betrayal

So my ex left for the Air Force on Tuesday. Hard enough in and of itself, to see someone who holds such an important part of my life and heart, leave, knowing that I will probably never see him again. But, try adding on that for the past eight months he has been dating someone who was my friend for fifteen years.

Needless to say, she has decided that it is too uncomfortable to talk to me. I think she hates the fact that I was there first. I was his first for so many things, and she can never replace replace me in that regard. I think it makes her jealous. So she has said a handful of words to me on twice as many occasions, which has effectively ruined the friendship that endured most of our lives. I have tried to talk to her, I really have. I've sent emails, tried to get her alone at school. She just turns red and leaves or ignores me.

In biology, we watched a video about Rosalind Franklin. I had never realized how much was wronged before- I had thought, "Oh, she wasn't considered for the Nobel Prize because she was dead, and posthumous nominations aren't allowed."

But it goes far beyond the Nobel Prize, or even any of the events after her death. She put up with sexism every day as a woman in the sciences, period. The male scientists dubbed her "Rosie" and "The Dark Lady." They belittled her based on her appearance rather than on her work, yet had the nerve to steal her data and findings to further their own studies.

That might seem biased, but James Watson freely admits to the nicknames, jokes about how supposedly unattractive she was, and even told the public that "Rosie, of course, did not directly give us her data," as stated in his book, The Double Helix. Maurice Wilkins, who has been said to be jealous of Franklin because she took over his lab at Kings College, gave some of her unpublished data to Watson and Crick.

My feminist experience has been comfortable and enlightening for the most part; it's shown me a new sense of personal value and taught me the integrity of women as a group. I used to identify as a "humanist" and even went so far as to call myself an "anti-feminist" before I understood what the terms really meant.

I've grown out of the other side. I believed in the greater goodness of man-and-womankind but not in the specific goodness of womankind. I didn't value women who fight the right to choose, I didn't appreciate the opinions of educated women working in their homes, and I didn't comprehend the experience of women in cultures that practice female genital mutilation. To make a long story short (ha, too late), I didn't give women's decisions the full weight and consideration that they deserved. But, as Jeyoani's signature reminds us, "Scratch any woman deeply enough and you find a feminist." And this time, a real one.

My mother wanted me to sign up for summer camp. So, OK, I took a look at the websites, and I looked at the 'a day at Bellaleo' thing and a couple others.

Then, because of some fatal error with the list of things I'll need for camp, poof, I'm at the webbie again. I'm trying every link I DIDN'T look at. And all of a sudden, I come to the scheduling page. This is at the point of absolute desparation.

August 12: Girls Session Begins.

Um...WTH? It's...all...girls...? I'm on the phone with my best friend, trying to figure out if she'll be able to sleep over after the next Mug (a monthly Pagan thing, and she won't) and suddenly...I'm going to be trapped for two weeks at an overnight camp...with three or four other girls in my cabin...and a lot more in the entire camp...

One thing I've personally come to terms with, the older I've gotten, is that for myself, and for a lot of women I've talked to in my life and work, the wounds which come from other women can often cut more deeply than those from men do.

As women, betrayals from our mothers often seem to hit us harder than betrayals from our fathers. A female friend who hurts us often seems to have the capacity to hurt us more deeply than our male friends can/could. For those of us who are bisexual, queer or lesbian, we might experience that the first time a girl or woman breaks our hearts the depth of that hurt is unexpectedly more painful than we have experienced with men.

We could theorize until the end of time as to why that is (and plenty of women have, inside and out of feminist contexts), but WHEN it is, it can be really tough to deal with.