DUKE IT OUT

Girls Need to Fight With Our Fists

Let’s trade in emotional warfare for something more direct

Sometimes when I am having a stupid passive-aggressive conversation with another female, I think we should wrestle. More than that. We should have wrestled years ago. More than that. We should have been wrestling all along.

Politeness among women who cannot stand each other is annoying and counterproductive. I’m guilty of it. You’re guilty of it. It’s an epidemic that prevents us from knowing how we feel about each other.

I can’t tell you how many times I’m talking to some woman I can’t stand and I think ‘this blows. We should duke it out.’ But, if you were looking at us, you’d think those women get along. They’re mwah mwah friends.

The reason it’s always wine o’clock somewhere for a lot of women is they can’t stand their friends. They’ll meet for lunch and playdates, but the fuck if they’re gonna do it sober.

Sure, Keri, I’d love to join you. Lemme stop at my pharmacists first so I can be high as a kite.

Why can’t we just fight?

My son and his friends wrestle all the time. His friends who don’t wrestle are the most emotionally manipulative of the lot. They’re the ones who are always starting dramas and stabbing each other in the back.

We need to fight with fists, women. If we wrestled, maybe we’d know how we actually felt about one another. It would get honest real fast.

Once, one of my friends and I decided we’d try wrestling. We were in high school. She was a delightful person. Everyone said so. She was encouraging and supportive and it never occurred to me that anything lay beneath.

One day, we saw some dudes wrestling during gym and she said, “We should do that. Why should guys have all the fun?”

So, we wrestled. I thought I was stronger, but once she pinned me down, I looked at her face and I was scared. Damn, she wasn’t angry. She looked so pissed off at me or at the world, or at some shit. It was a face I had not yet seen on her and it paralyzed me.

I could have probably hit her or shoved her off, but I was confounded. I was also someone who got very calm when I was pissed, which always made her more angry. I said something like, “You’ve got issues.” She jumped off and growled at me. Or it felt like a growl.

When we left school that day, she pulled my backpack off. “What the fuck?” I said.

“I think we should fight,” she said. She had transferred from another school, a tougher school, where she got beat up a lot for looking like a supermodel. Now, she was in our stupid wimpy private school where nobody fought.

“Fight me,” she said.

Because I was sixteen, an asshole, and unconvinced I could throw a punch, I used words. “You’re so tacky,” I said. “We don’t fight at this school. People are going to think you’re trash.”

I flinch as I write those words but they were the only punch I had in my arsenal. She’s still one of my best friends. We have both cringed about our parts in that stupid school non-fight.

She was right though. She usually is. I should have fought her. She should have fought me. We spent so many years in and out of our drama when we could have gotten it out all at once. Maybe more than once, but still — we ended up being manipulative and petty for years until we were too old to be that stupid anymore.

Instead of wrestling, we spread out our animosity, competitiveness, and jealousy over years. We should have duked it out. The beauty of fighting is it’s honest.

When someone is looking down at you, pinning your hands, you can see how mad they are. There’s no faking. There’s no, “Cup of tea, luv?” type of shit.

It’s hard to hide an honest expression when someone is about to punch you in the face. It’s also hard to punch someone in the face without showing real emotion. That’s what I want. She’s not the only one I wish I’d wrestled with. I got a list.

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