Ack! Look out everyone, the "sisterhood" is at it again.
👩🎓Meme: I just finished taking an evening class at Stanford. The last lecture was on the mind-body connection–the relationship between stress and disease.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Another Stanford hoax… Considering chain letter forwards cause stress, which causes disease, or maybe certain deceases of the mind cause chain letters to spread - oh well, I'll probably come back to that later…
👩🎓Meme: The speaker (head of psychiatry at Stanford) said, among other things, that 👨🏻🏫one of the best things that a man could do for his health is to be married to a woman.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Oh, please… Look, marriage just isn't for everyone, and there are a lot of unhappy, unhealthy marriages for that matter. So unless you're living an absolutely idillic life married, shut it.
👩🎓Meme: 👨🏻🏫For a woman, one of the best things she could do for her health was to nurture her relationships with her girlfriends.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Oh, not with the "Rah rah sisterhood!" thing again! and I can see this whole thing going very badly.
The man marries a woman for his health, not hers. So she gets stuck in an unhappy marriage because he may be happy but he's not the man she thought he was. so she unloads on her girlfriends, not for their health, for hers. and soon, they get sick of it.
👩🎓Meme: At first everyone laughed, but he was serious.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Another post-grad lecture full of vry easily amused students and a serious dude trying to be oh so profound… Yadda yadda blah blah.
👩🎓Meme: 👨🏻🏫Women connect with each other differently and provide support systems that help each other to deal with stress and difficult life experiences.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Hel-lo!? That's a human thing, not a gender thing! Everybody has their own individual way of coping with tough stuff. There, this lecture wrapped up neatly into one sentence for you!
👩🎓Meme: 👨🏻🏫Physically this quality “girlfriend time” helps us to create more seratonin–a neurotransmitter that helps combat depression and can create a general feeling of well being.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Yeah um, same for everyone, dude! Don't try to cloak your simplistic psycho-babble in science terms. This meme is still gender-oriented rubbish.
a night out with the boys, a night out with the girls, whichever works, depending on the individual involved. It's not just girlfriend time that produces seratonin! In fact, too much seratonin can be harmful, too, think of that.
👩🎓Meme: 👨🏻🏫Women share feelings whereas men often form relationships around activities…….
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: It's not the same for everybody, dude! For me, it tends to start out with activities and then I get friends from there, whether or not we get to be close friends all depends. But whatever. Spare me the gender stereotype claptrap theories!
👩🎓Meme: 👨🏻🏫Women do it all of the time.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: What, spread memes? Unfortunately all too true, which is one of the reasons I'm mangling them…
👩🎓Meme: We share from our souls with our sisters, and evidently that is very good for our health.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Oh, pass me a bucket, this sisterhood drip is making me sick! Ya know, I'm not all that into sharing everything, soul-bearing and all that stuff, especially based on gender. I just happen to be a girl, so what? And when did this "he" turn to a "We"? I thought this lecturer was a he.
👩🎓Meme: He said that 👨🏻🏫spending time with a friend is just as important to our general health as jogging or working out at a gym.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: DUH! Who needs memes and their fictitious university lecturers telling us *that*?
and I'd say that good times with friends is actually a heck of a lot better than all this jogging and gym crap everybody's selling, but again, only if the time you spend with your friends is good… sometimes it isn't, like if you and you friend get into a disagreement… Or one of you is sick in the hospital.
👩🎓Meme: 👨🏻🏫There’s a tendency to think that when we are “exercising” we are doing something good for our bodies, but when we are hanging out with friends, we are wasting our time and should be more productively engaged–
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: I don't subscribe to that folly, thank you!
👩🎓Meme: 👨🏻🏫not true.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Well duh, I coulda' told you that!
👩🎓Meme: In fact, he said that 👨🏻🏫failure to create and maintain quality personal relationships with other humans is as dangerous to our physical health as smoking!
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: also untrue, dude, chick, the whole lot of you. You know, there ARE people in the world who do fine on their own without friends or ties to anyone - and, they like it that way! I'm not one of them, but I've met people who were… And while there are girls who actually do need other people for their wellbeing, there are guys with the very same need. and not all girls need "sisters!" Just because she's a woman doesn't automatically make her this needy person who just can't get through a day without her sisterhood soul-shares!
👩🎓Meme: So every time you hang out to shmooze with a gal pal or sister,
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: I won't even give a second thought to our gender…
BTW, just for interest's sake, info on the word 'schmooze'
👩🎓Meme: just pat yourself on the back and congratulate yourself.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: Oh, for the LOVE of - … Look, I'm not going to pat myself on the back over doing something as simple as having an everyday human interaction, just because I'm a girl and the company I'm in has some female(s) present! Gah, this is so incredibly gender ego-centric!
👩🎓Meme: Let’s toast to our friendship with our girlfriends/sisters.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: No, let's not! No more meme toasts. You know, if men went around broadcasting the same chain letter, replacing the female gender with male, you'd probably scream sexism.
👩🎓Meme: Evidently it’s very good for our health.
🧝♀️Ocean Elf: AGGGGGHHH! I can't stand the agony! Must - escape - saccharin - girlfriend/sisterhood - drip! 🤢 It burns! 🤮
Look, I don't even refer to my friends by gender at all. They are not girlfriends or sisters! My guy friends are certainly not my boyfriends either. and yes, I make friends with both genders. I can also have a great time on my own without the company of "sisters/girlfriends" I get just as much out of listening to my Ipod when I want time on my own, as I get when hanging out with friends whenever that is possible.
this bit about hanging out with friends might be a nice ideal, but it is only that. You can't just go hang out whenever you want to, you have to take into consideration that just maybe your "sisters" have their own busy schedules too and can't just drop everything to hang out with you for the good of your health!
Over and out.
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