The Selfish Feminist

I'll admit that I tend to be a selfish feminist. If you want to act like a jackass and it doesn't directly affect me, I really don't care. If you want to ogle me a little bit, that's fine. Just don't think you're being clever when you "trick" me into bending over. I cannot abide by people who think they're smarter than me, even if they are. But I'm going to tell you what really pisses me off. What really pisses me off is the way I've completely internalized that a woman's worth is first and foremost based on her aesthetic contribution to a room. I mean, seriously, when I was going to have lunch with Brittney, a person I'd never met before, who wanted to meet and talk about Tiny Cat Pants, an endeavor about which I feel very happy, what was my gut reaction? Was I happy? Well, yes, but more than happy, I was terrified that she was going to think that I was fat and ugly. Tonight, I'm going to go and finally see for myself whether Jon is Brittney or Cindy or Andrew Jackson's illegitimate great-great-great-great grandson or just himself and have a couple of drinks and a few laughs about how funny the whole blogging thing is. Will it be fun? I have no idea because I'm busy worrying about whether he and the bartender are going to point and laugh when I walk in. People do this shit all the time, meet other people they don't know. But not me, because I'm all like "What if they think I'm ugly?" like y'all are a bunch of free-roaming Miss America judges. And good lord, I've been to Walmart; there are lots of people who are worse looking than me and they go out and meet people and, presumably, do not drive themselves crazy with their paralyzingly freakish self-doubts, perhaps because they drink a great deal. But obviously, they have something that works for them. And, (yes, another 'and') I get up today and start looking over the last couple of entries and I realize that over the last three days I've been utterly fixated on boobs, like if I talk about my body in ways that make me feel confident in it, I suddenly will be. Which, I'm sure was utterly obvious to y'all. Which means that the other important little story (the first being that pretentious people deserve my contempt) I tell myself to get through the day--"Well, I may be ordinary, but at least I'm mysterious"--is utter crap as well. I'm about as mysterious as vanilla ice cream. Argh. Christ. I annoy the shit out of myself.