I Swear…

Now and then I am rather startled when one of my close girlfriends speaks her mind. Of course that is THE point of a ladies’ night out, girl talk, female bonding yada yada yada. Still, it comes as something straight between your eyes when Ms.Dignified-to-the-point-of-being-Bronze statue-ed-almost or ‘Sweet n’ giggly Barbie’ or even the nun-in-jeans tell you exactly what they think about the world.

It is a really well-kept secret but my store of off-colour, raunchy jokes is constantly replenished by these women….Barbie in fact, gives the phrase ‘dirty blonde’ a whole new perspective. I’ve never heard Ms.Dignified say ‘Fuck’ in all the years I’ve known her. I have however gotten accustomed to frequent references to her ex- as ‘that bloody arsehole’, which is a rather painful allusion when you think about it.

There must be something therapeutic about swearing. My read-too-many-pop-psychology books-female-brain tells me that it is a natural release of negative emotions, it is giving free rein to expression. No wonder most men don’t carry around as much baggage as women.

First note: Must learn to swear, must get used to not looking pained in the company of those who swear. After all, it is about being able to accept people and their ways of being. Besides it is just a series of sounds…how bad can it be?

I tried. I really did. I let go of my ‘nice girls from good families don’t say things like that’ mentality. I substituted “mad fool” and “nasty person” with more…umm…shall we say, substantial phrases? With great effort I even learnt how to say something rated ‘A’ in Bengali….and that is an effort since all the Bengalis I knew insisted that their bee-yoo-tee-phoool language had no coarseness in it.

Once in a rebellious fit, I decided to show my then-boyfriend how ‘un-dainty’ I could be too. “Go on” he prompted. So I let loose a barrage of the coarsest language I could summon, raising questions about the character of ten generations prior and their parenthood. “And…?” he asked. “And…umm….bloody idiot!”. “HA!” was the triumphant reply, “I’ll tell you what swearing is..” and what followed didn’t sound like any language I remember learning. I was almost afraid to ask him what it all meant. Gleefully he translated his outlash as “You’re the punctured, pus-filled pimple on the right testicle of a diseased schizophrenic rat”.
And all of this in Hindi.

Now for some unfathomable reason, swearing sounds even worse in Hindi than it does in English. And it sounds horribly, caveman-type male. No wonder a lot of polite men don’t find it fit to swear in front of women. But this is a problem too. For the newly-found-her-independence, tough MW does not flinch in the face of anything. And hence I struggle to keep from grimacing while the men around me get more and more ribald in their jokes and languages. Hell….so now I can’t compete with them because I’m just not in the same league, but I bloody well shut up and put up with it. Double GRRRRRRRRRRRR….

Someone told me that women tend to visualize everything that they hear. Arrrrrgggggh….I don’t even like cursing. I mean, the thought of someone crushed beneath wheels with eyeballs popping out….oh, give me some oxygen…

New Note: Must remember not to compete on everything. There are some things that men ARE better at. Like being coarse and crude and absolutely disgusting, for example. Pimple on….ew ew ew.

I’ll stick to writing mournful posts for release of negative emotion.