no boys allowed in the room!!!!

Um, not to be the lone voice of dissent here, but aren't we in a... um, gender segregated space right here?

(I'm not disagreeing that the situation Crabbits describes sounds pretty ridiculous. Just saying that gender segregation isn't always due to... patriarchy.)

Yeah I appreciated that my brother-in-law at least TRIES to treat the women who visit his house like equals, even if they reject it! He said he gave up after many times of trying to integrate. I liked that he was willing to teach me how to play Ticket to Ride or hang out with me as an equal. But maybe because I am family and 'safe.' Or maybe because I am already going to hell – a joke I made many times, e.g. when I ate their coffee and tea flavored chocolates for them. It got the best, most conflicted laughter.

xp lol

good point BB!

Upon finding out that he had started working in the same part of town I did, I said to a male friend, "Oh, we should grab lunch sometime!" and his fiancée, whom I had just met, having been friends with the male friend for awhile, said, "You don't just ask my fiancé if he wants to go to lunch!" I got where she was coming from because there was some weird dynamics wherein the male boyfriend was still carrying a torch for one of my close friends (which, god, everybody just grow up already) so she was pretty insecure about the relationship but it hadn't even occurred to me that I was getting near a line much less crossing one when I asked. Hell, Jeff was there, too.

She stopped talking to me entirely after I declined to fly back to NC from Chicago during my first semester of law school to attend her bachelorette weekend, which was taking place in a cabin and would have involved only me, the friend for whom groom carried a torch, and her sister. But she and the dude are married with a daughter and seem really happy so I think it all worked out for everybody.

xp - i will add that my friendships that i assumed ended because of the fear-based line of thinking could also be that the person was super sick of me! i will never know.

My family used to do the post-prandial separation in which women hung out in the kitchen and did dishes while the men went into the living room to watch TV but my grandmother is too old for that shit now and she hangs out with the men. That was 100% due to patriarchy but at the same time, some of my most cherished memories of my family happened during the women's time doing dishes in the kitchen.

But and I'm just being an ornery bugger here, you could argue that this gender segregated space IS due to patriarchy insofar as the fact that we feel a need for the thread is because we want a "safe space" to talk about things without worrying about menfolk chiming in or shutting us down, so the whole need for the dynamic is rooted in patriarchy.

Here is my and my friend group from HS – we made albums and movies together, and had all kinds of fun. I miss them dearly:

https://scontent-a-lax.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn1/t1.0-9/10150769_10152002227011428_5996624387758037761_n.jpg

Weirdly my best friends were 2 gals and also mutual friends with these guys, but they thought the guys had immature interests and stupid activities, so I hung out with them separately. I didn't get it even then!

...The fact that we wanted a women-only space on ilx during the era of the primacy of would smash threads and rape joeks WAS because of patriarchy. I must be misunderstanding you because you are way way smarter than me and this doesn't seem confusing.

xp oh I see carl got there already (she usually does).

We got Ticket to Ride a couple of months ago! It's good!

"More like...overly cautious or careful,"

Relevant:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BlIjrwmIUAA5V3y.jpg

"One minute they were playing tennis together; before I knew what had happened, they were off hiking the Appalachian Trail"

I realized in church the men and women go to separate classes after sacrament meeting (which is not interactive)
So not a lot of chances to make mixed gender friends
Their church is organized so it never happens

xp I liked Ticket to Ride a lot; it was the first 'board game nerd' game I ever enjoyed

Me too! I liked it so much I paid for the iphone version of TTR and TTR Europe.

Mr veg lived in a house full of women post-college, 90% of his group of friends are still women now. A year or two after we were first married he went to Seattle with his ex-girlfriend (who is a mutual friend). She was in a lesbian relationship at the time, but even the fact that she was his ex, I didn't even think twice about it because they've been friends forever and that's first and foremost how I think of her. But when they were gone I happened to mention their trip to Mom and she did that raised-eyebrow tone of voice that I hate and and then I really resented having to even think about their relationship in such an 'expected' way.

I have quite a few male friends, have gone over to their houses for football games or wrestlemania PPV's and had a few beers while the wives stay in the other part of the house and no-one's ever given me side-eye for it. But I have had situations where people have pointed out that whole Male/Female thing and being 'unseemly' to be on frienship terms with a Man who is Married when I am Married myself. Like, the only person making this a problem is the person seeing the problem and it's NOT A PROBLEM SO SHUT UP.

It's always an awful thing to have it pointed out to you, like it suddenly occurs to you that oh this is a penis/vagina thing which hadn't even crossed your mind until then and it always skeevs me out to suddenly have to think about this male friend in THAT way
*screeching brakes*

Mr Veg thinks of his circle of friends as Friends, not as Women, and I think of my male friends as Friends and not Men...I forget that not everyone does that, and it's a real bummer when it comes up.

the parties i went to growing up were always gender-segregated in the way Abbs describes her sister's party being. (it was a Muslim community.) it was the way things were and i was used to it, and like Jenny i have fond memories of the women's part of the party. but i remember when Muslim friends of mine started to get married right out of college, things got weird. the assumption that i should drop friendships with dudes when they got engaged...i was really slow to pick up on it. i remember feeling like what even is the point of being all devout and chaste if you assume everybody's up to no good as soon as they get around the opposite sex...or as soon as they get around the members of the opposite sex who are not their wives/fiancees. it also seemed faintly absurd to me the first time i was cast as some Jezebel--it was plainly not my identity. i feel like that was the moment where it began to dawn on me that staying religious was not going to work out for me as an adult woman.

being 'unseemly' to be on frienship terms with a Man who is Married when I am Married myself.

Yeah idgi, if 'safety' is a concern you'd think this is the 'safest' possible arrangement? everyone's already committed by law to one person, so who even has to worry, right? otoh the time I got raped I was married and it was when I had a married guy friend over but that's an anomaly.

it had nothing to do with any of us being married

having said that, my boyfriend is a big flirt and is still good friends with most of his exes and i would be lying if i said i didn't indulge in stereotypical jealousies from time to time. maybe it is my crazed religious upbringing outing! on the whole i think it has been good for me to confront some of that jealousy.

yeah see I think with Mr Veg he isn't really all that flirtatious, he just is fun to talk to. if that makes sense. Engaging without being all that 'knowing', I guess is the best way to put it. And that's one of the first things that made me fall in love with him, so for me the fact that he has all these other cool women that we hang out with is more like an affirmation that he IS an awesome dude to hang out with

xxxp

Oy.

Yeah, echoing all of that--my parents were obsessed with that "appearance of impropriety" stuff and never being alone in a room with someone of the opposite sex. I wasn't allowed to have male friends over at the house (not that I had any but the one time I almost did, I got in trouble for inviting him in). I think I dismissed it as a weird grown-up thing and was therefore surprised when in college, my work manager's wife publicly accused me of trying to break up her marriage by being friends with her husband (who did have a crush on me and ended up cheating on her and leaving her, but I was COMPLETELY unaware of any of that).

In short I guess I'm saying I think we're all on our own in deciding how to navigate this one in our lifetimes.

Sometimes women seek out the company of other women because of patriarchy, or because they are actively excluded or dissuaded from inhabiting "male" spaces.

And sometimes women seek out the company of other women because the company of other women is inherently pleasurable.

That's a separate issue from a lot of what is being discussed here: the pressure of coupled women to drop male friendships, etc. But I don't have much to say about that.

I've told this story before but my mother once made me go with her to our church on a weekday so she could rehearse for a vocal solo with a male accompanist IN THE SANCTUARY OF AN UNLOCKED CHURCH. Even though it's a public place, they couldn't be "alone together" there. And my dad made me go sit in his office while he met with a (female) draftsperson to work on an engineering drawing outside business hours, despite being right in front of a giant picture window that was visible from one of the busiest streets in town. That was fine with me, I just wanted uninterrupted time to read, but I was like, you guys, this is ridiculous.

Then again my town was small enough that someone really might notice that your car and so-and-so's car were parked in the same parking lot together.

A lot of my friends growing up were boys (from church) and no-one really cared what we did until one time one guy's family had mentioned to him that another family member had been accused of inappropriate behaviour of some kind when alone with a girl so maybe it would be best not to be alone in a room together to avoid any danger of that (behaviour or allegations of). I guess we hung out in a group most of the time anyway so can't remember if we took much notice.

And sometimes women seek out the company of other women because the company of other women is inherently pleasurable.

This reminds me, I went back to reading The Beauty Myth and finally got through the Culture chapter (which was kind of "duh") and the Religion chapter (which was a little less mainstream but not exceptional) and into the Sex chapter, which immediately went into my brain and hit REBOOT and I still haven't taken in half of it. But right now I'm reminded of:

But we long to be loved the way we were, if we were lucky, as children: every toe touched, each limb exclaimed upon with delight, because it was ours alone, incomparable. As adults, we seek that release from the scale of comparison in romantic love: In the eyes of one's true love, even the most jaded wish to believe, each of us will be "the most beautiful woman," because we will be truly seen and known for ourselves. The beauty myth, though, gives us the opposite prospect ... by having to "present" herself to her lover as "beautiful," the woman remains not fully known. ... Insofar as he will never know her [when she is not "beautified"], the man will never fully know her; and insofar as she cannot trust him to love her with her "beauty" in eclipse, she can never fully trust him.

Sometimes you just want to be encircled with being seen and known and loved with no effort wasted on worrying about beauty or comparison, and in this world for most of us that means a circle of women.

oh yah, reminds me of my fave onion article:

http://www.theonion.com/articles/female-friends-spend-raucous-night-validating-the,27446/

growing up around a lot of mormons -- all i can say is that mormons are weird.

probably my closest male friend in high school was someone I had been in a playgroup with when we were 2-3 yrs old, so my parents found him completely non-threatening, because their strongest memory of him was fighting with me about who got to wear the kitty tail when we were 3.

girls rule!
boyz drool!

Shoes for LL:

http://24.media.tumblr.com/a9593937ff753acc762ba1c09ab7b4de/tumblr_mwh9opGeFW1so7nuho1_400.jpg

There was a link to a website with more info about these shoes, but the link leads to nowhere. So they are mystery shoes, but they remind me of you.

those shoes rule

Yeah that is some amazing footwear!!

yeah holy crap they are rad

hanging out with women is inherently pleasureable. Nowadays I find my male friendships fading away, and new ones hard to foster - it seems if I am not a sex object to said man, there's no interest on his side in a friendship. If I AM a sex object, he wants to be friends... but will sext me out of the blue at some juncture.

so this year, i got a radical punk dayplanner that includes a "mystrual calendar" - and it turns out my cycle is pretty damn regular -- but only 26 days, as opposed to 28 -- this was after an episode late last year when i was convinced i might be knocked up because my period was late but i had merely forgotten when i had last it

*mynstrual not mystrual

I track mine on Monthly Info. I have a 27 day cycle with a standard deviation of two days!

I use an app called "My Days" and am surprisingly regular considering I spent years thinking I wasn't. My average length is 28 days. Today is the 17th day in my cycle and I should get my next period on or about May 11th. I love this fucking app.

i don't keep track of my cycle at all -- these days i know it's coming from my general mood + the convenient discomfort of mittelschmerz

Me neither! I have to laugh when the doc asks for the date of my LMP, I'm usually like, "Sometime in..the last 3 weeks? I'm pretty sure."

i used to just rely on my bank records for transactions that probably included tampons

That's very accountant-y of you.

hahahah

I jnow when it's coming based on zits sprouting and bad attitude, but its usually 30 days.

i use the period tracker app, and i have a 28 day cycle and my next period will start 2 days into my honeymoon which is also my birthday!! which is only really crappy considering menstrual onset engenders a lupus/MCTD flare every single time for me. so i'll have one honeymoon day of bad pain and fatigue but hey, get used to it, husband. lol.

on the bright side, maybe the stress of marriage and graduation will delay my period.

i feel like this is a very Job Robinson post so id like to say something positive about my life which is that some of my BFFs and i are organizing a knoxville rock camp for girls this summer, and we've got mad funding, equipment, and a location all sorted out - registration for volunteers and students starts soon and i'm v excited.

that is so cool!!
you must have insane organizational skills. that's a lot to pull off!

Wow! Rock Camp For Girls thing sounds super-amazing! Well done!

(also good luck on yr honeymoon, ugh for day of crappiness and pain)

Rock camp! Awesome!

I want to send Ivy to rock camp. She can probably hold drum sticks.

I wished that rock camp for girls had been around when i was growing up. A friend of mine works for the one here. I am unclear on whether there's a national organization that the regional ones are subsidiaries of or whether they are all independent and are kind of like a franchise or ...?

gah no kidding
i was sent to babysitting camp and horse camp :-/

I was sent to church camp, she announced, much to the surprise of no one.