they tend to have a sense of humour closer to my own. The fact that I rarely have to engage in conversations about clothes, nails, hair or "cuteness" of various objects and people is also a fairly big plus. The blog was then going to go on to say "BUT, this has changed lately". And I guess it has - I have found myself in the middle of girls who I have decent opinions of recently. I've always had plenty of respect for many women around me (women meaning females older than me), but in the past girls my own age just seemed to either frustrate me or annoy me or both. I thought this was changing - either my view of the world was changing, or the "girls" around me had changed a bit to be more thoughtful, less bitchy, less glitter-oriented.

Now I get to the "but" of this blog. This was how I felt, and it is still how I feel about several of the girls that I am acquainted with. But the majority are still letting the team down. The new "glitter/clothes/hair" conversation is now "engagement/wedding/babies". They have turned from readers of Dolly and Girlfriend into readers of Bride Monthly and the "How to Please Your Man" section of Cosmo without passing go or working for $200. There are rules about how much engagement rings have to cost, and they are all planning their own rings and wedding locations. In between the bloody wedding talk, they somehow manage to find time to yammer on about about how fantastic their own relationships are (immediately after the whinges about their partners), while trying to denigrate everyone else's relationships around them. Since when has negotiating life with your significant other become a competitive sport.

This is not just the trend with one group of friends, but a pattern I am sad to see emerging with several of the girls I know from different social groups. It is sad that there is no real kind of sisterhood, either professionally or socially, among girls. There is no room to team up and work together because we are all too busy tearing each other down (or tearing strips off each other, don't think I don't see the irony of me writing this post) to feel better about our insecurities about our own lives and relationships. The competitive drive to get married and have babies has hit at 25-26, and I can see people around me losing sight of their hopes and dreams to pursue a comfortable, miserable life with 2 kids and a $10,000 engagement ring. I am so disappointed in my own sex that I am angry.