"We hurt you because we love you," says a Lady Master in Lakambini Sitoy's The Sisterhood, one of the short stories off Jungle Planet and Other Stories, which tells of a law student's journey into a nameless sorority in a nameless university.
The thing grips me as it's painfully real - girls together are sometimes the meanest lot, this is the truth. But they're such interesting creatures, aren't they? Like they become this one thing whenever they congregate, and it's impossible to resist the charm of their company, the temptation of their acceptance.
And boys think it's hard being with girls? Try being one.
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Also, I will not deny being guilty of some form of psychological torture similar to this one - it's not as thorough as depicted in the book, but it's similar, and torture just the same, and the applicants are never right and are always in the middle horrible choices. Looking back, it's all a bit... indulgent. (To quote Simon Cowell) And lazy. Like it couldn't have been done some other way? Like it had to be propagated because this was how the Ones Before Us had done it all along? I understand tradition. To some point, I also enjoyed... I don't know, power? Respect. But these days when I bump into these people I had once subjected to these things - children then, full-grown media workers now - there's a sort of shame. We're all the same now. What was the point of that thing before?
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