Like, ohmigawd, did you hear?!

I am thisclose to smacking a majority of the girls in my school upside the head. I’m not actually psychotic, but I am VERY glad that I won’t be seeing a majority of them ever again after June 14th. Don’t get me wrong, I have a few female friends, but my two closest friends are my 18-year-old, less-than-one-percent-Hillbilly (he says he doesn’t care, but he does. So I bother him. He’s over it, both he and his brother call me white) boyfriend and my 16-year-old, redneck neighbor – who is a boy.

I can safely say that girls start ninety-five percent of the rumors in my school (give or take a percent or two). Why is that? Why is it that girls are shallow enough to say something untrue about another person behind said person’s back, and why is it that other people are demented enough to believe it?

It all comes down to what we were taught back in the pre-/elementary school grades. Even though we played games like “Telephone” (you know the one, it’s where everyone sits in a line, and the first person is whispered something, they have to whisper it down the line, and the last person has to say it out loud? Yeah, that one. It isn’t always called “Telephone”, I know, but that’s just what I was told to call it), we were told to work in groups constantly. The groups were supposed to form our interpersonal skills, but all they did was make most of us reliant on other people for important information, and make some of us scared to be wrong or appear “stupid” in front of peers. Fast forward to now, and, because most of us are social creatures, we’ve come to apply what we were taught in those group exercises, and still rely on others to get our information. People don’t like to seem “out of the loop”, so they make stuff up in order to seem like they’re more educated on the subject than other people. Later on, newspapers and news programs play on those dependencies.

Okay, there’s the reason behind why rumors are able to be spread, but that doesn’t explain why girls are usually the culprits. My theory? I’ll explain by using Sally. Sally grows up believing she’s a pretty, pretty princess, and pretty, pretty princesses aren’t like icky, icky boys. Pretty, pretty princesses don’t get dirty. At the same time, Sally gets mad at that girl down the street, because she has the same pretty, pretty princess outfit (oh noes!), so Sally tells all her pretty, pretty princess friends that the girl down the street plays like the boys, even though Sally knows it isn’t true. All of the sudden, no one wants to play with the girl down the street because they might get dirty.

Yeah, uh, that actually happened to me, except I really did prefer playing with the boys. Hey, tomboys like to feel pretty, too!

But anyway, the Sally learns that her friends listen to her… And more rumors begin. Every other girl learns to start saying stuff, and a vicious cycle begins.

“But what about the boys?”, you ask. Yeah, they’ve been known to start saying stuff about others, but that usually ends up with a fight. Guys can get their anger out by fighting, and then basically go their separate ways. Girls, on the other hand, have a weapon that can hurt deeper and last longer. Forgive and forget? As if.

Almost everyone’s been the subject of a rumor, or at least knows someone who is/was. I’ve been pregnant since the eighth grade, for crying out loud, have slept with every guy in the school (starting my freshman year), and am a lesbian. Now seriously… It’s getting old. I have guy friends in ever grade, it doesn’t mean I sleep with them (why would I sleep with them, anyway? I don’t find myself sexually attracted to guys, apparently [someone tell my boyfriend])! The note that I supposedly wrote back in eighth grade, where I was giving my then-boyfriend sex advice? Er, that was someone else – I didn’t know that there were different flavored condoms! Haha.

Dear Rumor Fairy: Go the heck away. Love, the World.