The Airhead

We all know the the airhead, that girl who forgets what you told her five minutes, who is oblivious to all chaos around her - fistfights, hurricanes, head on collisions. In fact, we've dated her.

All things being equal, there should be male airheads. But while there are plenty of male idiots, the male airhead almost doesn't exist (except for some dudes I went to high school with who took several hundred hits of LSD).

What I never considered though, was how being an airhead was a defense mechanism, passive resistance. Young women are taught to be nice, not to say 'no', to agree with group, while men are allowed to be surly, obnoxious and poorly groomed.

Faced with these obstacles to expressing her feelings, the young woman turns to the 'airhead' defense. She's smiling, polite, agrees and then proceeds to do exactly what she wanted to do. If you get angry at her, she smiles, apologizes, shrugs. She's young, she's charming, ninety percent of the time she gets away with it.

As woman get older and more assured, they tend drop the airhead defense. After all, the downside of being an airhead is that nobody takes you seriously.