A still-here post

-I have a book contract! I'd say WOOHOOO, but I don't think that covers it. What I had before was a book deal, which is not the same thing, but which is still a publicly-announced thing, which... if you're not me, you almost certainly don't care, but if you're writing a book or thinking about it, this is maybe useful information?

-I wrote about friendship for TNR. Could have written endlessly more on the topic. An alternate, probably unpublishable version would have gone into my various middle-school neuroses (specifically, anxieties centering on not having 'guy friends' or friends from other schools).

-If you spend the day hearing and using only French, and are in a partially Francophone country, it seems very, very odd that people are speaking English on the street. Old news, I suppose, for my many Canadian and Belgian relatives, but a new one for me. Also: It takes only a couple months in Canada (at least for this part-Canadian) for the English here to start sounding default and the US variety, all regions, to start sounding vaguely like a Texas accent.

"[W]e further codify the idea of women as sexual objects"

Found on Twitter: a confessional essay making more or less the point I made earlier: boys/men aren't the only ones who experience unrequited love. Women and girls, too, can go through long (sometimes lifelong) stretches of unpopularity with the opposite sex. (Obviously gay men and women can also get rebuffed, but that's not so relevant here. Or maybe it is - that also serves as a reminder that there's nothing uniquely hetero-male about romantic disappointment.) Anyway, Lux Alptraum gets at the essential:

Because the problem is this: when we ignore the existence of awkward girls, of the female nerds, losers, and geeks who are just as befuddled by sex and dating, we further codify the idea of women as sexual objects. The notion that all women can get effortlessly laid, if only they open their legs, reduces the reality of female experience, transforming women from complicated individuals to the vessels for male sexual desire lusted after by Elliot Rodger and his ilk, and further fueling the misogynistic rage that leads men like Rodger to feel justified in their anger and actions.

I'll just add - repeating myself from that other post - that this is really the danger of sharing only stories of harassment, of deflecting unwanted male advances, of jealous ex-boyfriends, of leering strangers. Yes, those stories should be shared. But if that's all that's shared, it just reiterates this narrative of women as magical creatures who don't know what it's like to have one's affections repeatedly go unreciprocated. Discuss rape culture, yes, but not in a vacuum sort of a way that assumes women's only challenge in the romantic sphere is unwanted attention from men. It's quite a bit more - as Alptraum says - "complicated" than that.

OK, I'll add one more thing as well, to get into why it's so complicated. The particularity of the female version of unpopular adolescence is that you can be of no interest to the boys in your class, or the boys you like, and be just generally not considered particularly attractive, while at the very same time, you'll be subject to copious leering, catcalling, etc. from creeps on the street. That sort of harassment isn't about admiring female beauty at its peak, or any such nonsense, but about intimidating the most easily intimidated, which is to say girls aged, say, 10-16. So there will be this weird thing where you're spending half the time silently mooning over the boys who like someone else, and the other half getting told "You've been spending too much time on your knees!" by strange men who feel the need to remark in an obscene way on your Rollerblading scabs. Ah, middle school in the 1990s.

Point being, this is, I think, why people get confused. It seems as if all-the-women (#YesAllWomen) must constantly deflect male attention. And it's true in a sense, but not in the sense of attention a woman would possibly interpret as a viable romantic or sexual prospect. Not least because this attention is so often aimed at girls too young to be looking for relationships in the late-teens-and-older sense of the term.

Sororities virtually visited, "guy friends" revisited UPDATED

If what you seek are my more polished ramblings, go here.

In the mean time, while I contend with various deadlines, I suggest you go and overanalyze this "Into The Gloss" post about being a recovering sorority girl, and graduating to the ITG aesthetic, which also involves a lot of Sephora, but is different in some profound way that would not, of course, be perceptible to an alien from another planet, and that's not all that perceptible to me, either, and I tend to be clued into such things. It appears that the shift is from conventional attractiveness by Texan adolescent standards to the equivalent for a New York adult. Why a fake tan is one, but bleached hair another, I can't say for sure. The difference might have something to do with eyebrows.

And yet! So many shiny photos of an especially gorgeous woman who can also write! And sorority Facebook photos - so fascinating! And the post - so much material to overanalyze! There's the fact that a post about hating one's "sisters" includes abundant photos of grinning alongside these women - do these women know their Facebook pics are being posted in this context?

UPDATE

The photos in question - and there are many! - have since had all faces but that of the author blurred out. Which, yes, seems about right. Not sure the law on that (privacy-settings and whatnot), but ethically, yeah, posting friends' photos on a major beauty blog in order to talk smack about them and their beauty routines is poor form.

/UPDATE

And what's this? An unapologetic admission that the sorority look was ditched when a new boyfriend preferred something different? This, though, from a woman who admits - admits! - to having amazing hair. Which, hey, she does. And clever, too, how the usual links to products are snuck in there. The subliminal message is that Nars will make you look like the author, which I can sadly attest, it will not.

It's an unusual story these days, if nothing else. We're always hearing an "It Gets Better" narrative about kids bullied for qualities that will turn them into creative-class success stories as adults. So what's a grown-up popular kid to do? I guess the best bet would be to emphasize that despite all evidence to the contrary, one was miserable in the photos where one looks thrilled. Which is certainly possible. I was popular in middle school and more miserable than I would have been if I'd had the same number of friends but those friends hadn't been cool. But because I looked terrible at the time - or let's say out of deference to people who've no doubt grown up to be kind and lovely women - there will be no slideshow illustrating my middle school experience.

Or! You could read about the girlfriendzone. Girlfriendzoning, says Reddit via Jezebel, is when a man can only see a woman in romantic terms.

Which... gah! That is exactly how I was about boys from age, say, 10 to 15. I went to a girls school until I was 13, and had no idea how one went about having male friends. (The elusive guy friends.) There were so few boys around (a handful at Hebrew school and at dances) - and then, at 14-15, so few at my math and science high school who'd actually talk to girls - that I didn't know how to classify boys I liked to spend time with except as crushes.

Looking back, I wouldn't say I actually had crushes on most of these boys, but I was convinced that was what you had to call it when you hung out with a boy and had a nice time. I didn't know what to make of the additional spark that's there when you hang out with someone attractive of your preferred sex, and that's there whether or not this is someone you actually want something with romantically. It was all too overwhelming, socially and probably hormonally, so I boyfriendzoned the boys I wanted to be friends with, all the while not being at all emotionally grown up enough to have a boyfriend. Convenient, then, that no one was interested.

OK, not exactly. I was never angry when the boys I liked gave no indication of liking me back, or (as happened often enough) began dating one another. I never felt entitled to anything. There was no Nice Girl behavior on my part, if such a thing is even possible, given gender dynamics. But, thanks to the magic of single-sex education, it took me until 16 or so to see boys as friends. Which... maybe makes me more sympathetic to the non-entitled aspects of the men who girlfriendzone women. Some of it is Nice Guy and reprehensible, but some of it is also social awkwardness.