~a column by Colleen O’Brien
A health class at Stanford University having to do with the mind-body connection teaches students that one of the best things a man can do for his health is to get married, and one of the best things a female can do for her health is to hang out with her girlfriends.
I’ve read it before but this public confirmation of the facts from such a prestigious seat of higher learning relieves me, in many ways.
First of all, it validates that women ease life. We women know this, even those of us who don’t do it, usually because some gent has ticked us off beyond endurance.
Second, it refutes the many decades, or centuries, that men have spread vicious slander about women, calling us _itches or witches or cats, if not worse. In the face of men warring and dueling and hanging each other, of men shooting and stabbing and garroting each other, of men blowing everybody up with cannon, missiles and nuclear warheads, I suspect that men’s verbal abuse of women’s ways is completely full of . . . hyperbole. We women were not apt to be killed by each other. Men — and women — are mostly killed by men.
Third, we girls have always relied on each other and been perfectly aware of it. Whether it’s been in real life or in novels (at least the ones written by women), I’ve seen women helping women at every turn. And helping men, too, for that matter. The men? Well, some of them have helped us — walked on the street side so we didn’t get splashed with mud, etcetera.
Fourth, in the face of men’s petty name calling and making fun of women, as well as seriously abusing them, women have gone on being helpful, kind, loving and cooking gourmet soup for sick folk. Not that we’re angels by any means, nor even close to Mother Teresa status; it’s just that most of us really like to listen, talk, feed people, pour a cup of coffee and share wine. We can, and do, rise to the occasion whatever it is and take over when the men die or abandon us.
According to the Stanford health class, being around women creates more serotonin, that invaluable chemical that flits from cell to cell in our brains and slaps down depression in favor of a feeling of well being.
If this isn’t a good reason to hang around women and be cordial, I don’t know what is.
Of course, when a woman, or a dog for that matter, is mistreated, she will turn either mean or submissive (underneath all bowing and scraping is deviousness); so, if you’re nice to us, we are nice to you — a tit for tat, a quid pro quo, something for something.
In our family, from the mouth of one of our famous malapropping grandmothers, we usually called it “tit for tit.” But that, as they say, is another story.
