Just let us be stupid in peace
Women have the right to make mistakes.
Here’s a laundry list of things, in no particular order, significance or drama, that a woman should be allowed to make mistakes about:
For not cooking well. For cooking well but making the occasional blunder, like no salt or too much oil. For being unable to cook under pressure, like for a husband or a critical in-law.
For not knowing how to drive, especially if she has deprioritized learning the skill due to any reason. For not knowing how to fix a car, just because there’s a lot of men who know how to do it.
For picking a bad boyfriend or a husband. For not having noticed red flags which by the way, any bad partner works doubly hard to hide from the woman.
For not being able to leave even after discovering the red flags; for her spirit that wavers as she worries about being without love or on her own.
For ambitiously buying clothes one size smaller, then wondering why she willfully did so in the first place. For believing this awful world which tells her ‘smaller is better’, that her being smaller will magically make her more attractive.
For not magically being awesome at sports, just because some people are enamored with women who can act as ‘one of the boys’.
For being endlessly rude to assholes, and not being apologetic even when reminded twenty times a day.
For cutting hair and regretting it, for growing them too long which wrap like a net around her shoulders. For coloring them an unflattering color, and then just letting them be.
For losing game after game of chess because watching ‘Queens’ Gambit’ doesn’t actually teach you the game.
For not knowing every last detail of a show, movie or comic she’s just started enjoying. She doesn’t have ‘The Shining’. Not knowing obsessive little details doesn’t make her a ‘fake fan’.
For getting drunk after promising she won’t. For getting drunk without her friends sometimes in public, despite knowing the horrors of a woman with her guard down in the outside world. Being stupid should give you a hangover, not sexual assault. Being stupid shouldn’t get you dead.
For wearing heels to brunch places with uneven cobbled streets, for not carrying a jacket for an evening out over a tiny dress. For wanting to look nice over practicality sometimes. It’s the thing people tell us to do all the time, then when we do it we’re dumb.
Okay, so we’re dumb. We’re stupid. Just let us be.
Why?
Oh, I’ll tell you why right now.
Men are stupid all the time. This is not a criticism, just a statement of fact. They crash brand new cars they borrowed from their parents or accidentally drop their new phone in the toilet. They borrow cash and don’t pay it back and gossip about people behind their back. They’re rude and insolent and bad judges of character, they make companies that don’t make it to the first year and give their names to kids they play no part in raising. They screw up a lot.
And yet we forgive them. We don’t banish them from the public world for their crimes. We don’t judge the entire gender on the basis of one man’s actions. Their mistakes don’t damn them to hell, get them chained in dungeons, burnt at the stake, raped against their will. We compare the extent of their idiocy with the bigness of somebody else’s idiocy, and we let them off the hook. We do this because we consider them to be human, and as we love to say — to err is human.
Not when it comes to women though.
The hook stays stuck in our neck.
We’re tired of it. Please, just let us be stupid in peace.
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