Letters to the Editor
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Anon at 1:28pm
You're the one spreading hate around. Check yourself before you wreck yourself.
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"why should you or any single woman have to tie themselves up in knots worrying if they are "chaste-acting" enough when around married friends?"
Because I want to keep them and because people are competitive and envious by nature -- even nice ones.
Deering, you have even higher standards for your friends than I do for mine.
That said, (I now heave a big sigh and prepare to confess), it is a bit wearing to always have to pretend to be a completely nonlethal weapon.
So why do I do it? When the chips are down, you need friends. You need to tolerate their crap so that they will tolerate your crap because none of us is perfect.
Hmm. Maybe I am the good little girl because when I hit puberty my mother acted as if I was competition.
My. This has been a nice self-reflective exercise.
Happy now, deering? You have really made me THINK.
Thank you. As a therapy session, this has been quite inexpensive.
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haaley
since when does looking at naked women make a woman gay?
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an obligation to even out ratios
In response to "WTF?" I bet women who have a lot of female friends recognize the very obligation you say doesn't exist.
I would feel an obligation "to even out the male-to-female ratio of a freakin' party, bachelor or otherwise". And I say if you don't recognize this you won't-- if you are a woman-- be sensitive enough to be friends with a lot of women.
It is not easy to get the social respect you deserve if you are a woman in some contexts. Have you seen the studies on how slow people are to laugh at jokes women make (the same jokes men get laughs from?) There are all sorts of ways in which kind people still ensure that women get included in the public realm.
So, I disagree, I think there is an obligation to make sure traditions are open to all genders. I think everyone is obligated, but women particularly so (for practical and philosophical reasons.)
An early post put it better, but women know that there are all sorts of power plays that happen between them, concerning men. Men don't seem to notice these, but even the women who participate in them admit to them. And I think the LW is oddly focussed on the "best friend" and not the groom because she, too, is thinking there is an obligation here that women usually honor.
I would certainly not be comfortable going to a "no female" event myself (as a female) despite any compliment involved. My other girlfriends would kill me! Lol
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@ haaley- way off topic but
What is wrong with a woman who gets pleasure from giving pleasure to other men in the form of going to a strip club with them and having them watch her there, if she does in fact get pleasure from that? Everyone's different. Sexuality isn't black or white or right and wrong, unless you're molesting innocent children of course. It's permissible to get pleasure from all sorts of scenarios that don't fit into your Girls-Gone-Wild-is-shamefully bad-mentality. Since when is getting off on male pleasure a bad thing? Straight women are only supposed to get off from looking at naked men? That's what the Minister says anyway so it must be true.
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after reading the letter and a few responses
I realized that my partner and I have managed to totally avoid any "wedding/marriage/ceremony" involvement for over 20 years. Friends and neighbors and even family members we are close to have gotten married and divorced in these years, but somehow very privately. If we had been invited to these events when they occurred, we would have felt obligated to attend. We have had some interesting discussions about this fact. One of the reasons I think we have all avoided these usually public events are the incredibly stupid rituals, like bachelor/bachelorette parties, that are so often involved. I loved the letter where the brother was taking the groom to a strip club and they ended up playing pool instead. Our kinda friends.
Nonetheless, good answer, Cary.
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Anon @ 1:37
"I would feel an obligation "to even out the male-to-female ratio of a freakin' party, bachelor or otherwise". And I say if you don't recognize this you won't-- if you are a woman-- be sensitive enough to be friends with a lot of women."
You'd be wrong.
There's a line between being sensitive and being overly worried about all this crap. I would never force /anyone/ to invite people they're not close friends with to any event.
If the LW were close with the groom, I would imagine she'd be invited.
This isn't sensitivity. This is more 'lip-service-to-sisterhood-while-we-stab-you-in-the-back'. This is 'I don't trust women, so the party should men-only or mixed, so we can keep an eye on you'.
Perhaps the onus for sensitivity should be in the LW's husband, or the LW, who shouldn't make the woman going sound like a self-involved slut for accepting an invitation from her BEST FRIEND. Why does no one see this as harmful generally?
Has no one read Lip Service? Jesus.
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Heh...
>Because I want to keep them and because people are competitive and envious by nature -- even nice ones.<
But this is a game you can't win if people are paranoid and insecure. No matter _what_ you do, they aren't really seeing you--they are seeing their faults/insecurities and taking them out on you. Bottom line--if they consistently don't trust you on something as crucial as this, it's not going to stop there. So why be bothered with their grief?
>Deering, you have even higher standards for your friends than I do for mine.<
Nope--this comes from hard experience. No friend is a friend who makes you have to constantly assuage their insecurities to the detriment of who you are.
>So why do I do it? When the chips are down, you need friends. You need to tolerate their crap so that they will tolerate your crap because none of us is perfect.<
Are they friends if you have to mute yourself for them to accept you? Hell, do they even know how you really _are_? If not, how can you rely on them when the chips are down--or at all?
>Hmm. Maybe I am the good little girl because when I hit puberty my mother acted as if I was competition.<
Aha!
>Happy now, deering? You have really made me THINK.
Thank you. As a therapy session, this has been quite inexpensive.<
You're welcome. :) I brought this all up because I'm sick of the whole "married women are better than single women and they are always right no matter how insecure they are" social dynamic. Women like this enforce woman-hating restrictive social norms, and if we all had to abide by what they want, women would still be wearing corsets and not voting. (Geez, look at the number of married/ex-married women on here who swear up and down with no evidence that the woman in this letter is all kinds of a threat.) No real social advance ever came from conforming to wifey-dom and treating other women like rivals.