Another Side of Being Female

Another Side of Being Female

This is something I have wanted to talk about for a while, but a recent post I read helped me decide to sit down and share my feelings. This is not a pity party or an attempt to steal the spotlight and honestly I don’t even care if it gets any attention whatsoever. I just want my voice out there, even if it is lost in the crowd.

I have seen many beautifully written and heart-wrenching pieces detailing how difficult it can be as a female and dealing with daily sexual harassment and/or abuse their whole lives. I do not in any way intend to take anything from those stories because those are real people who were really hurt, abused, offended, and degraded. Their emotions are 100% valid and I wish everyone had more awareness of the kind of behavior those brave women have endured and overcome. All I want is to provide perspective from my own experiences, which are quite different from theirs but I feel is underrepresented as far as I have seen, and just as difficult to live with.

For almost all of my life, I have been invisible to male attention.

I moved a lot growing up, so I never was in one place long enough to really make friends and become part of any real peer group. I usually made my own small group of four or five girls and had to leave them behind once we moved again (not military, my dad’s job just transferred him a lot). I am also a Mormon and I attended a Mormon college, so I didn’t really have to deal with that party atmosphere typical in college life. Such parties existed, or were rumored to exist, but I never was a part of it. So perhaps, where it not for these two major oddities in my life, it would have been different.

The internet is inundated with stories of girls first receiving unwelcome attention or advances when they were in their teen and preteen years. I never did. Numberless friends and other girls I have known share stories about going on bad dates or having guys creep on them. I agreed and acted like I knew what they were talking about. I didn’t. They would share stories of their multiple boyfriends they have had and talk about how they got together or how they broke up. I couldn’t relate. It is a feeling akin to listening to girls much skinnier than I complain about being fat or talk about their diet/exercise routine. I do not know what you are experiencing but I genuinely wish I had that problem.

Am I bragging about this? No.

Am I saying that being sexually harassed should be the norm? No.

Am I asking to be sexually harassed? No.

 Am I saying sexual harassment is desirable? Weeeelll….

Here’s the thing. No one is denying our society is messed up, especially when it comes to the treatment of females. Oversexualization is a major problem and sexualizing young girls and teens and women in general is a huge topic of contention. I do not personally feel that any female should be thought of as nothing more than a sex object. Unless, I mean, that’s what you like. Hey, whatever floats your boat in the bedroom. But that is your personal, private life and it something you are still choosing to do with consent of a willing partner and certainly not my business or the business of anyone with whom you are not seeking that treatment. Unsolicited seuxalization, however, is a problem. No one should treat anyone as anything less than thinking human person without their consent. This does include men. Even if you are the type of person who is flattered by the attention, that doesn’t make it OK for others to do that. Wolf whistles and salacious comments from strangers are hardly polite, nor should they be taken as compliments.

That being said, they are also perceived as normal. It’s almost a given that any woman walking down the street will be subjected to this treatment. Women have filmed themselves dealing with this kind of harassment over and over again and they are lauded for their bravery in exposing what it is really like for females out in the world.

Well…if that is the case, then what does that say for girls who don’t receive that kind of attention? The ones who don’t get asked out by guys or flirted with or wolf-whistled or called derogatory names? Does that mean there is something wrong with us? Are we too ugly to be bothered with? Are we abnormal for not being noticed by the opposite sex? Are we that unlikable?

As crazy as it sounds, I feel jealous of girls who talk about the creepy guys that hit on them. At least they are noticed. At least someone wants them. Feeling alone and unwanted is a terrible thing. I am intimately familiar with feeling invisible and I can tell you that it is awful. My self-image is buried deep in the gutter somewhere. I have tried to make myself pretty and presentable and there have been days when I feel like I look gorgeous, but no one notices except my parents.

I don’t know what I am expecting, to be honest. Outrageously being hit on? Being stalked by a creep? Feeling unsafe? Is that really what I want? The sad truth is yeah, kind of.

I am a nice person. I am really shy in a way that can come off as intimidating when you first meet me, but I promise once you get to know me, I try to be the best friend I can be. Probably a little too hard. I have a lot of anxieties about friends secretly hating me and finding me annoying and I try really hard to avoid that, but as a result I think I might be even more annoying. I know I am not the thinnest person around or the prettiest. I cannot tell you the number of times I have felt passed over in favor of the pretty girl. I have stood at a dance during a slow song and observed that every single girl in the room was asked to dance except me. Yes, I know I could have asked someone, but go back to the beginning of the paragraph where I say I am shy.

This feeling like something is wrong with me only grows worse when I try to talk about boys with my female friends. Guys don’t ask me out, they never have. I have had two boyfriends but they came as a result of a “Hey I kind of like you,” “hey I like you too, let’s be boyfriend and girlfriend” type of situation. Dating, flirting, all of that completely baffles me.

Sadly, because of the culture of my religion (note, the culture, not the doctrine), there is an added stigma of being female, graduated college, not served a full time mission, and being unwed. The older I get, the more I feel like a spinster. And given my spotty (at best) dating history, is it so hard to see why I start to believe I will never find someone?

I did not intend for this to become about me and my lonely self and my gradual descent into either a crazy cat lady or the eccentric who collects ferrets and/or rats.  Sorry about that. I’ll try to find my point.

Ah yes. My point is, I think, that I wish that there was some way to stop normalizing sexual harassment without taking away from the harrowing experiences of others. Stop assuming that your experiences are universal when talking to your other female friends. Even when I have said I don’t have much dating experience, I have had girls continue to assume that I do. It is incredibly demoralizing, at least for me.

I do not claim to speak for anyone other than myself. Perhaps my feelings in this are unique. But I won’t let anyone negate or demean how I feel. They are my personal thoughts and feelings and if I can help just one person feel like they are more normal and less like an aberration, I will be happy. Even if I don’t help anyone and no one reads this, I am happy that I expressed myself. It is who I am. My feelings matter. Even when no one sees them.

Oh, and though I won’t go into it more, smaller girls should also probably stop saying how fat they are to girls who are bigger than they are. Just sayin. You’re like half my size. I could eat you and probably will if you keep complaining.