Cohesion among women: whistle on it!
The women of Hinterdings do not like me anymore. They are even mad at me. What have I done?
I disappointed her. So what disappointed! They invite me extra to go to their club meeting, to read from my books and to discuss with them. And me? I'll call my price right away.
"Oh, you want money for it, but we have no money!"
"Well, but that's my job ..."
This is not work! Our meetings are always so funny! We always have so much fun, only among women! " As evidence, they attach a picture from last year's meeting that actually shows them in different stages of happiness. I feel terrible. Misunderstood. Treated unfairly. I almost give in, but: "Do you work for free?" I ask again. And that's the end.
"Really!" The women are outraged. They had thought me more sympathetic. They thought I was "one of us". Instead: contradiction. Already on the phone I feel the icy coldness and exclusion, to which only women are capable. Now they will not buy my books anymore, I will not read my column anymore, that's what I got!
Women understand each other. Women hold together.
That should be a lesson to me.
Oh, sisters! I've learned that lesson long ago! On the contrary, I am on the point of freeing myself from the yoke of the sisterhood. From the claim to be "one of us". How hard does this idea hang around my neck and pull my head down. A sister is much more than a nice girl. More than a girlfriend. Sisters share a story. "We are sisters" means: We grew up in the same years, with the same pictures, we prevailed against similar ideas, crossed similar borders, we fought, and we had similar visions.
Is not that supposed to mean anything anymore?
Does cohesion mean that I have to find women always nice?
Women understand each other. Women hold together. Ha! Perhaps the concept of the sisterhood weighs heavily on me because I spent my childhood and youth in relative friendlessness? No sisters! I did not even have planets in my horoscope at that time, even astrologers are astonished. That's just how you do not become a writer. My feminist struggle was that in the German class I demanded female role models just before I left school. That I then found the longed for books alone and read alone. The youth movement that just happened to be raging during my youth in my hometown, I missed because I did not know anybody and did not go anywhere. I only had real girlfriends later. I had to learn to deal with people who did not live on paper pages. And always irritated me that I should find women in principle netter than men. Where that did not correspond to my experience.
False sisters do not have real girlfriends.
I did not fight together, I'm not a sister.
Only what I have written qualifies me. Make me "one of us". Or not: After all, I have committed the betrayal to describe women as anti-heroines. As murderers even. Do not I know that women are basically better people?
Germaine Greer, the sharp-tongued and most controversial author of feminism, had to verbally defend herself some time ago after slipping out that she finds male comedians mostly funnier than females. Susan Sarandon has been accused of her involvement with Barack Obama, who, as we know, is not a woman. Where was your female solidarity?
"We do not need them anymore," she boldly asserted. "We do not need a bonus, performance counts, not gender."
It would be nice. But this memo has probably not arrived with the majority of women of our generation.
Marlen, for example, has to regularly step in for her colleague who suffers from migraines - not that Marlen wants to swap with her, her colleague's face, when a seizure grabs her, distorted and pale, would each jump up and make a chair right. Only it is a fact that medicine can not do much for migraine. And Marlen's colleague pilgrims from a naturopath to a homeopath and also to a craniosacral therapist - and back again. Without success. And mostly during working hours.
Cohesion does not mean that everyone is equally solidary
Marlen accepts her work without complaint. Marlen annoyed in silence. Marlen feels bad: How can you be so heartless? Is she scourging herself? Where is your pity, where is your solidarity?
It takes far too long for her to finally say something, and when she does, her tone is bitter. Her colleague is upset."But you do not believe that I'm running from one doctor to another for pleasure?"
"No of course not!"
And then I thought that this is possible among women, there must still be something like solidarity! After all, we're all in a boat! "
"Yes, of course, but ..." Why, Marlen wants to say, why do not you jump in for me when my child is ill, when the day care is over? Because she knows the answer. "I would do that now, and still so much, only, my suffering will not allow me, you know."
Marlen does not understand. But the claim of understanding, of showing solidarity, of maintaining values such as sisterhood, is stronger than their self-preservation instincts. The latter is apparently not equally well developed in all women.
In the fight among women wins the one who suffers more.
And that is also the reason for their discomfort: those who rely on sisterhood, usually want something extra.
Marlen finds herself thinking the unthinkable: I'd rather work with men! At least they say what they think! When men get together, whether privately or professionally, it's about one thing, not the soul.
Women work on the unspoken. From a young age on, they train, with looks and hints, with half-sentences and opposite shoulders, to gain and exercise power. The direct demand is below their dignity. Better to perfect the emotional blackmail. That's true diplomatic art.
"Beware of gentle women!", My mother always warned me. Because they do not only know what they want, but also how they get it. All you have to do is watch any movie by Woody Allen to validate this theory. His angelically delicate blonde creatures always win in the end. To get to their destination, they trample unsteadily over corpses - with preference women's corpses.
Mother with halo
And to the brave single parents Marlen there is of course the counterexample, the woman who derives from her motherhood not only a halo, but also a free pass from all potentially stressful situations and at least as annoying in the workday. My friend Renée knows one who starts every sentence with "I as a mother" and "You just can not understand". Which is all the more annoying, as Renée even has children. But somehow that does not count. Where Renée is mother, her colleague is MOTHER. Renee's daughters visit the company's own hoard - not their colleague's. For the simple reason that they are way too big for that. They also spend half the week with the divorced father. But that, according to the girlfriend, does not understand Renée, who is married as normal and therefore has no reason to complain. And she does not. She stays longer when the colleague goes to the pediatrician, to the school performance. She presses her lips together, she does not complain, she says nothing, because she knows:
In the fight among women wins the one who suffers more. It would be nice, Marlen and Renée and I think, would be nice, if, yes, if we tackle any conflict as if it were only about the matter and not the gender of the participants. That sounds good, but it's not that easy. Certain ideals are not so easy to put down.
We decide to become immune to suffering and insulted looks in the future, we will prevail, and we'll practice saying no.
Luckily we have each other. Luckily we are friends. Because one thing that makes false sisters easily recognizable is their lack of real friends.
