AGA Roll Call: Girls on my mind

My feminist experience has been comfortable and enlightening for the most part; it's shown me a new sense of personal value and taught me the integrity of women as a group. I used to identify as a "humanist" and even went so far as to call myself an "anti-feminist" before I understood what the terms really meant.

I've grown out of the other side. I believed in the greater goodness of man-and-womankind but not in the specific goodness of womankind. I didn't value women who fight the right to choose, I didn't appreciate the opinions of educated women working in their homes, and I didn't comprehend the experience of women in cultures that practice female genital mutilation. To make a long story short (ha, too late), I didn't give women's decisions the full weight and consideration that they deserved. But, as Jeyoani's signature reminds us, "Scratch any woman deeply enough and you find a feminist." And this time, a real one.

Sometimes I feel guilty for looking at girls sexually.

Not for the usual reasons that come with being from a very religious family, but because I have to wonder if fantasizing about the cute cashier at the bookstore or the girl in my English class or even a woman in the mall (while I simultaneously wish I had her shoes) is just the same as a guy downloading porn from the internet without even bothering to learn the actress' name.

Is it different because I'm a woman, a lesbian, or because I consider myself a "feminist"? Or because the women I'm attracted to tend to be heavier and "more ethnic" than Hugh Hefner's girlfriends?

I've been really interested lately in the development of a number of threads on the forum, from the body-hair thread, to the friendships-thread , to name just two. Because the blogs provide a different form of expression than the discussion-threads, I wondered if we might bring some common elements from those discussions into blog-entries, and see if, in carefully crafting these entries, our thoughts cohere at a deeper level even than in the forumn.