Shit you guys, the males are onto us. They know we aren't virgins, that we've actually been with other guys, have seen bigger dicks than theirs and at least need a little concealer to look like Scar-Jo. Fuck, what do we do now?


Seriously, from the Dept. of Sex, Lies, and Hashtags: #LiesToldByFemales chronicles all the shit ladies be sayin' to dudes to seem cooler, prettier, less slutty, more laidback, when in fact women are not any of those things and are terrible liars who will say anything to make a man like them. Pathetic, amirite? A funny roundup at The Gloss put the Tweets into categories that reflect terrible stereotypes about women and act as a kind of guide to what insecure men think about women, like:

"All Girls Love Drama"

"Girls Who Put Effort Into Their Appearance Are Liars"

"We're All Sluts"

"Women Can't Have Male Friends"

And while I agree it's all pretty standard-issue sexist thinking about the tired construct of gender differences that is Venus and Mars mania, on another level, they are just examples of exactly the cultural expectations society has put on women since forever to be this perfect specimen of servitude to a man's ideal woman. It is really a guide to Impossible Things Men Want to Hear (but will then complain about when it isn't true even though it's not possible to be true).


For instance:






But these falsehoods are precisely the sorts of things women are culturally counseled to present to men to cater to their allegedly fragile egos and fulfill their fantasy for the Perfect Woman, the fantasy that we are, I guess, cryogenically frozen in time until hand-plucked by them, and that our true self is Exactly Like Them But Hot, Virginal to the World But Slutty for Them, Effortlessly Beautiful and Drama-Free. You know. ELTBHVWBSTEBDF.

But women aren't those things. No woman is. Women wear makeup, need maintenance to "look that good," have emotions and desires and needs, get 'roids, and, like any post-colonial country, are a complicated mix of who they are and who they have been forced to be.


FYI: The best way to get someone to lie to you is to set a standard for unattainable perfection and sit back a crack open a cold one. So, uh, duh, women have a nice bag of tricks because they need to. It is only barely in the last few decades (and not even for all women, trust) that large numbers of women have been able to support themselves alone. To put women in a position of less power and influence, and then condemn them for workarounds to succeed in spite of it, well, that's called a catch 22, dilrods.

It takes enormous courage to defy gender roles, ask anyone who is anywhere on the gender spectrum that doesn't line up to classic archetypes of male and female. It is a life lived in the margins at best. I'm not advocating that women lie. I'm just saying that if you take any of these Tweets seriously as part of the stuff of courting rituals, it's a thousand percent obvious why SOME women would lie about little shit like this, because the alternative is exhausting and uncertain and risks marginalization, that's why.


Which is why dudes also lie. There is already a #LiesToldByMales hashtag, natch, and it is proving to be just as illuminating. Gender roles have a way of trapping us all, and men too feel the pinch of cultural expectations that they must be virile, potent, rogue individualists unaffected by feelings.



Yeah it's just dumb, sexist Twitter, but this is the real trap of thinking of men and women as oppositional, it means we all get stuck in parts that might not fit. Rigid gender roles trap us all. Because if women have to be perfect, well, then so do men — and that's not pretty for anyone.