Once upon a time, and still in the vestiges of America’s minds today, there was the concept of the swinging bachelor. And, of course, his counterpart: the lonely spinster.
I hate that perception. As a happy, and very busy, 28-year-old single gal, I balk at the fact that single women of a certain age get pegged as social outcasts, all because we haven’t managed to “land” a man. People start assuming that these single women all own cats (plural), make sad little dinners for one, and enjoy doing laundry and jigsaw puzzles on a Friday night.
I am very, very glad that so many women of my generation (and even the one before) are choosing to shatter this antiquated notion. In fact, I would like to propose that my single girl friends are more the “swinging bachelors” than their male counterparts!
Ladies like myself (and my role model friends) are now the ones whose refrigerators “hold nothing but beer and ketchup”. . . except that our refrigerators actually hold non-dairy creamer, a bottle of vodka and medium salsa. We’re out to dinner most nights, so what’s the point in storing more than that? Our freezers and pantries may be full with enough staples to make something delicious on a snow day, or to play hostess on a whim, but our fridge is the barren wasteland we’ve been accusing the men of for years and years.
We are now the ones who fill the bar at happy hours downtown, who emit, unabashedly, the raucous laughter of vaguely inappropriate humor. We are NOT the meek, subservient wallflowers derided in bygone eras. NOTE: Speaking of shattering outdated stereotypes, I’ve been becoming friends with more and more librarians. They’re the wild ones – look out for them.
Most of the single men I know are really the homebodies these days. Sure, they’re playing Wii or some other computer game rather than knitting, but it amounts to the same thing: limited social interaction. And that’s fine, so long as they’re happy with it. Though, of course, it DOES tend to make it harder for us single girls to FIND the single boys.
You know, I started smoking when I was 15 or so just to shake-up people’s illusion that, as a smart girl who wore glasses, I was a goody-goody. I’m just hoping that this generation has had enough of an impact on the world so that, if I’m still unmarried in 10 years or so, I don’t have to start riding a motorcycle or pierce something obtrusive just to challenge this set of perceptions head-on.
Keep your fingers crossed for me.
Notes from a LiteraryVixen 