Girl on the Net

Sometimes Twitter’s hashtag games are total genius, and sometimes they fuck me off. Today’s was a combination of the two, so here are two things from the game – one annoying and one delightful.

#WhatWomenWantIn5Words: the bad

A surprising number of people think women want:

• Someone who buys them stuff
• Bullshit spammy weight-loss tips
• Various members of One Direction

But I am not an internet novice, and I know that these hashtags are usually a swamp of tedious bollocks: ‘lol women are so shallow’, or ‘lol men are stupid/sexual automatons/obsessed with beer’ if the genders are reversed. It’s happened for a long time, and will probably still happen long after I’m dead, although hopefully far less frequently.

There are so many truly shit ones, it’s hard to pick a worst, but I think on balance it might be this:

• Women’s desires are a mystery

Plenty of tweets on the tag give some version of this. It probably annoys me more than your average person because it’s linked to an assumption I come up against quite a bit. If I write about a particular thing I like in bed, I occasionally get people saying:

• “I didn’t know women liked this – I’ll try it on my girlfriend!” or
• “Bullshit do women like this. I’ve tried it with previous partners and they hate it.”

Both of which are making the assumption that women all think the same/like the same things, which is problem number one. Beyond that, they seem to assume that understanding women’s desires should be done under some kind of weird test condition, where you’re not actually allowed to ask the woman in question.

“Women are so mysterious, I simply can’t figure out exactly what they want!”

It would be like me saying ‘I don’t know how men take their tea – why are they such a mystery?!?’ And for that reason it’s getting my ‘fuck off’ badge for today.

WhatWomenWantIn5Words: the good

#WhatWomenWantIn5Words not being regarded as mysteries

— Another Angry Woman (@stavvers) January 18, 2016