Stereotypes, as has been muttered before, stick around because they resonate, and Carnivorous Cow got a sinking feeling in her stomach that went beyond her tummy bug as she reflected on this one. She thought back to some recent conversations.
Monica was a dishwater blonde, a little past her sell-by date and slightly shop-soiled, recently moved to Slaapstad to escape the vestiges of a broken heart, with her young children in tow. Whatever you might read in the newspapers, Slaapstad has a thriving market in second-hand men - admittedly some of whom are still legally married - and so Monica was hoping to find Mr Right among these pre-owned models. She projected herself as a flirt, a bombshell, a sex goddess - but also a caring, doting mother.
Pamela was the real thing. She'd been there, done that, shrugged off the wet T-shirt more times than she'd care to remember, but still looked good on it. When Monica arrived in her neck of the woods, Pamela took her in, showed her around, brought her into her social circle. Where Monica met Piet, Pamela's recycled cast-off. Pamela and Piet had been hot and firey, but short-lived. She moved on, he got clingy, she got heavy, he backed off. They settled into a comfortable friendship, and he was available to Monica's advances. Piet and Monica fell quickly into very public mutual gushing and gooing, but Slaapstad is tolerant and eyeballs were only rolled in private.
Until Pamela decided to host an end-of-year party at her home. Monica took the opportunity to launch into a very pubic dissing of Pamela, and things just kinda unravelled from there.
Carnivorous Cow put on her sherlock holmes hat, borrowed a pipe, and set off to investigate. It turned out, according to Piet, that Monica was "insecure" about his continuing friendship with Pamela. World War XVII erupts, because Monica is "insecure".
It would be easy to shrug Monica off as neurotic (though neurotics are incredibly hard to shrug off, in the main) were she not merely one of several exhibiting exactly the same behaviour at exactly the same time. There's Sandy, worried that she's not as slim as Glenda, so she doesn't want to go to the party in case David leaves with Glenda instead; there's Linzi, desperately colouring her hair and updating her wardrobe, to stay in the running against women she sees as younger and more attractive; there's Zania, dropping her boyfriend before he drops her, and fast running out of men she hasn't been through at least twice before; there's Cally, queen of the put-down, keeping everyone at arm's length in case they melt her icy shell and reveal her to be, just, ordinary; there's Thoko, so desperate to hold on to Jake that she _has_ turned into her mother.... All around her, Carnivorous Cow saw insecure women.
Insecure about men, mainly, but also about their appearance, their children's accomplishments, their careers, their futures, their hopes, and, mostly, their men.
By contrast, Carnivorous Cow flipped through her mental files to see what made men insecure. Well, not an awful lot - only one thing came up, so to speak. Size. Even among those who had no reason at all for concern.
"Maybe men are just simpler," she commented to Gramsci. "Or maybe they're just too busy running the world to worry about whether beige blonde rather than sunny blonde hides their grey hairs better, in case their current brand-new-second-hand sees a sleeker, younger model elsewhere..."