Ladies + Swear Words

I love the boys at my work, because they treat me so much like a lady that there is never any doubt in my mind whether or not I am one. In a primarily-male workplace, I love to be the surprising and confusing female, who takes her time to administer lipstick before meetings, wears heels on field trips, and comes to work every day in a darling, tasteful skirt-suit. I don’t think the men at my work ever really notice me as being a woman: they just mostly like working with me because when they’re around me they have to be men. I have always been extremely self-sufficient. I’m successful, I am comfortable in my own skin, and I know how to do most things better than they do. And yet, I love watching how these darling middle-aged men, whom I hear call themselves knuckle-draggers when I am not around, become creative, spontaneous, and nurturing around me. I have not always been the best at being a girl, but I am very much enjoying learning how to be a lady.

The guys in my office are WORSE THAN SAILORS. They have wild, untamed mouths, and they are all freakishly brilliant when it comes to inventing new and shockingly inappropriate ways of saying everything. They swear an awful lot. I grew up a good girl, the kind of good girl where I didn’t get into trouble, never sneaked out of the house to do anything, and made it through high school without experimenting with anything you smoke, snort, drink too much of, or get sick on. When I started working at this job a little less than five years ago, bad language was still inherently attractive because I had never had any occasion to use it. I listened to the men swearing around me and I thought, wouldn’t it be great fun to just….say the f-word in a sentence, when no one would notice?

One day, a gorgeous associate from another office came around to my building, and she entranced everybody, including me. She flipped her hair over one shoulder, winked ferociously at me like we had been best friends forever, and wore my favorite Kate Middleton nude-colored heels. I was in love. She had a mouth, too. I watched her laughing comfortably with the guys, and I heard her incorporate several bad words in sentences exactly where they belonged. When she left, I thought, “My gosh, I believe that she has done it.” I didn’t know what it was specifically, but I knew that when she swore with that pretty mouth and made the boys crazy, it made her exciting and lovely.

An hour after she left, I stepped into the lunch-room, where a half-dozen men quieted the instant they saw me. It was a sure sign that the boys had been discussing something inappropriate, and sure enough they all looked at me and sponanteously began conversations in my direction, speaking over one another:

“Heeey, Jane, how’s your day?”

“Did you get that memo written?”

“How long did you say that you were going on vacation? You’re going on vacation, right? Oh, you’re not? I guess I was thinking of someone else.”

“Nice dress, Jane!”

I waved all of that off, with my hand, and they looked relieved. “So,” I said, “Wasn’t she nice?”

The tempo of the room changed; it was electrified and sad. “I always used to say I would date her,” one man said, “She used to be different, sweeter.”

“Yeah,” another one said, “I mean, that body…..incredible. Too bad she’s such a ho.”

A third: “She used to be really classy; now she’s  a total hit-it-and-quit-it. I’d totally do that, but there’s no wonder she’s still single: she’s definitely not the kind you settle down with.”

I sat there staring, with gaping mouth, while they went on pointing out her physical strong points, encouraging one another’s strategies for sleeping with her, and establishing universal disinterest in her as a person.

This happened three more times before I got the point, with three different women. The others would have been less flattered by what they heard: they were average-looking ladies whose swear words seemed to immediately make them about one thousand times less captivating.

I was horrified, and after that, I was cured. I saw how differently they treated women who didn’t act like ladies, and I didn’t want to be one of those women. I waited six months, and then during an awkward silence one day when I walked into a lunch-room after everyone had been freely discussing guy-things in my absence, I announced nonchalantly that in twenty-five years I have never said the f-word. They reacted strongly, and their spontaneous attempts at conversation were the predictable things:

“Oh, Jane, it is TOTALLY okay if you swear once-in-awhile.”

“Yeah, it can even be sexy if you do it right when we’re not expecting it.”

“We’d still know that you were classy even if you slipped up.”

But all of their attempts were half-hearted, and anyhow, it didn’t matter what they said: I had seen firsthand what they might not have ever noticed: as soon as a girl swore around them, she immediately went from being one of the girls to being one of the guys.

I’m not one of the guys.