You Put What Where?!

            I can’t stress this enough: I have always felt that I was different from my peers. Not in a bad way, per se, but enough that I know that I’m not like my friends. That’s true when I came to sex. While my friends in high school were off “hooking up” and experimenting with the opposite sex, I was in a sexual limbo. I went from being terrified of sex, to wanting to at least wait until marriage (after all, it can’t be as terrifying with someone you love and trust), to not wanting to do it all, to thinking it might not be so bad to try it. I was seventeen when I finally decided that I was absolutely ready to have sex, and eighteen before it happened. It wasn’t like I wanted to do it with just anybody; I at least wanted to do it with someone I was comfortable with.

Then, the first weekend I went home to visit family, my best friend let slip to her older brother that I found him attractive (that’s a gross understatement, by the way. Her brother is sexxxxxyyyyyyy). Somehow, he got my number and we started texting. I told him I was a virgin, and he offered to fix that for me. Trust me, I jumped at the chance to bed Ben. However, that’s all I wanted. Sex. Don’t get me wrong, Ben is ridiculously handsome, but he wasn’t boyfriend material. So, we set up a date, and two weeks later, it happened.

To me, it was more of a favor than anything. I don’t have any weird, naïve notions that Ben ever liked me or wanted to be with me, I don’t obsess over him, and no, I don’t sleep around a lot. In fact, I can count on one hand the people I’ve been with since. I didn’t want to have sex so I could go whore around campus, I wanted to do it for me, and only me. In a way, I think it made be a stronger person because I didn’t give in to peer pressure (and boy, was there a lot of it!) to lose my virginity to some random guy at a party or after Homecoming. It gave me a better sense of who I am, and because of that, I regret nothing.

President Obama Can Do WHAT With the DADT Bill?

                Living in the South – especially in Mississippi – makes being a somewhat liberal-minded individual hard. It’s not that Mississippi is exactly oppressive; it’s just that there is one way of thinking for the majority of people. I won’t lie; most of my family is completely against Barack Obama being president (for reasons I don’t ask about – I don’t want to get into a fight with 95% of my family), they don’t feel it is necessary to go too far off from one’s family, especially if you’re a girl, and, while everyone depends on me to be the “educated one,” my family actually wants me to be the “educated Conservative one.”  For many years I knew I was different in many ways – not just politically – and I struggled with that, because I knew I wouldn’t have the support of my family. Then, when I was in my early teens, I did a complete 180 from my family. I was an ultra-liberal, ultra-feminist, ultra-annoying little kid who barely knew what she was talking about in the realm of politics. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t exactly ignorant of what went on around me, I just had a completely unrealistic idea of how the world should be. After about a year or so, I started to calm down. Today, my views are nicely blended: there are some ideas I’m conservative on, and others I’m more liberal-minded about. I’m now far less inclined to argue with my family on every little thing I disagree with them on (many of my family members are older, and they remember a different time, and their beliefs are just a reflection of that). I both respect what others have to say on topics I don’t  agree with and understand that, misguided or not, if I were to say that their opinions are wrong just because they don’t agree with my line of thinking, then I would be no better than my right-wing, conservative kinfolk.

Learning a lesson

About five or six years ago, I was, like many teenagers, trying to “find myself.” I was unsure of everything: my beliefs, my morals, my standards, everything. I didn’t know where to turn: I was angry and bitter, and I had no outlet for those feelings. Then, one day as I was surfing the Internet, I came across an article on feminism on some obscure little website. Having never heard the word before, I was curious. It talked about the empowerment of women and how it could only be achieved through protesting everything anti-woman, and doing so as often and as loudly as possible. From that point on I was hooked. While I couldn’t actively get out there and picket ‘anti-women’ events and whatnot, I was extremely outspoken on my beliefs on feminism. And I was radical in those ideas, too. Did I want to get married? No. Did I want to listen to any man? I don’t think so. And if marriage was out, then I certainly didn’t advocate the tradition of taking the man’s last name after getting married. I was a mess. For years, I spoke out against anything and everything I thought oppressed women, and I made sure people heard me.

About three years ago, things started to change. As I started to understand who I was as a person, my ideas started to change. I found out that I did want to get married (although it can wait a few years), that maybe having children wasn’t so bad, that being a housewife doesn’t make you a slave to your husband (I would do it if my future husband made enough money), and that being a feminist doesn’t mean you have to get belligerent every time someone makes a negative remark about a woman. That doesn’t make you a feminist, it makes you annoying.

While my beliefs have drastically changed over the past few years, I still consider myself a feminist. I believe that women should have the choice to go out and work, and if they do, they deserve equal pay. I also believe that if there was to be another draft, it should include women (after all, ‘feminists’ can’t pick and choose what they want to be equal in), and that if a woman belittles a man for the sake of feminism, then that makes her just as bad as any chauvinistic man. However, I’m realistic: I think that there are a few things that men can do better than women and women can do better than men; everyone has their niches. I think that makes me an empowered woman, as I understand my strengths but don’t delude myself into thinking I don’t have any weaknesses.