the guy friend
As a girl with several, older male friends I am constantly around sexism. I spend nearly all my free time with them as I don’t see them at school. Their favourite name for me is ‘woman’ and the number of times I am asked why I’m not in the kitchen, making them sandwiches, is getting ridiculous. And while I know it’s just a bit of banter, I know that by not saying anything I am being a bad feminist. But to be honest with you, I don’t really mind. I’m usually the only girl and they allow me to be who I need to be without judgement. They are the people who make me feel truly at home, which is ironic as my mother hates them and thinks they are a bad influence.
I think she is wrong.
They are the ones who have calmed me down after months of craziness, and while the only reason I became friends with them in the first place was due to an unfortunate, drunken encounter, which I’d rather not go in to but which did cause me to lose all my old friends, they do not treat me with any real disrespect.
It is hard to know whether or not they view me as an attractive, sexual being, although considering the circumstances under which we met it would be hard not to. Yet time has passed and things have changed, for the better I hope.
Six months ago I was a mess. I was the girl getting completely drunk and hooking up with random guys, and I couldn’t stop myself. It’s strange that although the incident which started everything ruined my reputation, it’s also the reason I now have such great friends. It’s hard for me now, though, because even with good friends you can screw everything up in a moment and I did just that, and yeah, now we’re all friends again and it’s so much better than it was before but it means that now I’m terrified to act on my womanly impulses, or to stand up against their sexism, because things are just going so well compared to the way they were before.
I’m pretty sure none of this makes sense to anyone, least of all myself. In fact, this is really just me letting it all out, but I feel like I need some female feedback after so long with male company. The only real female interaction I have these days is with so called ‘girlfriends’ at school, who are so judgemental it is impossible to talk to them about anything.
Anyway, the whole point of this was for me to explore the idea of double standards, because I’m seeing them more and more these days, and all I know is that if I were a boy, everything I’d done, all the so-called ‘mistakes’ I’ve made, would have been viewed very differently by my peers. Instead of being shunned I would probably be even more popular, so why is it that a man can explore his sexuality freely, yet a woman is deemed a ’slut’ the second she experiments?
