On the flip side

After musing about stupid and obnoxious males - well, it was never going to take long before a female counter-example turned up.

So, last night at Oxbridge a young "lady" latched on to long-suffering tutor Elfbiter Skysmith and announced that she was now his girlfriend.  Despite her summary of her personal assets and attractions ("I have big boobs!"), Elfbiter remained unimpressed... and, in fact, dealt with her more courteously than I could have managed, myself.

He was of the opinion that she was actually an RL male, but I remain unconvinced... there was something, to my mind, distinctly feminine about her dumb-and-obnoxiousness; it was arrogant and needy, more than arrogant and aggressive... a more stereotypically female behaviour, in fact.  Of course, I could be wrong - I often am, especially when it comes to gender stereotypes.  Me and gender stereotypes, we just don't seem to understand one another.

One thing I was wrong about, apparently, was her age - I had her pegged at fourteen, but she announced very loudly that she was sixteen, later on.  She could have been lying, of course - I always assume that anyone I meet in SL is an unemployed forty-seven year old accountant named Norman who lives with his mother in Wolverhampton, in any case.  Saves disappointment later on, you see - but, again, I'm not sure she was.  Teenagers lying about their age in SL tend to go big.  Sixteen is young enough to be believable....

... but it's also old enough to know better.  I am not an advocate of children being seen and not heard - well, OK, I would prefer things that way, but intellectually I know it's not desirable - and I appreciate that adolescents will be brash and have lots of rough edges because they haven't yet learned social skills.  But it is, in a sense, the job of an adolescent to grow up into an adult, and anyone carrying on like this girl at the age of sixteen is leaving things far too late.

One of those gender stereotypes - those ones I have such trouble with - says that women mature earlier and show more "emotional intelligence" than men.  (Whatever the hell that means.)  Sometimes I wonder if, since we get this stereotype reinforced repeatedly, women aren't in some danger of becoming complacent about our supposed superiority in this regard.  Certainly, the girl last night was displaying no noticeable maturity, and about the emotional intelligence of a mink in heat.  I am not impressed.  Arrogant man-children are not nice to be around; I see no advantage, though, in arrogant woman-children....