Archive for January 2009

Teenage Girls in the U.S. Have Dirty Cunts

scrappybadger January 2nd, 2009

I started the following entry forever ago, so it is a bit dated in terms of when the study was released, but I think it is still relevant and therefore worth posting.

It was a few days ago that I first heard about the new study that finds 1 in 4 teenage girls in the U.S. has a sexually transmitted disease. Since then it’s been 48 long hours of furrowed news anchor brows, smacking lips, and televised dismay at the filthy promiscuity among teenagers. Some of the discussion has focused on teenagers in general without separating out the sexual habits of either girls or boys, but that hasn’t done much to soothe me. I find it odd, no, wait; let me start over. I find it completely normal (which, by the way, is way worse than odd) that these findings would be couched in terms that put girls at the center of the discussion. Every report I’ve seen says that 1 in 4 GIRLS has an STD.

Now I suppose teenage girls could be infecting one another. I mean, technically women can transmit diseases to one another even though study after study finds that it is very difficult and highly unlikely with most STDs. Herpes is the exception and seems to be, according to everything I’ve read, the easiest to transmit in female-female sex. Of course, there are few studies that contrast sex between lesbians to heterosexual sex in terms of STD transmission. The truth is, we still know very little about lesbian sex except that it is cute and usually preceded by the use of cherry chapstick.*

So if girls aren’t giving each other STDs then there have to be some non-girls involved, and we all know that non-girls are actually, get this, boys! Why the hell aren’t all the media outlets telling us how many boys have STDs? You know the answer, and I know the answer, but humor me as I repeat it for what is surely the 1,548,394th time: women are nasty and men are victims of that nastiness. Even nature thinks so. Twice in the past year women close to me have contracted HPV. They were scared they’d get cancer; they had their insides examined, scraped, and cultured; and they were both told by doctors that it is impossible to know how they got it because men typically carry the disease without any signs that they have it. Both women also defended the men who very likely gave it to them by parroting to me what their doctors told them.

Excuse the lesbian while she spews expletives in frustration.

I could go on and on about how it defies any kind of logic that a woman would be HPV free for years and then sleep with a man (the only one she’d been with in a very long time) and suddenly have an abnormal pap result. On and on I could go, but my point is really that women shoulder the burden of this like so many other things including, but in no way limited to, birth control, child care, and domestic chores. Why, then, include boys in the X Number of Girls Are Infected With Y Diseases equation? I suppose if women are the ones who have to take care of it all then there is no reason to talk about men. That’s it!

It finally all makes sense. I’ve wasted so much time worrying about shared responsibility and logical explanations and it-takes-two-to-tango thinking. Now I can settle into the serenity of an explanation that puts the blame where it has always belonged — on dirty teenage girls.

* Tongue in cheek pop culture reference. If you don’t get it be very happy.

Is There an Echo in Here?

scrappybadger January 1st, 2009

Here I am returning again for what I hope will not be a brief, bi-annual visit. I’m a bit dizzy, and my computer screen won’t be still for me after scrolling through 377 spam comments that have been in moderation for who knows how long. I won’t bore you, if indeed there still is a ‘you’ out there after all this time, with the usual excuses for not having blogged in forever. What I will do is cut myself some slack, remind myself that blogging is something I’ve always wanted to do for fun and personal development rather than as an obligation.

Excuses aside, I do think it is important to look at one of the reasons why I’ve been absent for so long. I am afraid of you, Gentle Reader. I know, it is absurd. You’ve never been anything but kind to me in both incarnations of my blog, yet I can’t help but worry. I suppose it stems from that goddamned need to be liked and to do what I’m supposed to do — the same one from which so many women struggle to free themselves. I imagine myself armed with all the feminist theory in the world, but it amounts to little more than a paper shield, cardboard at best, held up against the persistent onslaught of armored Angels in the House, dragging behind their horses the ragged corpses of all the other women who have unsuccessfully fought against the urge to be liked.

Being a feminist, and I mean actively resisting patriarchy, requires one to let go of the need to be liked. It’s that simple. So what do I do? How do I reconcile the two? How do I resist feminine martyrdom? I’ve trained for it my entire life, and I am pretty good at it. Heck, I’m being modest; I’m really good at it.

You may be wondering what this has to do with my blog exactly. Let me explain. I spend a lot of time talking about audience with my freshman composition students. I explain to them how important it is that they anticipate both positive and negative audience reactions. I urge them to think about what their audience wants and needs before they ever start writing. In short, I train them like the world trains little girls. I teach them to put aside their ideas until they can figure out how best to make their readers happy. What woman, with any ability for self-reflection at all, can say she hasn’t done that hundreds and thousands and millions of times? As Woolf puts it, the Angel “sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught, she sat in it.”

Now one part of me says that’s just good writing. How can you be expected to have an impact on anyone without figuring out what s/he needs? The other part of me wonders if, like so many other aspects of writing, this is yet another patriarchal idea that has become so ingrained in our consciousnesses that it just feels like fact. After all, there have been many women who have broken through the traditional “rules” of writing — women who say fuck it to a conflict-climax-resolution model of storytelling, for example. Why not, then, examine this other rhetorical strategy, this idea of reader as God? Oh, but it is scary.

This brings me back to my blogging. It is this anxiety about audience that makes blogging increasingly difficult for me. What do I have to say that is new? What can I say that is different? that matters? The very kinds of questions that I’m raising, though, remind me of something else. I am again prioritizing someone else over myself in my own life, a life of which I am the primary actor. I am the leading woman, not a character actor, not a supporting actor. Why, then, should it matter what a reader thinks? After all, this blog was a gift to myself.

For now that realization feels really helpful. Now I’ll just need to reread this post once a week.