Woman to Women

Catty Remarks, Cloaked in Sugar

Avoiding the sting of the jellyfisher

-Jennifer Lubell

One of the best moments in Helen Fielding's book Bridget Jones, the Edge of Reason is when our heroine comes face to face with the jellyfisher. "Bridge, how's it going with Mark? You must be really pleased to get a boyfriend at last. Is it heaven?" Bridget's nemesis, Rebecca, asks of her new relationship with the ever-elusive Mark Darcy.

The little gem at the end of that sentence is "at last."

This is a woman we've all met before: the snarky little witch who, in a matter of seconds, can stealthily and cunningly cut you down about your weight, your age and your lack of male companionship. "Suddenly something stings you and next thing everything is back to normal except a bit of you really hurts," Bridget wrote in her diary of her experience with the jellyfisher.

Women and men are taught different combat skills from a very early age. Guys will happily pound each other with fists, swords or, in some cases, light sabers in order to work out their aggression toward one another. Women, on the other hand, are told they must sit on their little chairs, stir their tea, smooth out the wrinkles in their dresses and act like ladies.

With society pushing its rules and mores on us, women have little choice but to engage in a more subtle kind of warfare, delivering cloaked insults encased in sugar and honey and produced with a smile on our faces.

Kathryn, a former coworker, comes to mind. I remember those big, kewpie-doll eyes, that aristocratic little face and even teenier voice that would launch one zinger after another, against me. When our boss announced that she was looking for artists among us to draw cartoons for the newspapers we produced, I made the mistake of acting excited in front of Kathryn.

"Well...do you honestly think you could DO something like that?" she said, looking at me with those big, round eyes. "I think someone like Sally [her best friend in the office, who had recently taken a class in illustration] might be better at it."

Her comment didn't just sting me. Jellyfishers have a way of making us doubt ourselves or feel just plain stupid.

That's the way I felt when my cousin Julie tripped up the stairs to my apartment after seeing my newest purchase, a green Toyota Tercel. Almost immediately, she told me that she and her husband had taken the exact same model for a test drive and found that it was "slow on pickup."

"Was that your experience?" she asked me innocently.

At that point, I felt like strapping her into my new car and pummeling down the highway at 90 miles an hour. Risking a ticket would have been worth it, to scare the crap out of her and wipe that smug look off her face.

Jellyfishers will always be around in dark waters to sting us with their tentacles. The only way to handle them is to look them in the eye and say something completely disarming in return, such as "Thanks. Hope you feel better now."

Another option, I suppose, is to avoid them completely as they wash up on the shore, and wait until the tide sweeps them away again.

Do you have any tried-and-true retorts for women who try to beat you down with snotty words or catty comments?