"What a cool eye you are, Melly. Now go back to bed, you'll be dead if you don't."*

        Well, I’m pretty much moved in. I got up to some projects the other night (namely finishing one more chair and finding places for my books that don’t involve drilling holes in the wall…yet). And since, as I’ve brought up time and again, I don’t have cable, I decided to watch a movie. Or twelve. But mostly I watched Gone With the Wind, and scraped and moved and recited lines and cried a little bit (just at the end, you understand).

        Gone With the Wind isn’t something I have the time or inclination to get into in detail: most everyone knows the story, and it’s widely considered one of the best movies ever made. I hope to god they don’t try to remake it, because that just seems fiddle-dee-frickin’ dumb. It’s “practically perfect in every way”, and I know what I’m talking about because I read the book just about every year. So there. 

Melly stands by Scarlett, even though Scarlett is a bit of a whore.

        What I do want to talk about is how it recognizes the power of female friendships, and it recognizes them in a funnily truthful way and not in a heinous, catty bitch way (though there’s a bit of that, too). Scarlett and Melanie aren’t a couple of besties who braid each other’s hair and ask each other questions about penises and where babies come from.

        These bitches help each other give birth, watch each other bury loved ones (hell, they help dig the dirt), work their butts off to keep their families alive, kill a few Union soldiers, and assist each other in getting their asses through the Reconstruction without starving to death or getting murdered by Dirty Yankees.

        That ain’t no slumber party. That’s some real female friendship, and I salute it.

        This story teaches us a lesson about the strength of women and the female bond: it’s not all periods and not getting to vote. Gone With the Wind is an epic example of how our best lady friends keep us honest, watch our backs, and try to keep us out of trouble.

        Of course, it wouldn’t be a movie about women without some dudes thrown in to toy with their hormonal fluctuations, but I think Ashley is a big, whiney butthole of a man, and I’m kind of disappointed anyone is interested in him. The movie makes it a bit worse than the book because they cast Leslie-friggin-Howard as Ashley. So Ashley, the “great man of the south”, mysteriously has an English accent despite being raised on a farm in Georgia. But oh well, we can’t have everything. If I were casting that movie, I think I would have picked Errol Flynn. He and Olivia De Havilland were always sexy together. Of course, he was Australian, so there would still have been a bit of an accent. (Why was Vivien Leigh perfectly capable of doing a southern accent and no one else was? She was bloody English as well!) Okay, maybe I’d cast Jimmy Stewart. That would have been hilarious!

        Moving on.

        I don’t like it when movies focus on women hating each other and being nasty assholes to one another. All of my women friends are incredibly powerful, articulate broads who have no insecurities about other dames, no territorial dog-sniffing-dog’s butt attitudes about other ladies. Those women exist, for sure. But they aren’t worth bothering about. This movie celebrates both the good and the bad in female friendships and comes out in favor of women supporting and loving one another. Excellent.

Scarlett realizes that Melly is the best relationship of her life.

        And to all my women friends: I love you so much, and none of you has to die before I figure that out (perhaps a shortcoming in Melly and Scarlett’s friendship).

*Scarlett to Melly, when a bed-ridden Melly attempts to help Scarlett kill a Yankee soldier. (Gone With the Wind, Victor Fleming, 1939.)

"It is sooooo drafty! They much be catching cold all the time!"*

Tony and Jack as Josephine and Daphne.

            No offense to men (because I love men) but goddamn you, men!

            I’m not really mad at men, just mind-numbingly jealous.

            I talked at length to my mom tonight, who later told me that she’d been lying in her bed for the duration of our conversation because she was having a hot flash. What?

            “You’ve been out of menopause for years!” I seethed, angry with god or the universe or “the big bang” or evolution or whoever created the uterus and those pesky ovaries. I was just plain angry that my mom still has to put up with these kinds of blatant shenanigans.

            “Yeah, but my mom tells me it never really goes away.” She said, referring to my grandma. She seemed like she was okay with it.

            I’m really not okay with it.

            Despite musicals like Bye, Bye Birdie and Flower Drum Song, it’s not always so lovely to be a woman and I do not always enjoy being a girl.

            Yeah, sure, make-up is fun, and pretty hair is fun and even childbirth is fun (yeah, I’m sure squeezing a watermelon through a kiwi-sized hole is a really delightful adventure!). But seriously, guys have it better.

            Let’s do a little comparison:

Bad Things Associated With Being A Man

1.     Wet dreams in adolescence

2.     Erections at weird times (especially, but not exclusively, to be fair, during adolescence)

3.     Always pants or shorts, and if you wear a skirt: ridicule!

4.     No nail polish unless you’re punk, and if you’re not punk: ridicule!

5.     Debates about circumcision (though it seems that if you’re raised as a man, you are automatically confident and therefore whatever your penis has going on is the “preferred thing” if only in your mind.)

6.     Hair: shaved or beard or some variation in between (e.g. goatee, mustache or fu manchu)? On head: long or short?

7.     Judged on: height, penis size, how much hair is on head.

Bad Things Associated With Being A Woman

1.     Periods, cramps, associated embarrassment in adolescence

2.     Periods at weird times and hormones associated with that nonsense (and let’s not forget the associated expense that goes along with those things: pads, tampons, laundry detergent, new underwear, etc. I should have invested in Tampax years ago: just like death, tampons are a business that keeps on booming.)

3.     Pants, shorts, or skirts, but if you wear a skirt you better look “sexy” in it and it better not be too short because then you’re a “slut” but if it’s too long, then you’re a nun, so you better spend 5-10 years figuring out what the proper length of skirt is and how much you should be wearing underneath it (underwear, tights, shorts, leggings, and (just to be safe) a pair of pants?)

4.     Nail polish required, unless you go to Catholic school and it’s deemed inappropriate and you’re left questioning what “appropriate” even means and why your nails factor into the equation in the first place.

5.     Hair: shaved from armpits, legs, face (in some cases), stomach and nether-regions? Some variation in between? On head: long or short? Blonde, brunette, black, redhead? Curly, strait, wavy, relaxed, extensions, blow-out or shaved?

6.     Judged on: height, weight, breast size, hip size, stomach size, arm size, hand size, smell, hair (presence and lack thereof), lips, skin, how bad those periods might be, etc…

7.     Uterus: this thing can get pregnant if a man puts sperm in it (I’m sure it works something like that). Therefore, the need to keep this thing from getting pregnant (or go to agonizing lengths trying to make it be pregnant) is another huge expense. An expense that falls largely in the woman's lap, if I may say so (and I did say so, so deal with it).

8. The fact that even after you've passed through the years of heinous period cramps (and the expenses associated with them), after the years when you could still viably conceive and carry a child, you still have to deal with NONSTOP BULLSHIT! Hot flashes and hormonal fluctuations and weird hair growing in never-before-known places (not talking about my mom with the hair, so we're clear)! It's fucked up!

            Okay, so like I said, men just have an easier life. They make more money for doing the same jobs that women do, they are better at “managing their feelings” (i.e. they never have to discuss anything if they don't want to and that's okay with society and, apparently, with women) and they are trained from birth to feel really good about themselves.

            But, to make myself feel better, I’d like to point out what they don’t get to do:

1.     Wear ball gowns. I mean, technically they can, but they usually don’t and who remembers George Clooney’s tux from the Golden Globes? NO ONE. Thank you.

2.     Have babies. Men are notorious weenies when it comes to pain, so they probably wouldn’t have babies, even if they could. But they certainly act like they did it, anyway, so this one’s not so great.

Um…yeah...so that’s all I could think of. Must be really nice to be a dude.

You got any other points on this topic? I'd love to hear them!

*Jack Lemmon realizing what it's like to wear a skirt. Some Like It Hot is probably my favorite movie of all time. While Tony Curtis' character uses the opportunity of living as a woman to score a woman (Marilyn Monroe), Jack Lemmon empathizes with women so much during his experience pretending to be female, he actual starts to become a woman. (Some Like It Hot, Billy Wilder, 1959).