Books: not for guys, apparently

Flashback: It is the first week of 11th Grade. Having gone to the same school since kindergarten, I have no need for first day back-jitters or thinking what to wear to impress my peers. I wear what I like and that usually ends up being some lurid mod dress I bought at a thrift store because I enjoy wearing happy clothes when I seem endlessly angsty.

There is a new kid in our grade. Let’s call him Andrew. I do not make any effort to talk to him because, honestly, I generally don’t talk to people outside of the small set of friends that I already have. Perhaps this is due to my aspirations as a fashion journalist or the fact that growing up an only child has made me this way, but I have always had a highly anthropological take on my peers. Either way, I won’t sugarcoat it: I make observations about people based on their appearances and the behaviors I observe. This makes me sound super creepy and possibly even shallow, but I like to think of myself more as The Harriet The Spy type character. The kind that sits with her notebook, takes notes on the people in her class and then writes about it.

Anyways, judging by “Andrew’s” appearance we don’t seem to have anything in common. He wears extra-small t-shirts to show off his muscles and I’ve noticed that he rarely eats which I’m told is so he can make it into a lower weight class for wrestling. Oh, what the hell, I figure, he’s new and sitting alone, I’ll give him a chance! He’s not so bad.

A week or so later, I check back in on him in a free period. He’s in the midst of a conversation with my friend and I decide to eavesdrop. I overhear them talking about books. I like books so this seems to be something we all have in common. Maybe he isn’t so bad after all. But then he opens his mouth again.

“What do you mean you are reading Pride and Prejudice?” he says to my (guy) friend. “Guys don’t read books.”

I can’t help myself. I burst out laughing. It’s one of those bizarre statements where you’re not sure if the person just has an unusual sense of humor or if they actually just said the most stupid thing that you’ve ever heard. Apparently it is the latter. It is not my conversation but I cut-in anyway.

“Wait, what? What do you mean guys don’t read books?” I say.

“I mean that girls actually read books. Guys shouldn’t have to. They should just SparkNote them.”

I think this is such an eschewed, sexist perception of reality that in no way makes sense to me. Hobbies don’t have genders…especially something as basic and necessary as reading.

One of my favorite quotes of all time was said by Daria, a cartoon character from 1990s MTV: “People call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.” You see, it’s as if my parents prophesized that at the ripe old age of 16 I would proudly call myself one. Being a feminist has nothing to do with what you wear or your sexual orientation, it simply means that you believe men and women should be treated equally. Period. The boy, “Andrew” that I was telling you about and I get into a verbal match that escalates, until finally he walks away. Whether or not he acknowledges the rhetoric I’ve just spat at him, I nonetheless feel triumphant like I have suddenly overcome something big. I don’t know what then but I will soon enough.

Emma also has her own blog, The Emma Edition

As much as my generation seems to support Facebook, I believe that underneath all that tagging and friending, there’s a deep-seated resentment that we’ve had to grow up in a world where it’s the norm to share your relationship status with strangers.

I’ve blogged before about the issues I think Facebook creates for teenage girls, and I’ve heard a lot more of my peers agreeing with me about the perils and annoyances of Facebook. My Facebook blog last year received more comments than any other piece I’ve posted, and it seems that many others share my attitude about Facebook: I wish that Facebook didn’t exist, yet I still have a Facebook for several reasons.

I hope to debunk the myth that all teenagers are drinking the facebook Kool-Aid and pose the question: will my generation ultimately defect from Facebook? Believe it or not, grownups, I don’t think I’ve ever heard a kid my age say they “love Facebook,” a two word pairing adults seem to imagine us uttering all the time. Clearly, despite its popularity, Facebook still strikes a lot of people in my generation as having negative impacts.

At this point, you’re probably wondering why I keep my Facebook. In a nutshell, I have a Facebook because I’ve always been afraid that deactivating it would cause my friendships with certain people to suffer. I have a lot of friends who I don’t go to school with, including friends from other countries who I’ve met through international programs I’ve attended. I also use Facebook to communicate with classmates about schoolwork and organize logistics for clubs.

Finally, I use Facebook because no one in my generation checks their email! Teenagers reading this: WTF? Like, maybe I’m being retro and old in saying this but email is a great way to communicate—and if any of you used it, I wouldn’t have to be so dependent on Facebook!

A few weeks ago, I set out to interview my friend, and Rachel Simmons’s former teen blogger, Lilly about her recent disappearance from Facebook. That’s right…Lilly is a Facebook defector. I went into my conversation with Lilly especially curious about three topics: friends, schoolwork, and email.

Lilly told me she abandoned Facebook this September, but that she’s wanted to do it for a long time. She’d resisted because she’d always thought that after she got to college, deactivating her Facebook would make it difficult to keep in touch her high school friends, a concern I definitely identified with.

I asked her about the strain on her friendships with these people. Lilly told me that she still communicates with many of them through text messaging and email (woohoo! What what!), but that it’s certainly true that she’s lost touch with some people by deactivating her Facebook. “It’s been very indicative of who my true friends are,” Lilly told me, “My birthday was on the 31st and it was definitely interesting to see who remembered without facebook there to remind them.” Lilly said she didn’t want to be part of such vapid measurements of relationships and that quitting facebook has helped her do this.

Lilly also talked about the pressure to cultivate a perfect persona through one’s Facebook profile or as she puts it, pressure to constantly be your own PR person. “The whole language of Facebook stalking really irks me. That’s so sad that that’s what our interactions have become. They’re so diluted. No one says on their profile…‘I’m really messy and I sorta suck sometimes.’”

Lilly said she still finds out about school events, clubs, and homework assignments, although she said she is sometimes the last to find out about parties. “Sometimes it means, you know, showing up at a party and not realizing it’s a costume party until you get there,” Lilly said, laughing. But, these are small issues Lilly is more than willing to deal with.

“It was just taking up so much time. I didn’t realize until I got rid of it how instinctual checking Facebook was for me.”

When I asked Lilly if she ever thought she’d return to Facebook, she told me that, although she had been planning on going back over winter break, she really doesn’t want to. “I don’t think I’ll ever want to go back to having it,” Lilly said, “And when I tell people I don’t have a Facebook, they sort of get this look on their faces…like they get it.”

After my conversation with Lilly I felt both more tempted to ditch Facebook and more frightened to do so. Facebook is such an integral part of all of our lives, yet many of us seem to be noticing its flaws more and more. I’m still not sure if I’m big enough to take the plunge…are you?

Originally posted on Rachel Simmon’s website. Check out Fiona’s own blog, Barbara’s Angels.

who will you be left with when you break up?

In high school (and in life) people learn that they have to have priorities. Do grades come before sports? Do friends come before family? Does my boyfriend come before everyone/everything else? After a year and a half of high school (only two and a half left – yippie!) I feel that I have a pretty good sense of how high school relationships function. Many of my friends, teammate and classmates have had boyfriends or girlfriends and so have I and what has become very obvious is that people more often than not choose their boyfriend/girlfriend over their friends, which I think is really damaging.

It’s not secret that teenagers’ hormones are raging all the time. Walking into a high school is basically like walking into a hurricane of hormones. Unfortunately, this not only has the obvious effect of making teens horny ALL THE TIME but also blinding them. A few of my very good friends started to isolate themselves once they got into relationships. This didn’t happen because their boyfriends cut them off from everybody else, but because those girls decided to pick the boy over their friends.

It’s a terrible situation. These girls forget about friends and family. Some of my friends look like lost puppies when they are not with their boyfriends. When these couples are together they even start kissing in the middle of a conversation! When they are apart they only talk about their boyfriend or their relationship problems. Honestly after more than a year and a half, having to hear about how someone thinks their boyfriend might be cheating on them gets ridiculously old. One girl I am friends with only texts me when she is worried about her boyfriend at a party, when her boyfriend doesn’t have cell reception or when she needs my opinion on their relationship. It is not cute to be attached at the hip. It doesn’t mean you’re so in love. It’s just distracting and makes girls/boys lose who they truly are. They begin to define themselves by that relationship which is a huge problem.

In my experience, this immaturity leads to a lack of trust, which is not only bad for those girls’ relationships but bad for our friendship. Over the past 6 months, my friends have been getting livid at me whenever I talk to their boyfriends. One of my friends said that the only reason I’ve been wearing make up and dressing nicely lately was just to impress her boyfriend. Needless to say I was furious because I don’t change to impress anyone but myself. I only started doing those things because my older sister said that getting ready in the morning wakes you up (which if people know how much coffee I need to drink to wake up they would understand) and also it’s the holiday season and I am happy during the holidays so why not spend a little extra time feeling nice? Of course our friends started picking sides – single friend versus girl with boyfriend – which caused so much unnecessary stress and anxiety not to mention that it weakened our once strong friendship.

Finally, what happens when these couples break up? All hell breaks lose. The person that gets broken up with (usually the clingy one) calls the dumper a “dick” or “asshole” or “tool” and many other insults. That person starts using other people to get back at the original boyfriend/girlfriend.  But after all that drama dies down, (hopefully) that person realizes that because they isolated themselves, because they accused good friends of trying to steal their significant other, they are left with fewer people who actually cared about them but got sick of being treated badly. Is it worth ending up completely without strong friendships because you thought a boy was forever? Probably not.

Anyways the point of this (other than ranting) is that we need to be able to love ourselves first. We should prioritize the people in our lives that want to be there because they care, not some high school fling. Lady Gaga says it best when she stated, “Some women choose to follow men, and some women choose to follow their dreams. If you’re wondering which way to go, remember that your career will never wake up and tell you that it doesn’t love you anymore.”

Anita Hill

On October 15th, I had the honor of participating in the “Sex, Power and Speaking the Truth: Anita Hill 20 Years Later” conference. I spoke on an intergenerational panel that also featured speakers Kimberle Crenshaw, Virginia Valian, Gloria Steinem and Devon Carbado, which was terrifying and beyond humbling, but also probably one of the coolest things I’ve ever had the opportunity to do. Using your feedback about sexual harassment and my own observations, I pulled together a speech that I thought reflected our generation’s attitudes towards sexual harassment.

I’m beyond late sharing this with the FBomb community, but I hope you enjoy it and would still love to hear your reactions to my speech or any of the other panelists’ speeches and your thoughts about sexual harassment today.

The whole conference was televised by CSPAN, so you can watch my panel here (my part starts at about 1:18:30). Otherwise, here’s an approximate version of the transcript.

TRANSCRIPT:

Founding and running the FBomb, a blog written for and by teenage feminists, has been rewarding in innumerable ways. But I think the most valuable aspect of editing the writing and comments of teenage girls and boys from all over the world has been the insight I’ve gained into the main obstacles my generation feels we face. On the FBomb, my peers have written about everything from personal struggles with body image to double standards to the sexist media coverage of female political candidates to – yes –sexual harassment.

In fact, I recently asked the FBomb community what they thought about sexual harassment – what their opinions were or if they had any stories to tell. Unsurprisingly, the community unanimously responded that sexual harassment is unequivocally wrong, and that we all think it’s ridiculous that it still occurs in 2011. What I found interesting, however, were the stories people chose to share about their experiences with sexual harassment. Specifically, they shared stories that contained a notable lack of action. One commenter described how she was sexually solicited by an older male mentor, then made to feel guilty about refusing him. She was left wondering if he had originally taken an interest in her because he thought she was smart, or just because he might get lucky. Another commenter described how a male peer tried to take off her bathing suit during a middle school swim lesson. Neither did anything about these instances, but admitted they felt horrible about them.

So why, even when we know it’s wrong, do girls still fail to act against sexual harassment? Why don’t we do something about it? Why don’t we speak out against it?

Well, there are probably countless reasons why many girls remain silent — reasons that vary greatly depending on the individual. But, overall, I think there are a few main reasons why girls today still endure sexual harassment.

First, I think we need to look at the gender conditioning we still impose on young children. Despite decades of feminist action, despite the strides we’ve made, I think my generation was still raised with gender stereotypes firmly intact. We still grew up with a social structure that encourages boys to pursue girls and girls to chastely refuse. Because while my generation, the so-called “hook up” generation, may find ways around this, while girls my age may acceptably pursue boys, while our definitions of relationships may have changed, we are still very aware that this archaic structure is our baseline. It is the guideline we must ultimately revert to. And that is incredibly problematic.

The bottom line is boys still believe that they have an inherent entitlement. Many boys still feel that they are allowed to say whatever they want to girls and solicit them in any way they see fit. How else could a group of Yale frat boys march around their campus last year chanting, “No means yes and yes means anal”?

This gender conditioning doesn’t just affect boys, though. There is, sadly, still a large percentage of young women who take these comments as compliments, who see these predatory actions as flattering attention. Because, just as guys are trained to pursue women, girls are still told that our main role is to attract men. We’re taught to compete with our female peers for the most attention, and accept any and all attention we do get.

But even if we reject such harassment, even if we stand up against it, the fact is that we still live in a victim blaming culture. Consider some of the major news headlines of the past year alone. A police officer in Toronto told members of my generation that what we wear determines whether or not we will be raped. When reading the New York Times coverage of the gang-rape of an 11-year-old in Cleveland, Texas, we noted that the reporter quoted her neighbors as saying she wore make up and dressed inappropriately. Our generation is paying attention to all of this. We are internalizing this. And this is evident in even the most superficial aspects of our lives. I think the best example is, when girls my age heard that pop-singer Rihanna was physically assaulted by her boyfriend, singer Chris Brown, many of us – too many of us — asked, “Well what did she do to force him to hit her?”

This is how we’re so easily able to write off sexual harassment. We still look at claims of sexual harassment and first doubt the woman, because that is what we are trained to do. We think any woman who claims she was sexually harassed is probably over reacting, or the whole thing was probably her fault. We blame the victim because that is what credible people, like police officers, and credible news sources do. So why wouldn’t we?

Another significant problem my generation faces with sexual harassment is that we’re still not sure exactly what it is, and I think this stems back to our attitudes towards the feminist movement at large.

For my peers and me, feminism is no longer a fight against obvious obstacles. We won Roe v. Wade. We won Title IX. The list goes on. No, feminism for my generation, for the most part, is not about “getting” rights. It’s about preserving them. Feminism for my generation has largely become a much more subtle fight, full of nuance.

And this is where it becomes complicated for my generation to integrate our feminist beliefs and values into our daily lives. Because while my generation as a whole may be passionate about fighting injustices, while we may theoretically be able to identify what is acceptable and what is not, we find it difficult to recognize the same injustices we speak against on a theoretical level within the contexts of our own lives. We have a semblance of understanding, a superficial acknowledgment of “right” and “wrong.” But it doesn’t always permeate our actions. And I think our relationship with sexual harassment is a perfect example of this paradox.

As a whole, young women undeniably reject sexual harassment: we know that it is wrong and is something that should be fought. I think a lot of this understanding is a direct result of Anita Hill’s courageous decision to publically fight against sexual harassment. Yes, she did so when many of us were very young or (like in my case) before we were even born. Unfortunately, far too few of us even know who she is. But even though we didn’t necessarily witness her actions first hand, they undeniably impacted our lives. Because of Anita Hill, we were born into an environment in which sexual harassment is taken seriously, in which it is legally considered a serious, unacceptable offense.

Yes, in theory, my generation is completely intolerant of sexual harassment and knows that it’s unacceptable. Yet, the same young women who say they’re opposed to sexual harassment often end up enduring it. Because, like many other forms of sexism, sexual harassment in real life doesn’t always have a huge flashing arrow pointing itself out to us. And yet, we expect that it will. We expect that sexual harassment will always take the form of a man physically grabbing us on the street. We think sexual harassment means our boss demanding that we sleep with him if we want to keep our jobs. We don’t think of sexual harassment as uncomfortable come-ons. We don’t think of sexual harassment as comments made to us on the street. We don’t think of sexual harassment as the “uncomfortable” jokes guys in our classes sometimes make. And yet it is.

Whereas many offices and workplaces routinely have seminars and workshops about sexual harassment, the same does not occur in high schools, or even in middle schools. Our exposure to the concept of sexual harassment – as is the case with many things for my generation – is largely delivered to us through the media. Most often, it is presented as humor. It is made fun of and it is belittled. And this is how the line can get blurred – this is how we can experience sexual harassment but feel unsure about whether or not we really did, or what to do about it.

Basically, there’s something missing between the surface communication that sexual harassment is wrong and understanding and integration of this principle into our own lives. We know the “right answer” we’re supposed to give – sexual harassment is bad — but we don’t always remember the right answer when the hypothetical becomes real.

However, this is not the reality for all of us. There are many young women who are taking action, who are speaking out against sexual harassment and refusing to tolerate it any longer.

I think this is evident from the recent SlutWalks, in which young women marched in the street protesting our victim-blaming culture.

I think this is evident from Hollaback, an organization started by young women that encourages other women, to post pictures of the men who sexually harass us online, and therefore hold them accountable for their actions.

I think this is even evident from recent legal cases, in which young women did fight sexual harassment. 2007 brought the case of Simpson v. University of Colorado Boulder, in which female university students brought charges against fellow male university students who sexually harassed and assaulted them at a party and held the University accountable for their past indifference about such matters. The same year, we witnessed the case of Jennings v. University of North Carolina, in which a female university soccer player brought charges against her coach, who sexually harassed her and her fellow teammates. Both cases were ruled in favor of the women who had experienced sexual harassment. Those young women recognized an injustice and took action, to rightfully successful results.

It’s not that there is no hope left for my generation. It’s just that our work, as the feminist movement and as women at large, isn’t yet done. And believe me, there are plenty of us who are willing to continue the fight. There are plenty of us who are willing to take Anita Hill’s legacy and run with it.

what the "Funny Sexist" thinks is funny and what pisses me off

There has been too much sexism is surrounding me this week and it’s really getting me down.

To start, a boy I know who I considered one of my friends and who knew about my intolerance for sexism thought it’d be really hilarious to pull the: “Do you want to hear a joke? Women’s rights” joke on me. The first couple of times he said this I ignored him. But then after a few more times, I told him to fuck off. He has continued to repeat it to me all of this week. The worst thing is, he’s not even just being a jerk because he thinks it’s funny, he even said “It’s hard for a man not to be sexist,” which I find utterly appalling. It’s pretty damn easy for a man to not be sexist. I know some men struggle due to their lack of decency/brain cells, but I found that statement really offensive.

Secondly, we watched a play that was supposedly to be about ‘road safety’ in school. The play was pretty rubbish and irrelevant to the topic, but what annoyed me the most was the frequency of sexist jokes, especially towards the end of the play which involved a mock ‘chat show’ that involved our participation as an audience. One of the characters, a male, was portrayed as a bit of an arsehole. Now, granted, it was in his character to act like an arsehole but one of the jokes during the audience participation was: “The only thing a woman should be driving is a washing machine.” How is this kind of joke acceptable? Especially in a SCHOOL, in front of an easily influenced group of teenagers. This joke wouldn’t have been so bad if it were in context, like if it were in a play that was supposed to show how sexism still exists in society, if it were used to represent and teach against misogyny, but it wasn’t. It was pretty irrelevant and unnecessary to the play. This joke received a disheartening, disgusting amount of jeering and agreeable laughter from an awful lot of the boys in my year. If it had have been a racist or homophobic joke made, there is no way the staff would have let the theater company get away with this, and it wouldn’t have even been told in the first place. So why is sexism still okay?

Lastly, I came across the Twitter account The Funny Sexist. Reading through this page makes me feel physically sick and even more furious by the amount of followers it has received. It is completely and totally disrespectful to women. I can’t understand how anybody finds this page funny, appropriate or acceptable. The photos that the page have posted feature a photo of a woman holding a sign saying “30% of women killed are murdered by their boyfriends or husbands” and then a slogan underneath saying “30% of women should have just shut the fuck up.” The page encourages domestic abuse, and even murder of women: full blown misogyny at its best. Why the fuck has this page not been taken down? With the amount of followers it has received, I can’t imagine it’s slipped under the radar of the professionals at Twitter HQ. I urge you all to report these pages to Twitter, as well as reporting the Facebook equivalent of The Funny Sexist.

Here’s to hoping that next week’s better.

college: where I learned to lead

One of the coolest things I’ve been able to do since entering college is become involved in radical politics. I think many people, and women especially, feel a few barriers to the realm of radical politics.

The word “radical” sounds polarizing. Actually, I didn’t identify as a radical until relatively recently. One of my professors explained that radical feminism, as opposed to liberal feminism, is interested in actually breaking down the power systems (patriarchy, racism, etc.) that form the fundamental barriers to equality. And it just clicked. Duh, I’m radical. There’s a stigma to the word, though, that I think presents a problem for a lot of people.

Radical politics are often dominated by that old chestnut of a demographic: white men. But for people of color, or for women (or for basically anybody who isn’t a white dude), joining a group whose membership is heavily male and white can be daunting. This is an obvious Catch-22.

Also, sometimes the task of radical politics seems too big, and often hopeless. It’s hard to imagine committing to a cause if you’re not sure it can make a difference.

One of the taglines of Miss Representation is “you can’t be what you can’t see,” and I think that is absolutely true. I believe very strongly that having real, positive role models in one’s life is very important. I have been very much influenced by the people in my life who have taken on responsibilities that impact people aside from themselves and/or have done really cool projects that have made a difference for other people. People like old camp counselors, my mother, old chorus directors, teachers, former employers, coworkers, friends — these are all people who may not become famous for being role models, but who have definitely impacted many people’s lives.

College is an interesting environment for this. On the one hand, most college campuses are now mostly female. Potentially, there are ample leadership opportunities for college women to become involved on campus, and many of them do. Volunteering, tutoring, and mentoring are all staples of college-age involvement. These are awesome. I am fortunate to know a lot of kickass lady activists, and actually one national organization I’m involved in recently voted down an old rule which required a minimum percentage of women on the coordinating committee. This rule was made to encourage women to feel confident enough to step up for leadership positions, and I think in general it has fostered an environment that–while most of the members are male–encourages the active participation of female members. After the rule was voted out (with much debate, not everyone supported this), the actual members of the coordinating committee were voted in. Women are currently the majority. (Heyoooo!)

So I just want to say to any high school or college students who are interested in radical change, don’t be afraid to get involved! I used to be the kid whose parents heard at every parent-teacher conference that I needed to talk more in class. Finding my voice is an ongoing process, and I am proud to say that I am now at a confidence level where I am a leader at my school and in my community. I spent plenty of time as a peripheral-member, then active-member of groups before I got into the leadership positions where I am now, and in addition to the work I do as a college activist, I hope that my presence is encouraging the younger women at my university to eventually do the same.

We have to be the leaders we want others to be as well. If you want to be involved in something, go for it! If you want to see something done, do it! And if you want more diverse representation, represent yourself!

Ms. Norbury gets it

You know that scene in Mean Girls where Tina Fey’s character tells all the girls that they need to stop calling each other sluts and whores because it only makes it okay for guys to call them sluts and whores?

I wish Fey would tell that to girls everywhere.

There’s pretty much two types of that sort of name-calling and they both piss me off.

First, there’s the casual, “Hey, slut, what’s up?” or “Hey there, ho!” that friends say to each other. Now, this would be one thing if they were trying to reclaim the word, if this was some sort of movement or statement – but in the vast majority of cases, it’s not. These girls are just trying to fit in with the patriarchal bullshit that tells them they have to say that in order to tear other girls down to build themselves up. And what better way is there to keep those other girls in line than to admonish them about their sex lives?

I just don’t understand why you would so casually use a word that has been used to repress women for centuries and even today? Do you have any idea how many rape and sexual assault cases that have been dropped because the woman was declared a slut, or a whore, or some other equivalent?

And then there’s the other, arguably much worse kind of name-calling: “What are you doing with her? She’s such a slut.” “Did you hear about what she did at that party? Can you say whore?”

Why, why, why do girls think that this is okay? I’ll even ask my friends point-blank sometimes, “Well, what’s wrong with being a ‘slut’?” And virtually every time I get the same answer: a nose wrinkled with disgust and a “Being a slut is just…bad.”

I’ve never met anyone who could actually articulate what was wrong with being a so-called whore – and that’s because there is nothing. I wish girls and guys would get it through their heads that there is nothing wrong with sex! There is nothing wrong with liking sex, with wanting sex, with having sex – as long as it is consensual and safe.

The thing about “slut” and “whore” is that there are no male equivalents. And before someone comes after me for that, I am not saying we should make male equivalents. That would not fix anything. I’m saying we should get rid of the words altogether because they’re rooted in misogyny.

Those words, if you really take the time to sit down and think about them, are words that are designed to keep women in their place – the kitchen, with the babies. They obviously shouldn’t be having sex if they’re not creating new lives. What other reason would they have, right? It’s not like girls can get pleasure out of sex. They’re just vessels for the almighty fetus. So people make them feel ashamed if they ever do have sex for pleasure, and “slut” and “whore” are the weapons of choice.

We need to stop calling each other these names because it just reinforces the idea that’s it’s okay to attack women based solely on their sex lives. And that’s something that’s been going on for far too long. Most of us are aware of the virgin/whore dichotomy, and this is just an unfortunate perpetuation of that.

Just ridding “slut” and “whore” from our vocabularies can really make a huge difference.

what have you been texting lately?

In our world of technology and instant communication, sentiments often get lost in cyberspace. In fact, there’s a whole website devoted to some of the crazy mishaps that can occur during texting. But when texting is successful, I can confidently say that one of its most common (and more recent) uses is as a means of hooking up and conducting relationships.

Some of my friends use text messaging in order to conduct their booty calls in college. If you meet someone at a party and exchange numbers, a text conversation is sure to ensue in the hopes of ultimately having a sexual encounter. One of my friends told me that if she is planning on meeting up with someone that she has been casually texting, she will continue to text until she enters the dorm room or meeting location and they physically connect. This notion of texting as foreplay is one that is worth our time and consideration—perfect for the busy college student.

In the world of the text message, there are a series of unspoken rules that we follow. These obviously differ a bit by location and within social circles, but basic guidelines remain constant. Proper texting protocol can be quite confusing as far as who initiates the conversation, use of emoticons, how long to wait in between texts and the overall tone of the message. In the case of texting as it relates to hooking up, however, all of this texting is ultimately foreplay — simply a song and dance leading to sex.

Although texting is often considered the best way to set up a hook-up, it presents some difficulties. In texts you can be all of the things you want to be in public when attempting to get your game on: a blend of humor which is direct yet still erotic. Texting results in just the right level of invasiveness that allows you to come off as simultaneously interested yet detached. Painfully shy people, who may not have been able to express private sentiments about a person they like, now have a means of expressing their inner kinky selves.

However, there are pitfalls. The limited space of a text can just as easily be sexy and flirty as it can be confusing and hurtful. There are no voice intonations or sarcasm options in texts and sometimes, a winky face simply won’t suffice. Being rejected or rejecting someone via text is much easier to do than via a real conversation. Sexting and other forms of texting can also be the source of lots of drama in relationships. Where then is the line drawn between socially texting a potential partner and engaging in destructive behavior?

Texting isn’t just for hook ups, though, even in a romantic context. Couples also use texts as a way to keep the spark alive during the day and to let their partner know that they are thinking about them. During class and across campus, I constantly see people holding their phones with smirks or wide grins across their faces – it’s easy to guess what kind of text they might be reading.

There are obviously a lot of pro’s and con’s to texting as it relates to the way our generation conducts our romantic relationships. What do you think? How has texting played a role in your hook-ups/relationships/romantic encounters of all sorts?

Emmeline Pankhurst, anyone? ANYONE?

Today’s youth culture encourages females and males alike to embrace their sexuality and allows a freedom of expression. But it seems this freedom of sexual expression has ended up glamorising the idea that females are nothing more than sexual objects. Or at least, it seems that’s what girls our age think.

I have to wonder – how have girls our age not heard of the efforts made by Emmeline Pankhurst and the Suffragettes at the beginning of the 20th century? Or the women’s liberation protest demonstration at the 1969 Miss World beauty contest?  I have discovered that there are very few teenage girls out there who fully comprehend the feminist movement and its effects on society, and, more importantly, its hopes and aspirations for the future generations of women.

I wanted to see what our generation really thinks about feminism, and why they feel they have to be sexual objects, so I pinned up questionnaires about feminism that I had written at school for my peers to complete on a voluntary basis. However, I unfortunately received only a small sample of responses which were completed primarily by females. It soon became apparent to me that even amongst 17 and 18 year olds in my own sixth form, a stigma existed regarding feminism, as there was a serious lack of interest in my questionnaire, especially amongst the boys.

The single male who did answer my questionnaire was clearly influenced by the echoes of a hundred out-dated attitudes as he referred to feminists as “petty, whiney, naggy, desperate,” and that feminism was “more sexist than what they stood against in the first place.” This is the voice from the present generation, a young man who, though he was the only one to answer the survey, is definitely not alone in this attitude.

Any evidence of conscientiousness of feminism that I detected only came from female respondents and even then very few had heard of Third-Wave feminism. This lead me to believe that there is a significant level of ignorance about feminism amongst young people which will prevent any continuation of the feminist movement unless something is not done now.

I also picked up a contradiction on the question of whether pop stars such as Rihanna and Beyoncé promote equality between the sexes. A third of my questionnaires stated that they agreed that such pop stars do promote equality between men and women and that they also “sing songs about female empowerment and being proud of being successful women.” Indeed, there is nothing I love better than punching my fist in the air as I sing along “Who run the world? Girls!” to Beyoncé’s new single but there is no denying that Beyoncé and her fellow female pop artists promote little more than ‘Bimbo feminism’, which Maureen Dowd defines as “giving your intellectual pretensions to a world where the highest ideal is to acknowledge your inner slut.”

Feminism is alive, but it has taken a new form. It seems dungarees and hairy armpits have been replaced with fake tan, hair extensions and fake nails because young girls are linking sex with success, a proposition that couldn’t be further from the intentions of women like Germaine Greer.

After all, would Beyoncé still be ‘Queen B’ if it wasn’t for her notorious booty shake?

But I’m not talking about hairy armpits verses vajazzling, I’m talking about the increasingly dominant pressures in society which are felt by young women and young women only: am I pretty? Am I sexy? Am I fat? We live in a media-ruled world where magazine headlines everywhere are declaring what is and isn’t sexy, what you should and shouldn’t wear. And it doesn’t stop with girly magazines such as Cosmopolitan or Glamour. Lad magazines are just as guilty, arguably more so. Have you ever seen a guy’s magazine feature and promote feminist values?

The media has created an obsession with sex and as a result, there is now a right and wrong, how to be and how not to be. The media has encouraged the belief that to be a feminist is to be a radical, an anarchist, an untouchable. If society and the media continue to brainwash the generations of young women with such empty prejudices, us girls are going to have to get angry again, fast.

The bottom line of college orientation is that it’s a paradox: feeling simultaneously deeply comforted and entirely thrown off your axis, spinning rapidly towards the unknown. Or at least, that’s what orientation was like for me.

This paradox manifested itself at the very beginning of the journey from Ohio to New York. After posting my obligatory, “Leaving for college. Thanks for the memories everybody!” Facebook status, I packed all of my earthly belongings into the family car. That’s when I realized that all of my earthly belongings fit into the family car. While the reality of this totally satisfied the fatalist in me (look how easy it would be for me to escape with so little materialistic baggage to weigh me down once the zombie apocalypse hits — yippee!) it also left me reeling. It only underscored the fact that the home I was leaving, the home I had grown up in and considered my own, really wasn’t mine any more. Everything that grounded me to my house was stuffed into the car, ready to be shipped off to what is essentially a linoleum-floored, whitewashed box. Statements I had made with confidence ever since I clicked submit on my electronic application quickly turned to questions: This is what I want? I’m excited? I’m ready to be on my own?

I often felt a little lost in the shuffle, unsure of who to ask to hang out with me and a little uncomfortable with the thought of having to ask at all. When I was asked to hang out (I did manage to avoid total social leprosy) I wondered if I was being funny enough or smart enough or if people would remember that I had been with them at all.

But when I arrived on campus, a wave of peace washed over me. Everything from the overheard conversations about starting a Quidditch team to the deeply important and intricate debate I had with the senior who so graciously helped me move in about which side of the room I should take (I GOT THERE FIRST, BITCHES) reminded me why I chose to go to Barnard in the first place. These were my people.

This solid sense of being in the right place only became more apparent as the week — known as “NSOP” or “New Student Orientation Program” — wore on. We were pretty much booked day in and day out with lectures on public safety, college life, and even an awesome alumnae book club, but between all of the required activities, I got to know my fellow bold, beautiful Barnard women. Yes, I think I might even have temporarily forgotten about my home back in Ohio … if I hadn’t had to repeat my place of birth along with my name, intended major and reason I chose this school every single time I met somebody new, which was approximately every five minutes. Such is orientation.

I met girls who aspired to be neuroscientists, anthropologists, philosophers of literature and everything in between. I met girls from all over the country and the world — my own roommate is from Istanbul, Turkey. Possibly most impressively of all, I met a girl who proudly dressed up as George Costanza from “Seinfeld” for Halloween the year before. I was so proud that I was selected to be one of these girls and slightly amazed that I made the cut. I finally felt like I had found exactly where I was supposed to be, and the peace that came with that was unlike anything I’d ever felt before.

But then again, despite going through the ranks of what many of us described as “friend speed-dating,” despite casual jaunts to places like Times Freakin’ Square, the West Village and the Brooklyn Bridge, and even despite tasting a variety of cupcakes that truly forced me to reconsider everything I had previously thought about baked goods and subsequently my entire life in general (they are intricately related after all), I felt a little niggling of homesickness.

Longing to see my beloved dog, I tried to convince my mom to set up a Skype account just for him. (For the record, she refused … but she will. Trust me I’m not giving up.) I missed having conversations that didn’t require me to explain myself — my likes, dislikes, hometown, family, etc. — in any way. I missed knowing who I would be hanging out with, when and what we’d be doing. Every evening it seemed like girls formed groups and went off together before I even had the chance to say, “Anybody up for ice cream and Netflix Instant?” I often felt a little lost in the shuffle, unsure of who to ask to hang out with me and a little uncomfortable with the thought of having to ask at all. When I was asked to hang out (I did manage to avoid total social leprosy), I wondered if I was being funny enough or smart enough or if people would remember that I had been with them at all.

Of course, despite the general love I already have for this place and my new life, I’m admittedly struggling a little bit. I’ve already met wonderful people that I truly, genuinely like, but I still worry that once classes start they’ll completely forget about my existence. Hopefully I’ll stop missing my family and friends as much, but I know that I probably always will to some extent. Classes haven’t even started yet (oh right, I came here to learn) so who knows how that’ll work its way into the mix. All I know is that I’m trying to live in the moment, trying to remember the disorientation as much as I remember the orientation. Hopefully, I’ll look back on this moment at the end of the year, shake my head and sigh, ‘Oh, September Julie. If only you knew what’s in store for you.’

Cross-posted from The Frisky where I’m writing every other week about being a college Freshman. Check it out here.