Schick Quatro "TrimStyle" - one such product made for them girly parts

Pubic hair has become kind of a controversial topic, especially among feminists, who seem to have gotten a reputation for being, well… hairy. But with so little exposure in porn and in the media to what an actual average female looks like… what can we say really? Who knows how many women shave? As far as I know, nobody’s done a poll or drawn up statistics. No one seems to be talking.

Google pubic hair and you’ll find several resources… some of them rather intriguing (You can style it in a Mohawk! You can dye it pink!) but none informative. When women talk about shaving with other women, they often use terrible euphemisms: “shaving the girly parts,” “pruning the garden,” “clearing the entrance,” and so on.

A lot of the anti-shaving argument stems from the idea that shaving is another expression of the male-created archetype of female beauty, mainly through porn. And if you look at porn, few women have any hair at all, usually if they do it’s a thin little strip or extremely well-kept triangle.

I recently had a discussion with my mother who told me that a real woman never removes her public hair, not beyond the crease of the thigh anyways. She told me to “let it grow, let it grow.”  I didn’t have the heart to tell her that she was too late. That eleven months ago on a fateful New Year’s Eve, I did the deed.

natural?

For the first ten minutes after I was extremely upset with myself. “What a stupid idea,” it looked so different so foreign, “That is not my frickin vagina!” But then I saw it in the mirror. Felt my vagina’s presence more than ever had before. And I grew to love it. I’ve kept shaving it since, loving the feeling. It helped put me in touch with my own body.

Many women who shave do it for their husbands or boyfriends. Personally, I haven’t had a male voice dictating what it wants. However, from the stories I’ve heard, men seem to be way too opinionated about the subject.

So my question for all of you: Is there a good way or bad way for a woman to approach shaving? Is shaving your pubes un-feminist? And what do you think is more common? Let’s get talking.

Petracovich

Based out of San Francisco, Petracovich is Jessica Peters with an old-world version of her family name. Her great-grandfather came to the US from Russia at the turn of the century, and one of the only things Peters knows of Abraham Petracovich is that he loved to listen to the New York Opera from the radio in the living room. Out of respect for the music, he would always wear his best suit.

Many years later, his 9 year old great-granddaughter would be at the piano, practicing Chopin and Debussy, which evolved into writing unrequited-love songs in highschool, and spending her 20’s in long, blissful hours on a living-room floor, creating sounds and beats, twisting knobs, tinkering and writing.

The new live show includes drummer Max Diez of Audio Outsend, adding a momentum and dyanamic to these tunes with skill on a standard kit and various shakers and tambourines, and cellist Heather Houseman.  Jessica plays the keys, banjo and loops bells and percussion.

Petracovich just released her third album, Crepusculo, which was recorded two years ago while Peters was pregnant with her first child, Otto, and shelved when he died 8 days after he was born. Now, two years later, she is finally releasing the album and touring behind it while she is pregnant with her second child. A joyful album filled with stories of interesting characters inspired by events in songwriter Jessica Peter’s life including the tale of a wayward father created from a son’s letter that Jessica found in a book on the street, a fantasy about leaving the gridlock behind on a sundown on a traffic-filled freeway which came to her as she was stuck in traffic on her way home from work, hotels overgrown with wildflowers, arrests at gun point and a love affair with her own heart, all sung with heart and truth.

via Petracovich.com

Nighttime

Petracovich on KCRW – San Rafael and others

Check out her myspace. I also love Heaven Help the Day.

Carol Jenkins, WMC Founding President

It’s no secret that the media is dominated by men. The sexist treatment of Clinton and Palin in the election coverage is only one example of how women are viewed as less seriously as men, and certainly as less important in what we consider news. And while the treatment of women in news coverage is abominable, the story behind the scenes in news rooms isn’t much better.

Carol Jenkins, the founding president of the Women’s Media Center, knows all about it, and is working hard to combat it. The Women’s Media Center is a nonprofit advocacy organization that was founded in 2004 to make women more powerful in the media. She is also an Emmy award winning former television anchor and correspondent.

Ms. Jenkins talked with The FBomb about feminism, her career in and opinions about the media, and the Women’s Media Center.

How has your past affected your identity as a feminist? Were there any defining instances in your life that led you to identify as a feminist?

Well actually I come from a very feminist family. Our roots are in Alabama and I come from a farming family. My mother was one of 15 children, 9 girls and 6 boys. All 9 girls went to college and all 6 boys were expected to stay home and farm. All 9 girls became very successful in their careers, and all boys, once farming was done, because they were not as well educated as the girls, had to go into the factories. So you can imagine that there’s still some bitterness in the family. But I think that that the perception that education would be passed along through the women and the fact that they are the ones who should be educated was really, truly feminist and far sighted of my grandparents back in the 1940’s. So I think that that defined our feminism, and I define feminism by equality. If you believe that women should have the equal options and access as men then you’re a feminist, that’s the way I define it. It has nothing to do with male bashing or with axe grinding, it has only to do with equality. I grew up in a feminist family and all of the girls and women always worked. We had the family business; I started working when I was 8. It was a printing business and I could barely see over the top of the table but I was folding: that was my job. So I grew up in an environment of equality, of feminism, so that there never was the defining moment of “Oh, I’m a feminist.” It really was a way of being raised and the way our family – and most of the families- operated at the time. Mother worked side by side with Father to create a business. And every relative I know, male or female, has worked hard to create a life here in this country.

Who have been the most influential women in your life, professionally and/or personally?

Well in my family certainly my mother and my aunt, who is the matriarch, and who were both such hard workers and really effected so many lives. So I have those two tremendous examples of what it took to create a life and to create one that was useful. Of course Gloria Steinem is a friend of mine and Marilyn French is a very good friend of mine, and Esther Bromo we were part of what we called a coven we met 4 times a year – unfortunately Marilyn died this year. But that was very sustaining to me, to be rooted, to have a feminist congregation, to count on having a feminist conversation at least 4 times a year and the support and the thinking. I encourage other women to do that; it’s important to not be alone and to share your information and to support each other. That’s part of the progressive women’s voices – they get as much out of their relationships with each other as they do from the training we provide because they know they’re not alone out there in their work. So Gloria and Marilyn and Esther and coven mates as well as my mother and my aunt: all sort of defining forces.

Were there any clearly sexist instances in your career that put you on this path?

Well certainly in the early days when you were counting the women who were reporters and who were anchors on one hand. And then it got to be two hands: it increased. So I think that my experience – having to fight through those early days first political stories I got were major accomplishments – and I think that watching the two creepiest attempts in broadcast news to seat a women anchor, Barbara Walters and Connie Chung, those were 20 years apart, but essentially the same thing happened – they were rejected. And the way network executives could justify moving them was that the public had rejected them, that the ratings were bad and that people were not ready to hear news from a woman. And then to see Katie Couric just recently do that and almost have the same thing happen to her, what I say is that as a country we really don’t know what women look and sound like. We’re completely unprepared to have them deliver the most important information to us. I think Katie Couric and Hilary Clinton’s race have changed that, so that as a nation for the very first time, which is extraordinary to think about, we have looked at powerful women who have the possibility of changing our lives.

Especially as a former political reporter, how do you feel about the way the media has targeted women in politics recently (Hilary Clinton, Michelle Obama, Sonia Sotomayor)? How do you think this has affected them as candidates?

I remain extremely concerned about this because you mention a lot of strong political women candidates, but when you look at the figures in our congress, we only have 17% women who have won seats and are sitting there. That’s really shocking. And I think the media is to blame for a lot of it. And I think that watching what happened to Clinton and even Sarah Palin was demonstrative of the kind of viciousness and really life unraveling that takes place when you put yourself out there and say you’re going to run for political office. So I do think we need to watch ourselves very carefully and insist that the media does not search and destroy. They do it with male candidates too, but certainly not to the extent that women are torn apart for their looks, their hair, their clothes, their family, can they have a family and serve politically? It’s all absurd. I’ve talked with women who would like to run for political office but are frightened. They don’t want to be destroyed the way they’ve seen other candidates destroyed. So what’s going to happen? We’re going to continue with less than 20% of the important decisions of our lives made by women. It’s an untenable situation and I hold media to blame for a lot of it.

Do you feel that now that the news industry is changing, women have unique opportunities?

I would hope so. I guess the theory is that men made a mess of everything economically so lets see more women, and the question is does it hold for the media as well. What most people don’t understand is that this disparity is so entrenched that it will take I don’t know what to really change it significantly, enough where we can say things are better. In radio – I mean most people think of radio as a medium of the past but many people get their information from it – it’s 85% to 95% a male medium. That’s everybody from ownership to management to people on the air. So there’s a lot of work to be done there to get women to have their own shows and run companies. Women opinion writers — 75% of the people who are paid to write opinion pieces are men. Major papers like the New York Times and the Washington Post the LA Times have 18 or 20 male writers and 1 or 2 women and think that’s okay. So I think that first of all understanding the depth of the disparity, that’s part of our job, that’s what we keep saying, “Look we’ve got a real problem here.” And most of the executives in all media are still occupied by men so that there’s so much work to be done so that things will change, but I wouldn’t say at all that we’re at the point where we’re relaxing. Here are great opportunities. When we go to networks and say, “Sunday morning is the most segregated time span of media. Where are the women, where are the people of color in hosts as well as guests?” And we’ve had media executives actually suggest to us that these are great guys and we can’t take them off the air. And what we think we hear them say is they’re going to die soon, so when they die or retire then maybe that’s the chance to get a woman or person of color. It’s morally corrupt. There should be an equal playing field for the networks. They should have a deep enough bench of women that they’re training and bringing along so that they will have many options as many women and people of color as men do and who are sitting in the seats so we just have some part of a shift there but they only thing that happened was the white men got younger. But we’re looking for the women and people of color.

How does the Women’s Media Center promote diversity in the media? Other than producing statistics and information about this issue, are there more active steps the organization takes?

We meet with the network executives and we talk with editors of newspapers. We give them our statistics, but most importantly we provide them with options. We have our Progressive Women’s Voices – women we’ve been doing intensive media training with. We have the largest media database of women experts and chief sources. So they can’t really say to us that there aren’t any women, which is what they used to say. Thy used to say, “We’d love to have somebody.” And I’d say “Great, we have a wonderful woman, she could build an atom bomb, but she would just rather talk about not using them.” So I think that we realized when we were creating we had to do more than the advocacy part – to talk about the discrepancy. We had to actually provide women. So we train them and we pitch them every single week and we give them a place to write on our website. It’s a site that was created as a place for women to build portfolios and to begin to craft their opinion pieces so that then the next ones could be in mainstream media. So that’s part of the work that we do.

What are your ultimate goals for the future of the media – how would you ideally like to see the media industry change?

I would see it reflecting the society that it’s supposed to serve and I think the reason that old school media is now failing financially is because they failed in their job to reflect the stories of the people of this country so that women and people of color and immigrants and bisexual people do not find themselves in the stories that are told – they’re not finding themselves. And as Gloria has often said, if you’re not in the media, if your stories aren’t told, then you’ll be absent from history. And that’s exactly what has been happening. So to me it will be not only that 50% will be women and there will be many more people of color engaged in the media, but that the stories that are told will reflect the lives, because that to me is the mandate of the media. It’s one thing to be informed– that’s part of the media, you need to be informed. But also media saves lives. The difference between life and death is often in the information that is passed on through the media, so it’s not only intellectual, it’s a visceral mechanism that has to engage all people in this country and the world. Because when you look at the statistics it’s not just our media that excludes women. If you look at the statistics, 85% of every story that’s told around the world has to do with a man. Even if it’s about a woman, it’s a man telling the story about the woman. The net result is that women and people of color are being left out of history. On the one hand I have thrill of new media and the possibility of telling your story without spending millions of dollars. So it’s the cost effective way of providing information and news and connection and all of that. But I’m also worried about it because what it’s done is fractured our country. We no longer have a public square where people get all information. Some of the stories about Walter Cronkite – he had an audience of 22 million people. The networks don’t have that anymore. It’s niche, it’s siloed – we go to the sites that attract us. So we never come together as a country anymore to get information at one time. That’s what I’m worried about.

How do you see my generation of girls in America today in relation to the media?

Well you give me great hope. You’re an example of the results of all of our hard work. The fact that you understand the media and have a voice and are making waves out there is just fabulous and it just makes my heart full. It’s exciting because when I started in the media back in 1970 it was really difficult. I wasn’t the very first wave, because people like Barbara Walters had been there before, but certainly still early enough that women were the exception rather than the rule. There was very difficult backlash and it was difficult working with film crews. Difficult getting the really good stories, the tough assignments, getting credit, becoming anchors — all of it was just such a struggle. So I think that I’m very optimistic about young women who understand the media and are using it to get their points across.

Do you have any advice for teenage feminists today?

Do not be discouraged by any adverse reaction to the term feminism because it’s still out there, it’s still vicious, and just keep saying this is a question of equality – are you telling me that women are less than men. And I think that an important thing is to not be afraid, to use that word because you will be attacked for it but I think you need to know in your heart that this is not a dirty word, you are fighting for a human right and a right for women to have the same rights as anybody else. So it’s a valued effort. I would say to embrace the feminist word, to not be afraid of it, but also use any other words that essentially mean the same thing. Understand in your heart that this is what you’re talking about. And also create these universes, don’t stay alone in your feminism – band together, create groups, because the more people you have with you the more power you have, so getting together and if you have a complaint to make as I’m sure you know you’re only 10 people, people could probably ignore you, but if you’re 1,000 if you’re 10,000 and lord how many young women do we have in this country if we ever get a mechanism so that they respond in one voice then girls will not be ignored. I think we have a serious problem with the self-esteem of our young women, the opportunities that they will have. But I think that I’m optimistic about the future. I see such smart young women who make us feel that we can step aside and say, “Job well done.” Because here they come.

yay diversity and stereotypes

This post occurs at the same boarding school where girls have to wear pastel dresses for commencement. Ah, the bright future that lies ahead of us as the esteemed, Ivy-Leagued educated CEO’s wives…

Another tradition (among many) that irritates me is International Night. This is an evening event hosted by yours truly, ASB, where the student body celebrates its diversity through ethnic dinners, performances, and finally, dance. The motivation behind the event is truly commendable: a campus fraught with students from various regions around the world takes benefit of its diversity and celebrates it. However, when applied, it becomes a crow-pleaser—a victim of superficiality.

As an avid critic of school events, I have never attended this event since my freshmen year (a traumatizing event we won’t get to…) but in order to be a good friend, I decided to go since many of my friends were performing. What greeted me as I entered the supposed “microcosm of the world” were pathetic backdrops and amateur decorations: the Sri Lanka section had exotic drapes of different pastel-slash-neon colors and the China section had the famous lanterns. I don’t know a lot about the cultures represented last night, but I am pretty certain that the atmosphere was, at best, quasi. The next irritating aspect was the food. Each booth had catered food from decent restaurants around the campus, but an absence of truly representative food made the menus from each booths all identical.

After meandering around aimlessly, I finally sat down for the performances, completely unaware that I would be even more disturbed. There were some great moments: many student performers took their responsibilities seriously and maintained poise throughout the show. The Spanish folk song, Chinese traditional dance, and Bollywood dance were superb! The majority of performers, however, were giggling, indifferent, and ditzy. The girls in Chinese sword dance were giggling, desperate to make eye-contact with their man-friends in the audience; some of them looked like they didn’t want to be there (then why are you wasting my time?). The next was the Hawaiian hula. Strategically, they had the regular-hula-practitioner at the front to charm the audience, hoping that their inability to shake their pelvises would be undermined by the leader’s grace. But I saw through that.

typical hula dancing outfit. sextastic.

First, the boys were not fully dressed: they were shirtless, as if to flaunt their pubescent sexuality and they had forgotten to tuck in their underpants (I never knew that hula dance outfits consisted of blue checkered underpants). Then the girls. Oh, how visible it was that they girls were lured by the revealing aspect of the hula outfit. Instead of paying attention to perfecting their dance moves, they were busy pulling their skirts up. But alas, this was only the beginning.

What followed was an Israeli hip-hop where the group’s mentality was that if you play an Israeli music despite the very-American sweatpants and very-American moves, the dance can be officially categorized as “Israeli.” Not only was the dance pathetic to look at (since physically-challenged person like I could imitate), but the attitude of the group, frankly, infuriated me. Girls stood with their hair down and flirted surreptitiously (but visibly) with their partners and the whole purpose of the dance was not in conveying the Israeli culture, but rather in presenting how popular they were in school.

Perhaps I was being too critical, but in my mind nothing about the evening was international—it was pathetic.. I commend the school’s efforts to take advantage of the diversity but it has clearly failed to add some gravity to the event. These are people’s cultures we are trying to understand through festivities. Chinese culture has more than Panda Express and the Israeli hip hop is not about the sweats. Not to mention the implicit gender discrepancies. It was so evident that the girls had joined to flaunt their bodies and boys to have access to them (I guess the need to flirt and mate is an international theme). The entirety of the evening undermined the richness of cultures and amplified how stupid my peers are.

My conclusion: there was a reason in never attending this event for the past three years.

2010 Super Bowl

This year I, like nearly 100 million other Americans, will watch the super bowl. However, this fact has very little to do with the game of football. I have no idea what occurs in this game, and if you asked me to name more than 3 football games I’d probably just walk away. The few times I’ve gone to see my high school team play I’ve left even more confused than before. No, I watch the super bowl for the ads.

Let’s be honest, the ads are awesome. About 99% of the time I watch T.V. ads make me want to bang my  head against a cement block repeatedly (a lethal combination of sexist and stupid), Super Bowl ads are different. First of all, they’re well put together because…well they have to be for that  much money and that big an audience. And if they’re not “good” they at least bring people together – as does the sporting event as a whole.

Remember the Magic Fridge?

Now, the merits of this commercial are certainly debatable, sure. But I remember kids at school were talking about it for days afterwards. Not in the “yay alcohol” way but in the “haha that was funny” way…just to be clear.

But not this year. This year the topic of Super Bowl Ads is tearing people right down the middle…right along the lines us feminists know very well. Yep. Pro-life  versus pro-choice will rear its adorable little head in an unusual place: an audience of predominately drunk men.

Christian group Focus on the Family has paid about $2.5 million to run an ad focusing on football player Tim Tebow and the fact that his mother was told to have an abortion, didn’t, then gave birth to one of the greatest college football players ever.

While I do think it’s unfair to completely condemn this commercial before having ever seen it, I did check out Focus on the Family’s website. They advocate complete abstinence outside of marriage, with this winner of a paragraph included: Looking at the history of teen birth rates, it can appear that rates have lowered significantly and that there’s less reason to educate our youth about sexuality. The rates have in fact decreased, but the higher historical numbers represent married teens. And, married teens tend to face less life-long negative consequences of teenage births than unmarried teens.

Yep, that's Tim Tebow. With the bible verses under his eyes.

No. We need sex education. We need it. And I’m sorry, what are these life-long negative consequences that teens are facing by marrying their high school sweethearts because of an accident? Not that I’m saying that never works, but honestly, why does that make everything better?

Although, at the same time, they do have what I will term “not-negative” articles on homosexuality and transgenderism.

So, yeah, I don’t want to completely judge the organization Focus on the Family or the commercial (especially since I haven’t seen it yet) but honestly, the fact that CBS is willing to run a commercial that is taking any type of definitive stance on a controversial issue is just not okay in my book. Honestly, I don’t think the Super Bowl is the right place to address this issue, even if Focus on the Family spokesperson, Gary Schneeberger, believes that, “there is nothing political or controversial about the spot” and that it’s just about “family values.”

Whether or not the ad uses the words “abortion” or “pro-life” doesn’t mean America will look at what they’re seeing as unbiased. The message here seems to be “abortion is a mistake.” The only mistake is not viewing this as an issue of choice. Tim Tebow’s mother had a choice: she chose not to have an abortion. That we’re incapable of viewing this situation as a choice is the real problem.

Can’t we just leave the Super Bowl as one of the very few times our country comes together? We lose this and we’re left with very few times that that actually happens.

Source: Rachel Papo, “Hanging Out on the Weekend.” 2005.

I have always thought the Jewish coming of age ritual for a girl was a Bat Mitzvah, the grasp of the Torah in ceremoniously manicured hands a rite of passage. Rachel Papo’s photographs show me that the coming of age for Jewish women in another hemisphere is the army, the positioning of a weapon in expecting hands a passage to a nationality that overrides patriarchal assumptions of femininity.

The United States military continues to be dominated by men. Masculinity continues to be conflated with violence and weaponry with notoriously phallic connotations. Maybe because of their minority status (women make up 20 percent of the US armed forces) and maybe because of the rampant macho-ism army institutions promote, one in three female soldiers will experience sexual assault while serving in the military, compared to one in six women in the civilian world. Women in the military are a shock to the system here, but what happens in a country that has always used women in the armed forces and that has one of the strongest armies in the world?

Well, according to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, today women represent a third of all soldiers in the Israeli Defense Forces, and can be deployed in 90 percent of all positions within the IDF. Men serve a compulsory three years in the army, and women serve shorter terms, usually around two years, depending on their roles. However, most women do not serve in combat: during the Second Lebanon War in 2006, around 1,500 women served in combat jobs, approximately 2.5 percent of female conscripts. And according to a 2008 military survey, one of seven female soldiers in the Israeli Defense Forces report that they have been victims of sexual harassment or assault.

So how different is the Israeli Army and its compulsory service different from the American army, in terms of women? Not just in terms of assault, for which the numbers do seem less grim, but also in terms of what they feel their roles should be. One difference is that women must serve, so that women’s army service is not considered an anomaly. But what makes women not want to serve in combat units? The age-old idea that women’s lives should be protected by men so that they can raise children?

From my personal experience with friends and family in the Israeli army, many men, from as young as 13 or 14, plan and train for getting into elite combat units in the army. Since army service comes before college, many Israelis, mainly boys, spend their high school days planning their future in the army in the same way that Americans study for the SATs. And from what I’ve seen, combat units mean glory to boys: no one wants to be a “jobnick,” someone who sits in an office and files paperwork, to such an extent that the word “jobnick” can be used as a derogatory term. But with girls most of this does not seem to apply—many girls that I know hope to become jobnicks, knowing that they will be able to stay close to home and stay out of the trenches. The statistics show that if women want, they can and do serve in combat units, but Israeli culture still seems to be saying that women shouldn’t want to. Can joining the army really be considered a coming of age for women, when for many women it is just perceived as a duty?

Photo Source: Rachel Papo, “Hanging Out on the Weekend.” 2005.

Shira and Dina have their own blog about progressing Jewish feminism: From the Rib?

Eliza Doolittle

Eliza Doolittle – strong of opinion, smiley of face, loud of tights – is the freshest girl on the block. London born and raised, she knows about the stresses of modern city life, teenage aggro, old soul and the appeal of simple, strong melodies built from clanking percussion and jazzy licks.

“Every song is an individual song,” she says of her debut album. “And the sound is just really happy and summery and light and breezy, but with thoughtful lyrics.” Her attitude, whether on-mic, in-studio or onstage, is not that of a high-maintenance diva. “You pick up something, you just play it…I love that whole sound – really simple – where you can just put it together and anyone can play it.”

Raised by a piano-playing dad and singing mum, Eliza’s been writing songs since she was 12. Her first songs came quickly, with Eliza eventually writing songs on the piano at 15. “Mr. Mysterious” was one of the first – I was listening to Destiny’s Child, and I thought I had to write about a boy. It actually put me off writing about boys forever,” she laughs.

“I would never have been able to be Britney or anything like that – someone who just sings. I love being involved with every bit of the music, making it from scratch. It’s really fulfilling.”

And Eliza Doolittle believes in herself – no record company makeover for this young woman, no spin’n’slap’n'tickle courtesy of stylists and scenesters and hipsters. “Kicks and funky tights and cute dresses, that’s me. I’m not saying no to high heels but I just feel more comfortable in this.”

via EMI Music

Skinny Genes

Rollerblades

There are a lot of things that suck about high school. For one, getting up after about four hours of sleep because of some ridiculous paper I forgot was due and started at 11. Also, having to pick out an outfit that won’t make me look like I escaped from a mental institution. Another one is the “boyfriend” issue. I always get asked by parents (mine AND others) and other various clueless adults seeking insight into our world, if having a boyfriend is still all that important to girls. Without even getting into the “it’s not an assumption that all teenage girls are heterosexual…it’s a fact in my mind” issue of misguided adults, they also reason that girls have as many extra-curriculars as boys (as if boys used to be our after school activity?), and we are more independent (okay…) so why is having one still as important?

Now, I personally can only speak to why girls have boyfriends, but the first thing they have to realize is that girls don’t have boyfriends because they’re so ridiculously insecure and desperate that they can’t exist without some guy agreeing to pay for their pizza every once in a while. Well…most of the time.

First, there’s the obvious fact of our raging hormones. I think people underestimate girls and their hormones. Just because we’re capable of controlling them doesn’t mean we’re not as affected as guys. I know I have a friend whose conversational repertoire is that of eating and hooking up. She’s actually worse than most guys I know. I’m not sure that’s really something to be proud of, that some girls are that single minded, but its true and its something that’s accepted for boys.

Mostly, I think it’s because having a boyfriend is fun. A boyfriend (a good boyfriend, anyway) is there for you when you want to talk and generally cares about you.

Also, it seems like a lot of the time girls have boyfriends so that people will pay attention. Like, on facebook, everyone knows that that little heart symbol is the most clicked on link in the mini-feed. You’re announcing to everyone that someone likes you; someone thinks you’re pretty, funny, nice, whatever: you’re worth it. A lot of the time that real connection isn’t even there: its just affirmation.

So, there’s status. Even if two people who aren’t popular at ALL get together, they’re talked about. Even if no one cared about him or her singularly, together they get talked about, even if it is in more of a surprised way than a jealous way.

I don’t think having a boyfriend is bad. I don’t think it’s anti-feminist. People at my school assume I don’t have a boyfriend because I’m a feminist (or that I’m a lesbian. They’re very creative). I guess they think that the only way a girl can be independent is if she doesn’t have that overwhelming influence of a guy. Well, guess what? Girls can still have their own opinions AND have boyfriends! Yes, we ARE able to overcome the overwhelming power and intellect of teenage boys! Their extreme brilliance and ideals do NOT sway us in any way! Puh-lease. Teenage boys don’t know what the hell is going on.

I know in my life, having a boyfriend has made a difference. Even if its not really discussed or pointed out, I know when I’ve been in relationships, some girls (who also had boyfriends or who just think they’re hot) would talk to me more, respect me more (because that’s just a display of my talent-Look, I caught one!). But the thing is the difference was never personal. I was always the same person, just treated differently.

So my question is this: why or why don’t you have a boyfriend? Status? Fun? All of the above?

Mean Girls: not always the truth

It may have been my simplistic seven-year-old view of the world that made me categorize everyone into ‘good’ and ‘bad’, but I soon got over it with the help of time, and even things like movies. Still, there was one kind of movie that never seemed to stretch that idea of good and bad, that always seemed to use the same archetypes, and frankly, that scared me.

Yes, I’m talking about the high school flick.The protagonist? The new girl, warm-hearted, pretty, smart. The antagonist? A typically blonde, vapid creature, who is usually captain of the cheerleading squad and always vain. Most of the time, the plots aren’t too creative either–our evil, sputtering antagonist realizes that new girl is a threat to her popularity, especially after new girl catches her boyfriend’s attention. So, antagonist comes up with some nasty ploy to destroy new girl and keep 1st place in the popularity contest.

Fast forward, though, to my first day at my own new high school, one of the best and most expensive in Jordan. I was given a scolarship to go there, and it was well-acknowledged that this school was for the diplomats’ sons and daughters, the children of rich businessmen. This, of course, terrified me. Not only was I afraid of being outcast as one of the scholarship students,  but also of finding myself in one of ‘those’ high schools, the ones I’d seen far too many times on T.V.

Neither happened. I’ll speak for myself, because as an overall uninvolved girl who likes to be on good terms with everyone in a relatively small school, I’m probably not the best person to give advice on this. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying my fellow high school girls are entirely peaceful creatures–I’ve seen girls bitch-calling and holding months-long grudges and I’ve been slapped by a best friend who claimed I was flirting with her crush. So, I don’t think it’s that we’re innately programmed to act like the cast of Mean Girls. I think it’s just that we’ve seen so many movies like it that we start noticing the little similarities–like, we see a girl who’s popular–and we immediately make a connection.

And if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s never to take another high school flick seriously, because I’ve seen some girls who could fit in the ‘vicious cheerleader’ stereotype, and hey, they’re not so vicious after all.