The Girlfriend Experience? Yeah, We Offer That Here

by Alicia Costa

“I think that dating is awful. I just don’t understand people that can go out with someone and be so relaxed about it.” –Natalia, Girls

I’ve been dating for about a year and a half. This was after a substantial hiatus of over five years where I did a lot of work on myself. All the while I silently snickered at the articles I’d read about women in their 20s and 30s online dating and having a terrible go of it. Oh the horror stories! I’d sit there behind my computer screen stroking my cat on my lap and smirk away. I’d think to myself, “That won’t be me! I am a catch! I have my shit together! When I am ready to dabble in online dating I will pick good and sensible men and not get jerked around!” No really. I really thought I’d sign up for a online dating site, meet like three guys, and one of those guys would fall for my adorable good looks and charm and that would be it. Bam. Consider me off the market boys.

Ha.

I’ve met a handful of men (I’m picky and you have to weed through A LOT of crap to find any decent guys. LIKE A LOT) and overall I’ve been pleased. They have been charming, good looking, educated, have jobs, have dreams, don’t live with their parents, and are genuinely nice humans. And they love their mothers and sisters (my mother always told me to judge a man based on how he treats his mother and sisters). But they all seemed to enjoy, what I have dubbed “The Girlfriend Experience”, in that they want to skip over the actually dating part right to the sweatpants and sex.

I am not a fancy gal. I’m not interested in being wined and dined by someone I barely know. All of these men I’ve met for a quick coffee and let it progress from there. Which usually brought us to my apartment. And I’ve had a really nice time entertaining a few of these gentlemen.

The evenings usually consisted of sharing a bottle of wine on the couch, some good conversation, and heavy petting. And while I am not one to shy away from casual sex it really isn’t what I am looking for at this point in my life. I need something more. Don’t get me wrong: I love comfy pants, wine, and sex. But didn’t we skip a part? Like the part where we get kicked out a poetry reading for making out and groping each other? Or having sushi and going for a walk along the ocean? Or exchanging dirty texts at 3 a.m. on Saturday night?

And after this happened to me a few times with a few different guys I named this behavior “The Girlfriend Experience.” After a while you start to feel like the girlfriend they have been with for a couple of years who they come home to, unload their day on, drink beer with, and give a quick bang to. Then you don’t hear from them for a week or more until they are lonely and want something comfortable to slip back into.

A good friend of mine calls this the “Comfy Sweat Pant” (where a guy treats you like a old pair of sweatpants they can throw on and veg out in). So how did we skip all the fun and get right to the part where you text me daily updates about your car repair and hectic work schedule after we’ve hung out twice? Or tell me you have “mild managed depression” yet have a bathroom full of anti-psychotics and only call me when you need someone to listen to your disturbed ramblings?

Now I am not trying to make this sound unpleasant. Like I said I’ve had nice experience with a few guys where the wine/couch/conversation/hot making out was a very enjoyable experience. However, this would lead any lady to the place where she also feels comfortable to expose herself to him by telling him how she constantly gets herself stuck in/between things because she often misjudges just how much room her voluptuousness actually requires.

Now if a lady is telling you one of the their secret shames then she is comfortable with you. Comfortable enough to text you something like, “Hey man I think you’re rad, I like spending time with you, and let’s get naked again soon.”

To which I believe the guy reacts like this:

Whoa now, crazy lady. What did you think was going on here?
Read more

Posted on April 7, 2013 by jarrahpenguin in Feminism, My Reality 2 Comments

GF Reads: Airbrushed Nation: The Lure and Loathing of Women’s Magazines

Airbrushed Nation Cover

by Ashli Scale

Like many girls, I grew up reading Seventeen Magazine, Cosmo and Vogue. Also like many girls, I had horribly low self-esteem and I hated by body. I spent hours agonizing over the models’ faces and bodies, wondering how I could achieve the perfection found in the glossy pages of my magazines.

No matter how much information I gleaned from the magazines about improving my body, dressing in style and enhancing my looks with make-up, nothing seemed to work. I even spent most of my allowance on cosmetics, clothes and diet products recommended by these magazines. No matter how much money I threw at the “problem” of my appearance I could not achieve what these magazines promised.

Many years later I read a book called The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf. This book was a game-changer for me because it completely opened my eyes to the manipulation of the beauty, diet and fitness industries. I had always considered myself intelligent, savvy and a bit of a conspiracy theorist so how did I get duped for so many years? This insight kick-started my interest in the body acceptance movement so when I was given the opportunity to review Jennifer Nelson’s book Airbrushed Nation: The Lure and Loathing of Women’s Magazines, I was thrilled. Read more

Posted on November 22, 2012 by jarrahpenguin in Feminism, Pop Culture 1 Comment

Feminism F.A.Q.s: What is Objectification?

Feminism FAQs Title Screen

by Jarrah Hodge

My latest episode of Feminism F.A.Q. is on the issue of objectification, specifically sexual objectification, and why this is an issue for feminists. Check out the video below and read my notes and the transcript after the jump.

Posted on October 15, 2012 by jarrahpenguin in Feminism, Pop Culture 3 Comments

Meredith Shaw Inspiring Girls Who Believe

by Jarrah Hodge

Toronto born-and-raised singer Meredith Shaw is using her talents and her networks to help empower girls. Last week Shaw launched the Girls Who Believe contest with Girls Inc. I spoke with her about the project, her music, and why she thinks it’s important to work with girls on issues around creativity and self-esteem.

Meredith Shaw got started with music at a young age: “I had always kind of known music was my thing…I think my parents really recognized it before I did.” She took classes on piano, guitar, voice from when she was a little kid. When she was in her mid-teens a producer heard her and she decided to go into music as a career. In the last couple of years Meredith met Gordie Johnson. He produced her first full-length album, the positive and inspirational Place Called Happy. “Getting to do that with someone like him is really amazing because his track record is awesome…we got to do it [recording the album] in Willie Nelson’s studio in Austin, which I was really star-struck by,” she said.

Place Called Happy has a track called “Girls Who Believe”.

“Girls Who Believe was a really special song for me on the record. I knew when I was writing it it was a very special song to me. It’s really true to me and what I believe in…usually those songs are what resonate with people,” Meredith told me. The song got picked up in an episode of Degrassi: The Next Generation and that process of realizing that a young demographic liked the song helped spark the GWB project and contest.

“I thought that demographic for the show likes the song, maybe I can reach out to them in some way that isn’t inviting them into a bar they can’t get into,” she explained. Read more

Posted on July 12, 2012 by jarrahpenguin in Can-Con, Feminism, Pop Culture Leave a comment

One Size Doesn’t Fit All: Talking to Youth about Body Image

by Ashli Scale

Last month I did something really brave – I set aside my fears of public speaking and co-facilitated workshops for junior high girls on body image and beauty standards. The workshop is a tool developed by Hopewell Eating Disorder Support Centre to raise awareness of body image concerns. It covers a range of topics such as:

The unrealistically “thin ideal” for women and “overly-muscular ideal” for males which, when internalized, can create feelings of anxiety, shame and guilt since we are not able to achieve them (Cash & Fleming, 2002; Grogran & Wainwright, 1996). Results from research show that young girls exposed to Barbie report lower body esteem and an internalized “thin ideal” (Dittmar, et al., 2006). Additional research results demonstrate that teen magazines with slender, enhanced images create high levels of body dissatisfaction in young girls after just 5 minutes of viewing (Monro & Huon, 2005).
The concept of media literacy, which we defined as viewing the media with a critical and informed attitude. Part of this is challenging the practice of Photoshopping images by explaining the extent of digitally enhanced images in the media and showing before/after images for analysis.
Exposing the diet industry with particular emphasis on fad diets and providing information on popular fad diets, explaining how to critique the ads and listing the dangers of losing weight in this way. We shared results of studies that found 95% of people who diet gain the weight back within one year (Grodstein et al., 1996, Weinsier et al., 2000).
Defining negative self-talk and discussing how to combat it and promote positive self-esteem. Promoting the overarching message: “Don’t question why you are different, question why the images are all the same”.

I observed two disturbing trends throughout the series of presentations. First, the narrowness of beauty ideals being taught to our youth was clearly demonstrated when we asked how women are portrayed in the media. At every workshop the very first answer was “skinny”. The only other answer provided was that women in the media are made to look “perfect” with no flaws like acne, moles, scars or wrinkles.

Posted on May 19, 2012 by jarrahpenguin in Feminism, Pop Culture 1 Comment

FFFF: Our Revolution is Long Overdue – Margaret Cho

More of a rallying cry than ha-ha funny. But I put one that’s more ha-ha funny underneath (also sacrilegious so fair warning). Happy Friday everyone!

-Jarrah

Posted on May 18, 2012 by jarrahpenguin in Feminism, FFFF, LGBT Leave a comment

For Girls who Wear Glasses

I was in Grade 10 when I decided to ask out a guy from English class.

He was tall, dark, and as close to handsome as you got in the group of band geeks I hung out with. So one day when we were waiting for the bell to end class, I approached him and said, “I was just wondering if you wanted to go to a movie sometime.”

He turned to look behind him, then turned back and with eyes wide, asked, “Me?”

“Yeah?” I said, suddenly less sure of my plan.

“Um….um….” he stalled, opening and closing his mouth like a fish.

“Oh. You can think about it and tell me later,” I said, my heart sinking. He looked hugely relieved.

“Ok, cool,” he said. Just then, the bell rang and he literally turned tail and sprinted down the hall to get away from me.

Just in case I hadn’t got the message, he ran away from me after each class for the next month.

When I came home crying and asked my mom why boys didn’t like me, she said, “Boys are just intimidated by your intelligence.” Of course, being 14, my immediate reaction was to wish to God that I wasn’t smart. If she’d said it was because of my clothes, that could’ve been fixed, but I couldn’t not be smart! I was sure I was going to be alone forever.

And I wasn’t the only one hearing the message. “My grandma used to say, ‘Guys don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses,’” recalled one friend.

Another remembered seeing a matchmaker who told her she was an “extremely difficult case…because [she's] so successful at such a young age.”

The smart girl myth is perpetuated in pop culture and fashion. A few years ago Abercrombie and Fitch were forced to pull a line of shirts with slogans like “With These, Who Needs Brains?” (written across the chest).

And online dating coaches like Evan Mark Katz keep doling out advice like this:

This doesn’t mean you should play dumb…It might mean, however, turning off some of the things that make you “successful” at work. This is a bitter pill to swallow…Still, it doesn’t change the fact that “hard-driving, opinionated, and meticulous” are not on most men’s lists of ideal feminine traits.

This is me intimidating men, apparently

But Christine Whelan, author of Why Smart Men Marry Smart Women found that women with graduate degrees or top salaries were more likely to marry than others. And even if the myth were true, why would a smart woman want to date someone who wanted them to be stupid?

So what do you do when you’re bombarded with messages that say you have to be dumb to get a date, and you have to get a date or else?

Guardian columnist Barbara Ellen’s advice is to “enjoy being fab and brilliant, hold out for the guys who’ll appreciate it and tell the ‘lower 2 percentile’ that, sadly, you never mastered the international language of Thick.”

And in my favourite response, John Green agrees, stating: “The venn diagram of guys who don’t like smart girls and guys you don’t want to date is a circle”:

So, girls with glasses, stay strong, and stay smart.

Posted on September 9, 2009 by jarrahpenguin in Feminism 1 Comment