no boys allowed in the room!!!!

Oh yeah, I had an IUD taken out and it was nothing. No worse than a pap smear, and totally unlike the insertion (which made me want to die).

Thanks guys, I feel better.

I have been going condoms-only and I'm just too paranoid for it. Plus freaky deaky accident already! God! Went to pull it out and I followed all the directions – held onto it at the base and whatnot, but it was stuck inside me and didn't want to come out?? Such a thing has never happened before. My #1 rule is no babies so I hope the plan B did its job.

IUD insertion didn't work for me. The man who 'tried' to insert it was one of the most condescending authority figures I've had to deal with in my life.

lol <3 "my #1 rule is no babies"
i love that rule

yes
I have a little 1" piece of cardboard with this picture taped to my turntable

http://www.thefix.com/sites/default/files/styles/article/public/no-pregnancy-fix.jpg

you have no idea how happy that makes me

i recognize it from somewhere. is it from an accutane container? i think my friend showed me something like that when she was on it but i could be misremembering

yes, I had an endless supply of them when my brother was taking Accutane

Hmmm. I feel like I would kind of like to discuss this:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/17/cool-girl-gone-girl

Adewunmi is generally a pretty cool columnist, and I have not read the book in question, but there is just so much "Hmmmmm" in my response to that article.

Because this assumption (from the book, rather than Adewunmi herself): "You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who'd like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them." is such bullshit.

I don't doubt that that trope exists and is manipulated in male authored films to turn into a new kind of MPDG. But there *are* girls who grow up tomboys and geekgirls and have interests associated with the "wrong" gender and are into those things because we like them not because we're looking for ~male approval~.

Which I think she tries to get into in the latter half of the article, but at the same time, I'm still feeling butthurt and twitchy at being told that because a kind of woman has been manipulated into a male fantasy figure, that means somehow she doesn't exist at all? It just feels like one of those "you can't win either way." But maybe I don't know what she's talking about because I haven't seen the films or read the book. But having spent most of my life being "the girl who was not into girly shit" I resent being told I was that way because of ~Patriarchy~.

having spent most of my life being "the girl who was not into girly shit" I resent being told I was that way because of ~Patriarchy~.

tbh i was that way because of patriarchy? i mean, not because i wanted to be attractive but at least in part because as a child i thought boy things were better than girl things (once i'd ascertained that the use of things was gendered), and i lived in a culture which confirmed this belief for me, so that my nascent interest in e.g. playing with toy cars or listening to indie became a repudiation of 'girly shit'. But everyone is the way they are because of patriarchy! it has been an inextricable part of our culture, we can work against it in ourselves but the fact that it was there will always be true.

that is a confused article, anyway - the "cool girl" the quote is railing against is a ladette type, not an MPDG at all.

also: we can win either way

i guess the secret is to remember that other people's definitions never apply to them and so clearly cannot apply to us

Yeah, that is part of what is confusing me, the conflation of ladette and MPDG which seem to me to be different phenomenon. (Though they are both caricatures which are marketed as male romantic fantasy figures.)

I don't think that ~Patriarchy~ was to blame for my tendencies (though obviously I have probably internalised a lot of the automatic dismissal of "girly shit" because Patriarchy) but because I honestly did not realise that I was a non-Boy until I hit puberty and sprouted breasts. Until that point, I did not see any difference between myself and my brother and did not understand why suddenly puberty meant that I had to develop different interests than I had always had.

I get that Patriarchy exists and it does horrible twisted things to people. But women can exist in ways that are not necessarily always derived from Patriarchy.

women can exist in any damn way they like, it's true.

i honestly do not think the article is worth the time it would take to work out what it is trying to say beyond "some women seem to have made more of an effort to fulfil certain male fantasy roles but tbh it's hard for everyone and judging is nagl"

I guess that's it, though. Just that despairing sense of "oh god is this yet another thing that I'm going to be judged on? Fuck that."

Hokay, sorry for long and self-absorbed post.

I am totally a tomboy and a geek with very male-coded interests and I did not read myself in that excerpt AT ALL because I have never been the "cool girl" - too ugly and neurotic by far. In fact I can get p. angry when people say "why don't more women like this thing", because it seems to mean "why don't some women who are Cool Girls like it, because I am going to pretend women like you who like it don't exist, and if you continue to remind me that you do I'll get v. unpleasant telling everyone your Cool Girl credentials or your Liking My Stuff credentials are not up to snuff".

(Though I'm not sure the Cool Girls get off any more lightly on that part. I guess they just get less of Phase 1: Ignoring and more Phase 2: Gatekeeping. What I took from "Cool Girl": mainly hot but also socially "fun", plus maybe some nastier back-stabbing anti-feminist aspects listed in the article but not the original rant, which I won't list so we don't have to argue abt how straw-womany they are, which is probably a little but I know I was guilty of some of them when younger and insecure in a mostly-male group)

So I'd agree the conflation of MPDGs and hot ladettes and geek girls into one big category of Women Who Like Man Stuff without considering the different ways in which they like Man Stuff and the different reactions they get for it - never mind the different categories of Man whose Stuff is being liked - is not very helpful here.

But I read this post on "'fake' geek girls" yesterday and it ties into the bits of this I can relate to, so here it is: http://www.themarysue.com/on-the-fake-geek-girl/

(Interesting post, C#. I was into boy stuff before I knew it was gendered, of course, but definitely entered a feedback loop when I was at primary school that the stuff other girls liked must be Bad and whatever the boys liked must be Good, and later was drawn to interests not shared by others at my girls' secondary school; maybe pure iconoclasm plus not even knowing any boys, and obviously the origins of likes/dislikes are always tangled, but probably still an element of privileging male interests, yes.)

Yeah the 'fake geek girl' thing is a red herring – if there are geek posers it's not a gendered phenomenon.

I try not to read about any of this stuff anymore so I can just go deeper into my own fantasyland of what a fun woman's life is like without worrying I'm fitting some kind of (patriarchy-tooled?) stereotype. I spent my mid-'20s worrying about all that shit, image, and I had no fun at all.

yeah i always just ignore "articles"/opinion pieces like that because clearly they are not talking about me as a subject or as an audience so NEXT

whoa xp

i meant that thing about "cool girls" -- i didn't mean your fantasyland. I live there too!

meaning also that i have stopped trying to figure out where i "fit in". i don't feel like i fit in anywhere, so i just carry on not worrying about it. i guess to some degree everyone's interested in defining themselves but i have little interest in that, for the most part.

I suppose I just let that one get through the filter because I normally like the author.

The "fake geek girls" article and the whole minor geekworld clusterfuck that it was written in response to is something that has been doing my head in. Different people trying to carve out some kind of identity within "geek" or "hipster" or exclude/banish others, as if it's a binary. Mostly I just eyerolly about that stuff because I'm too old to care. But I'm certainly familiar with the phenomenon described, the gatekeeping deployed against women but that doesn't only happen in geek worlds.

Ugh, I shouldn't have eaten that cheesecake at lunch I've got major sugarcrash and can't think/post straight now.

ha LL no the xp was whoa because who PSYCHIC LINK

I try not to read about any of this stuff anymore so I can just go deeper into my own fantasyland of what a fun woman's life is like without worrying I'm fitting some kind of (patriarchy-tooled?) stereotype.

TBH this sounds like the right answer, and yes I have long since given up on "fitting in" so why worry? But I guess I'm worried that in some ways the stereotypes and divides seem even harder to avoid than when I was a kid, and maybe one day (soonish if ever, for purely biological reasons, not a declaration of immediate intent) I'll have kids, and how can I steer them round this shit?

I mean I don't have any concrete evidence that it's getting worse, just a lot of my friends are having kids and all the mothers with daughters have said things like "we were totally not going the pink princess route because it's so limiting and I didn't like it as a kid but she's really picked up on it and insists on it", plus thinking of the female musicians I loved as a teenager and drawing a blank thinking of modern equivalents, or seeing sexist crap in the music press and thinking, ok, it was a boys' club when I was 15 but not like this... all purely anecdotal and hopefully more reflective of me looking in the wrong places than the world changing

WCC -- I guess I feel like if it's bothering you so much, why are you immersing yourself in the discussion? I guess that's my natural tendency -- to flee conflict -- and it's not that great of a tendency, but it does protect me from getting overly upset about stuff. Sometimes I get overly upset about international relations or private corporate greed or the intersection of these two things. I know the feeling of being upset about a current topic. But I have to make myself take breaks, especially if there's nothing I can do about the situation from my current position in life. It's why I couldn't go into that field professionally! It would have taken over my brain and made me MISERABLE.

Anyway, I don't mean to diminish your feelings or your reaction to this article -- I just wanted to add my unsolicited $0.02 about the topic.

ha LL no the xp was whoa because who PSYCHIC LINK
you've seen it too! :D

Seriously the less I read about anything about how you present yourself to the world, the more at peace with myself I am. I had made *the mistake* of reading something about what kind of decor will help you get laid (har) if you bring over a man. Which, why did I read that? What was I thinking? It made my house I worked so hard to carefully decorate after my own dreams – it made my house seem the product of a deranged mind for a couple days. Which it isn't. Garbage in, garbage out, and there's so much garbage in disguise as reading material.

Anyway I have a giant framed print of this over my bed, and guess who has sex under it, it's this lady
http://www.bongonews.com/StoryImages/double_entendre_-_beating_off.jpg

Hey, I'm not upset. I just thought it was something worth discussing. And seeing if other people thought it was kinda bullshit, too.

I follow the discussion because I'm interested in it, the gendering of interests etc. etc.

I don't believe in that whole "if something upsets you, ignore it" way of thinking because these things have ways of affecting you, even when - especially when - you're not paying attention to them. So I think it's better to be aware of, and be aware of the countering mechanisms with this stuff.

Anyway, I wasn't upset at all before. (But now it's kinda bothering me a tiny bit that people can no longer tell the difference between "WCC thinkin' bout stuff out loud" and "WCC actually upset.")

I'm gonna go make more smutty jokes about "standard deviations" with OfficeBoy now instead.

Anyway my Blakean friends you can always call upon the spirit of Los in Jerusalem: "I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's."
xp

6 billions xposts gatekeeping deployed against women but that doesn't only happen in geek worlds

Oh agreed but
1. that's where I personally see it most;
2. it maybe takes on a slightly different form, in some ways more blatant and in some more insidious? maybe not, but
3. geeks have this horrible conviction that they are Logical Beings and that therefore every thought that enters their head is purely logical and anything which contradicts with it must be illogical, and it gets unpleasant if you try to point out that their kneejerk emotionally-based ideas are not in fact pure binary instructions read off the ROM of the universe

(ok, conviction in your own rightness is a purely human trait rather than a geek thing too, but it's slightly more entrenched as OK to talk like you're the only logical being in the room if you're a geek, or a politician)

I've got a bit off-topic here, sorry, the bees have carried my bonnet over a cliff with me still in it

Yes yes yes, especially to No. 3 there.

<i>women can exist in any damn way they like, it's true.

i honestly do not think the article is worth the time it would take to work out what it is trying to say beyond "some women seem to have made more of an effort to fulfil certain male fantasy roles but tbh it's hard for everyone and judging is nagl"</i>

Read the article and became irritated. Fuck that! I have always liked what I liked without it being a part of some strategy. My likes and dislikes, interests and hobbies have never been part of some strategy to snag a man. They have come in and out of fashion, hipsterdom etc... over the decades but I was there before and remained after. This article reminds me of branding and all that is associated with that. Deconstructing a group until it is so finely filtered and can fit into a nifty lil label or niche demographic. I can care less who is out there trying to be someone they are not. I imagine that shit is hard.

ugh! bbcode...sorry

aaggggghhhh i just remembered how cute harold "happy" chichester is
but this is the saddest thing i have ever seen http://www.howlinmaggie.net/fans/categories.php

AND THEN i went to his facebook page and saw that he is recovering from a bout of bell's palsy!

whoa

sorry for the fluffy subject matter, but apparently my girlish crush on this person persists even after all these years even though i completely forgot about him after 1998 or so?
that's a no boys allowed topic if i've ever heard one

Aw. I had Bell's Palsy once. It was really dumb.

i had a lengthy dream last in which i was on a date with damon albarn who was not yet famous and it was awesome.

we ate some kind of pink goop on a bridge. when i woke up and went into the kitchen i noticed my only edible food was some kind of pink jello. not the part of this dream i was hoping would come true.

damnit, Albarn <3

brb eating pink goop

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mc5ehgePAo1rn4zwmo1_500.jpg

lol

God I could still look at pictures of Blur all day

When I met A he had such an Alex James haircut but he kept getting called emo at work & swore longish hair off forever!

literally skipping class to look at pictures of blur all day

ok there are other factors but

haha graham coxon looks just like me in 1995 only way cuter

imo that is one of the hottest pics of graham

i think a deep part of my attraction to damon albarn is bound up witht the fact that he annoys me on some level. lol

yeah he's real "annoying" alright

lol e!
I'd let him annoy me any day!

hahaha otm