The important thing is, I'm meeting new people

From Claudia Gray’s blog:

It saddens me to see girls proudly declaring they’re not like other girls – especially when it’s 41,000 girls saying it in a chorus, never recognizing the contradiction. It’s taking a form of contempt for women – even a hatred for women – and internalizing it by saying, Yes, those girls are awful, but I’m special, I’m not like that, instead of stepping back and saying, This is a lie.

…

The real meaning of “I’m not like the other girls” is, I think, “I’m not the media’s image of what girls should be.” Well, very, very few of us are. Pop culture wants to tell us that we’re all shallow, backstabbing, appearance-obsessed shopaholics without a thought in our heads beyond cute boys and cuter handbags. It’s a lie – a flat-out lie – and we need to recognize it and say so instead of accepting that judgment as true for other girls, but not for you.

The totally honest, totally terrible thing is that I have only really recently realized just how harmful and self-defeating and stupid statements like these are, and stopped saying them myself. It’s still a knee-jerk reaction that I have, this kind of ingrained sexism that has me equating real actual human women with the media’s and marketing’s fucked up definition of “women” (that being the white, straight, able-bodied, upper-middle class, 25-35 demographic) and saying, “I’m not like that”.

“I only have guy friends” is another one I used to rely on (and, for the most part, it was true for most of my life). But since moving to Austin, I only really have one guy friend with whom I hang out alone*, in a circle of mostly married friends. I now also have close IRL girl friends. And most of my Internet friends these days are smart, nerdy, outspoken women. Although my best friend is still a guy, I’m no longer just one of the guys. It’s sort of a weird thing to get my head around.

It’s something that I had started doing, in a backwards way, to “be cool”. For someone who was uncertain of where they stood, and who constantly feared being acknowledged as Other, this was the way in which I tried to make being different a point of pride. And then I just didn’t think about it. 

People who know me, know that I’m a know-it-all. And for the most part, my track record is pretty good. But when I’m wrong, I readily admit it. I was wrong. This is an embarrassing post, because I should have known better. 

*I did once go to the movies with my friend Jake, who is one half of another married couple in my group of friends. We went to see Enter the Void. It was just as awkward and hilarious as that sounds. For those of you who don’t know, Enter the Void is an ambitious and experimental film from Gaspar Noe, featuring lots of drugs and a mostly nude Paz de la Huerta (so, basically, everyday Paz de la Huerta) being horrible and mildly incestuous and doing lots of sex things.