So, I say to you, let’s have a girls night out and what do you think. Martinis. Stillettos. Good lighting. Voluminous hair. Pink things. Sexy banter…..
I am sure you picture some scene from Sex and the City, where all the girls are giggling about their vaginas and overanalyzing the last phone conversation they had with their latest bedmate. A night where things get “bad” and “bad” is defined as flirting with the bartender, down and dirty gossiping and maybe puffing on a menthol.
I am not one of these women. For one reason or another, I have made it my mission to destroy this idea of girls’ night and turn it on its ass. I never set out to do this. It is just something that continues to happen every time I or one of my girlfriends gets the bright idea to do an all female night; we end up completely fucking it up.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not anti-girls nights and I LOVE spending time with just my girl friends, but what never seems to work for me is the pre-planned-girls-only parties. They do not resemble anything like Sex and the City or whatever other over-glamified television show out there. Nope. They are more like a bad scene from Absolutely Fabulous, where everybody’s falling and binge drinking or puking and people get trapped in rooms or are soliciting sex in hilarious, yet obvious ways and shit is on fire and everybody is roaring with cackling laughter!! These are my girls’ nights and they are not pretty.
The problem is in the planning. When these nights don’t happen naturally and it is an imposed no-boys-allowed policy, I think us gals start to think we have immunity to all the regular rules that are associated with drinking and partying. We are louder than we have to be, ruder than we should be and can lose our demure in the chaos of it all. Honestly, when I am in the midst of one of these pre-planned girls’ night frenzies, I consume twice as much alcohol in half the time because I don’t have the fear that any of my friends are trying to get in my pants. And, it is that trepidation I have when men and alcohol are around that keeps me cool, collected and flirtatiously buzzed.
Look, I don’t want to be the one woman out there talking smack about girls’ nights, I just want to point out the flaw in the design. Women, friends or not, will always have an underlying sense of competition with each other, so without the male presence there, the night just turns into an escalating series of dares and one upping each other. No one bothers to think, “will this make me throw up?” or “if I do this move, will everybody see my vag? And will I care?” No. Nobody asks themselves these important questions when its girls night. We don’t think. We just do.
Maybe it’s just my friends? Maybe it’s just me? If you have any girls-nights-gone-bad stories, I’d love to hear them daretounravel@hotmail.com
Now off to find my cell phone and my dignity.
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