friends

I was doing an experiment on cleavage a couple days ago; I put cleavage on my page, to see how much attention I could get. Of course, I got a lot. Friend requests, picture comments, e-mails, etc, and they were all from guys, 15-18.

Before I put it up on the internet I talked to a couple of my friends about it, Katie thought it was a stupid idea even if it was just for All Girl Army, Lisa, Lynn, Brittany, Lindsay and Tonya thought the same, but I did it anyway.

“They only want one thing,” my friend said to me, “’sex’”, she referred to the guy’s commenting and friend requesting me. They didn’t want to be my friend because of my personality or anything—they wanted my body only. That’s all.

I wanted to write a post to explain why I've been so quiet and to explain what I've been struggling with, but I am too conflicted about the situation to even manage to put it into words.

My ex-boyfriend is re-entering my life, and though everyone I respect and whose judgement I trust is telling me that he's a Really Bad Idea, I'm finding that I am still in love with him.

I'm feeling like the lousiest feminist on earth right now. And no matter what I decide, I need to figure out how I can reconcile all of this inside of me.

I'm sorry.

Yesterday as I sat on the couch after work comforting my friend who was sobbing on my shoulder due to an arguement she had with her boyfriend and how she didnt know how to fix it, I started to think about the many times I have been in this situation, sometimes it was me there sobbing on someones shoulder. Most of the time it happened I found out later that the guy was just out having a beer and a good time while I was at home trying to make everything good and nice for if he came over after and I could fix the arguement. So I asked my friend why do we do this? We didn't really know the answer to that question so we blamed our parent's for 30 minutes and then we went out for a beer.

This is going to be hard for me to post. I am not sure exactly why I am posting this at all, but I will because this has shocked me into reality about something that I have treated like some sort of option in my situation, some sort of relief of what I am going through, and this last weekend has really shaken me back into reality and I realise how very selfish I have been.

I have had people in my life commit suicide before. With them, I got a phone call, they were gone, I cried, I screamed, I sat in black at the funeral and felt like my insides were raw with anger and grief and loss, but this was different. I got the phone call. My friend, dear friend, who I don't see enough anymore, was in the hospital. She had overdosed and cut herself badly and was found by one of my other friends just in time. There was no time for tears. I sat in black at the hospital next to her bed, neither of us saying a word to each other just staring, my hand on hers. It was wierd, to be the one next to the bed. I have been the one laying there, more than once, waking up and realising where you are, only I dont remember someone holding my hand. Eventually they released her, and I drove her home. She lay down for a sleep, while I cleaned up the house from the night of what we were calling, the accident. Even though we both knew, it was no accident.

There's a straight guy I've known for four years, since the first day of ninth grade. We were friends before I came out, friends when I shaved my head and wore a lot of his old clothes, and friends when I got into feminist activism. We weren't the kind of friends who talk about their feelings all the time, but we were there for each other during the more serious crush issues and school issues, and just general high school depression. We're very open with each other about most things, and whenever we hang out we always have a great time.

As I started to become more aware of feminist issues in tenth grade, I became somewhat uncomfortable with some of the things he said or did. I didn't want to hear misogynistic jokes or talk about porn with him. If he did something that bothered me, I'd just say, "That's not very funny," or something, and move on. I got the impression that he respected the actual women in his life, so him being occasionally off-color didn't seem to me to be something to end a great friendship over.

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.