Girl Meets World

As promised in the previous post, this one is about 'what a girl who has been in a girls' school and college feels when suddenly thrown into a work environment which has specimens of the opposite sex.' What prompted me to write about this is the weekend I spent with ex-colleagues and now buddies from office.

I have had a peculiar kind of upbringing. One where I was devoid of any interaction with boys my age. Girls' school and college happens to a lot of people. In addition to these skewed institutions of society, I have no brothers or male cousins with whom I interacted on a regular basis. My friends in the neighborhood always happened to be girls. As a family, our social circle is practically non-existent. There is just one family that visits us once a month.

My first interaction was when I joined the mandatory tuition classes in tenth standard. However, there was hardly any mixing that happened and usually people hung around with others of the same sex. During classes, I found most boys to be far dumber than me and that further prevented me from trying to interact with them. (Probably just a coincidence, so don't scream guys)

Then, I got a job and stepped into the real world. The singular principle behind my approach was to not treat the guys any different from the girls. It worked and I felt absolutely no discomfort while interacting with guys.

So, why am I writing this post? It is because the environment still baffled me. It wasn't just the guys. It was the kind of talk and humor that prevailed when members of both the sex were prevalent in the same space: something I observed while hanging out with my friends, specially last weekend. Suddenly, you are not just human beings. You are a guy or a girl. Two people talking to each other must be passionately in love- irrespective of gender. So, everybody gets ragged about being homosexual. Guys proclaim to be subscribers of Glam. A guy talking to a girl must be flirting with her. Some guys think so too and hence, whenever they talk to you they must flirt (even though everybody knows that they have a girlfriend back home). Sexual connotations can be derived from absolutely anything in this world and watching movies like Kya Kool Hain Hum and reading Cosmopolitan at night doesn't help the case.

These jokes are funny but there is always just too much of this kind of humor. I do not understand why this happens. When I ask them, I am informed that this is how young people are. When I try to challenge the fact that girls from my kind of background are accused of being obsessed with guys, I am told of unspeakable things that happen in girls' colleges and that I am just an exception.

Still trying to figure out this world!

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As some of you might have noticed, Haloscan is gone. It was deleting my earlier comments and not displaying the ones that were there in the account. Hence, I took this drastic step. Sorry for the inconvenience that Blogger comments might pose!