Girls’ Code

“Better listen to me, ‘Cause I wanna tell you, son.
Don’t give away your love; don’t give away your sweat.
‘Cause a girl can’t know you, and a boss can’t forget.”
-Minutemen

To discuss: Is there a Girls’ Code of Ethics?
I was talking to a very old friend on the phone today and she invoked that even-older set of laws regarding situations of ladies perpetrating what is supposed to be the very worst type of betrayal: against their own lady-friends. With men who are or were at some point, tied to said friends. In a romantic manner.
That story.

(“Ooh, catfight!”)

As long as I can remember, the whole idea’s only made me cringe, this notion that it’s up to women *only*, to uphold some sort of loyalty toward one another. Because the automatic flipside of that conviction can only be this: that men can’t be counted on. That Boys will be Boys. Which is just one giant pile of stinking biznullshit, far as I’m concerned, letting half our population off the hook as it does. I refuse and I refuse.

You Can’t Trust Guys.
And yet now that I find myself in this rather intensely crappy situation in which I do feel betrayed (and my sisters my old friends, their jaws drop when I elaborate “Oh Alice,” they say, “you have been betrayed; it’s not you it’s not your fault oh poor poor Alice” and I fall into this stinking archetype, this role so old and so worn and so tired.)

“You better back down before you get smacked down/
You better chill.”-Jill Scott

And yet now—I find myself *so much* angrier at, *so much* more hurt by, this girl/(friend) than by the guy involved. My reaction to this particular punch-in-the-gut feels particularly hardwired. It’s doesn’t feel like a cultural construct, so is it one?

But cultural mores run deep. To me, invoking some Girls’ Code still feels supremely fucked up. I’d rather believe in some simpler code, some basic decency that we’re all supposed to have. For me, believing in people—not half the people, but people—has always been something I’ve held as my principle article of faith in the world. Not stupid, blind faith, just human trust. We’re all we’ve got. Right? I’ve become closest to people I’ve let in with a great, big, open heart and I want to say that damn it, I refuse to give that up, now. I’m not a naïve fucking fool; I refuse to see my lack of guardedness as a sign of some immaturity on my part. Still, this has shaken me. This has worked to mess with that particular faith. I don’t feel trusting, now. And that makes me angry, too.

In the past couple days, I’ve heard a feast of Betrayal-By-Supposed-Girlfriends Stories; I’ve eaten them up like junkfood. Tasty while I’m hearing them and I beg for more, more, more to prove I’m not alone right when I feel Really. Fucking. Alone.

You Can’t Trust Women.
I ask for these stories and I’m given this veritable All You Can Eat Buffet: There’s the girl who walked in on her roommate/best friend and her boyfriend, the one whose friend made a habit on hitting on and sleeping with *all* her exes the moment they became exes, the one who’s given up on having female friends At All. (“With guys, it’s all on the table. You know you can trust them.”) All these stories fill me up and leave me with a big stomachache later.

I hate the moral: When the shit hits, you can’t trust your girlfriends. Because the Girls’ Code thing, besides saddling gals with all the responsibility and giving men a free pass to act like assholes, does something else. The truth is that women can’t be perfect all the time. We screw up, just as men screw up. But the message when women screw up is always the same: While boys get to “be boys,” women: you’re not allowed to make mistakes. And the ones who slip even slightly become slippery snakes.


“Well, who said life was easy/
and who said a man was fair/
Well I wish you well/
but keep your paws off mine.”
-Magnetic Fields

I didn’t want to join this pantheon. I never wanted to inhabit any of these roles. I never wanted to become a woman with one of Those Stories. I guess that yeah, I did want to believe that maybe, yeah, if I believe in people and treat those I come to love, Golden Rule style, that I’ll get the same treatment back. And maybe yeah I also wanted to believe that there is, on some level, such a thing as sisterhood. Because with all these double standards, with all this sexist bullshit, you’ve gotta have something, right?

Chebbles’s Mama tells me that it’s because I grew up in a houseful of girls that I don’t acknowledge the Girls’ Code of Ethics. “You just grew up with it being there, naturally,” she tells me. “The fact that you *don’t* treat your girlfriends this way is something that’s just ingrained in you.”
That’s one angle. Maybe if I’d grown up in a houseful of boys I’d just shrug this development off as kinda shitty, rather than feel so powerfully betrayed.

I could spend even more hours analyzing all this to death. Maybe it’s birth order. Maybe it’s age. Maybe it’s experience. Maybe it’s relative amounts of self-absorption. But none of this helps, when it comes down to it. All I’m left with is a head full of useless theories and a mounting number of sleepless nights. And all alone at three a.m., no amount of analysis will solve anything for you. There’s just no sense.