My favorite is when a guy gets asked about the birth control pill and he says this: “I guess that’s the one I have most indirect experience with, and I guess that it would be my favorite.” I bet it is, buddy. (To be fair, some guys knew what they were talking about. The guy with the hat is pretty smart.)

But on a serious note: can I reiterate that sexual health knowledge is not just a woman’s realm? That men should know about birth control, the statistics on date rape, abortion access and other such essential life info? Cause I’m tired of being the only one who gets lectured on sex and how to protect myself. Throw us a bone, guys. (No pun intended.) It’s not cute when you don’t know anything about our lady parts.

That said, I’m wondering how women would fare with the same kind of experiment. Something tells me that a lot of us women don’t know what goes on with our bodies, either. What do you think?

I didn’t realize I was intelligent until college; even then, however, I still had my doubts.

In third grade I was diagnosed with a learning disability. According to LD Online, “Fifteen percent of the U.S. population, or one in seven Americans, has some type of learning disability.” It was absolutely horrifying to my third-grade-curly-haired-self. From the way it was presented to me, I knew it was something negative; something no one wanted. Some of you may not know what exactly a learning disability is.

Here’s a definition:

A learning disability is a neurological disorder. In simple terms, a learning disability results from a difference in the way a person’s brain is “wired.” Children with learning disabilities are as smart or smarter than their peers, but they may have difficulty reading, writing, spelling, reasoning, recalling and/or organizing information (LD Online).

I was diagnosed as having two types of learning disabilities, both of which are mild for the most part. One, which is quite common, is called Dyscalculia. This is a “mathematical disability in which a person has a difficult time solving arithmetic problems and grasping math concepts.” The second one I have is called Language Processing, which basically means I have trouble recalling information or retrieving words to express something. I fought with these disabilities long and hard when I was younger.

Immediately after this diagnosis, I was enrolled in special ed class. It was horrible. Us “special” kids would have to leave in the middle of regular class to go to “special” class and it was always so embarrassing. All of the students knew where we were going–they knew we were “dumb.” All through elementary school, I felt different and extremely stupid. In fact, I had many teachers who actually told me things like, “You’re not going to be able to do things like other kids”, or “We don’t expect you to do this that well, because you’re not as smart as the others.” Literally. Or, teachers would say, “Oh, that’s just a crutch.” No, it’s not a crutch–though, if I want to use it as a crutch, that’s my damn right.

When an authoritative figure tells a young girl that she is nothing, those words really stick to her (This is why I’ve never understood the whole, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” saying). Because of the many terrible teachers I’ve encountered, I’ve never been that fond of teachers in general, unless they teach at the university level—these ones seem to have their shit together and appear more educated on the subject of learning disabilities. I still deal with those negative comments in my head to this day. I learned early not to ask teachers questions if I didn’t understand something. When I did ask, they acted like I wasn’t listening. I was always listening.

It’s really difficult to be a girl child in general, but to be labeled “disabled,” and be a girl in this society is a lot to handle. I knew other girls like me in school, but I felt myself not wanting to associate with them. I wanted so badly to fit in and to be considered “normal.” This seems to be the constant struggle for young women. Even though my disability can’t be seen, I used to always feel like I wore it on my sleeve. I always felt others could see my secret shame. I hate that word…”disabled.” It makes me feel like I can’t breathe–like I’m “slow” and “different,” and it’s always used in a negative way. Perhaps this is why I still have trouble telling people, even my closest friends, that I have a learning disability. I worry they will look at me differently. I worry they will pity me.

Today, I know that I’m intelligent. I mean, I’m in a Master’s program, I must be somewhat smart. Though, every now and again I get called back to that 3rd grade place of shame. I used to despise my “disability.” I used to be violent towards it. I hated myself. Then, luckily, once I got accepted into college and received a Fine Arts Scholarship and others, as well as having great supporters, I realized that maybe I was smart. Maybe it wasn’t terrible to be “different.” I can honestly say that I am thankful for my learning disability. I like that I don’t think like everyone else. My 3rd grade self would never, in a million years, think I would say this. But I am saying it–loud and proud.

My hope is that young women with learning disabilities will strive and feel good about themselves and their abilities. A learning disability is not so much a “dis”-ability, but an outright “ability” that makes one’s mind unique and beautiful. It’s no fun to think the same as everyone. Remember that.

In my daily existence, I deal on a strictly local basis. My job as a reporter confines me to five towns in the Chicago suburbs. Even most of my freelance work and blogging intensely focuses on the uniquely American experience.

So I’m thankful for this day to jolt me out of my tunnel vision, especially since it’s easy to miss the dwindling amount of international coverage the media provides nowadays. And even though Girldrive is a truly American story, some women we talked to explicitly told me and Emma that feminism needs to get out of its Western bubble.

Here are some IWD events going on across the country. Also see Gender Across Borders’ International Women’s Day blog directory–many many feminist blogs are jumping on the bandwagon today and blogging about global issues.

Check it out…it’s pretty amusing:

Berkeley reading:

When: TONIGHT, March 4th, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley
What: I will be signing copies and reading from Girldrive, including profiles of some Bay Area ladies.

San Fran reading:

When: Friday, March 5th, 7:00 p.m.
Where: Modern Times Bookstore, 888 Valencia Ave., San Francisco
What: I, along with Girldrive interviewees Rebecca Rosenfelt and Bea Sullivan, will be reading from Girldrive. Famed ecofeminist Starhawk might make a guest appearance, too!

Anyone who knows me is probably surprised that this blog post hasn’t shown up earlier. I am lightweight obsessed with My So-Called Life, I’ll be the first to admit it. But it’s only because that show was the shit and so was its heroine. Angela was great because she was incredibly, discomfitingly real.

I loved how she was dorky and awkward and wore brown overalls with a black shirt–yet was still so inexplicably cool that every teenage girl in America wanted to be her. I loved how she was insecure and stumbly and passive-aggressive, yet still stuck to her guns (remember when she went to that teacher’s house and demanded why he abandoned his family? Remember when she told Jordan she wasn’t going to lose her V-card in some skeezy abandoned house?). I love that she was unconventional-looking and had zits and compared her small breasts to the huge ones in the locker room, yet was also beautiful and confident at random times and had that awesome shiny red hair. I loved how all her statements were questions (“When you call someone’s name? Like, kind of loud? And they don’t hear you? It makes you feel really lonely.”) I loved how she was completely insightful and utterly oblivious all at once. I just love her and always will.

Girldrive interviewee Ula kindly pointed me to this simply amazing video of Angela’s greatest hits from FourFour. Enjoy:

Anyway, since clearly I have a one-track mind, we started shootin the shit about feminism, and damn did these ladies have something to say:

Nona: Do you guys claim the word “feminism”?

Kelley: Yes. I hate when people say “I’m not a feminist but I enjoy using birth control, not having to be married, being able to have a career.” The word needs to be more celebrated than it is.

Jessi: I’m a feminist but I don’t like forceful, overbearing feminism. It seems like some feminists have this set of rules, and you’re wrong for everything you do. So I’m a feminist, but in a positive way. I’d rather show it by example rather than preach.

Nikki: I don’t feel the need to label things. We’re fuckin’ livin’ hard, out of a van, doin’ things that dudes complain about.

Jessi: Oh also! None of us care to shave our armpit hair, but people make a really big deal out of it!

[hysterical laughing all around]

Jessi: See, and I think that’s cool for people to see. We don’t even mention it or make a big deal out of it. So I think a lot of people all of a sudden are like, Oh ok.

Kelley: Yeah, “like they’re wearing makeup, doing girly shit.” It’s all about what you’re comfortable doing. I can’t believe people are grossed out about something so natural. Remember when that girl went on MTV and talked about her armpit hair? People freaked out!

[we all remember. obviously.]

Jessi: It’s like saying, “We’re feminists, and we’re normal just like you.” You don’t have to be a freak of nature to be a feminist.

Nikki: Sometimes, people ask me if our song, “The Whole Damn Thing,” is a feminist song about body image. And I’m like, “Um…sure! Why not?”

Kelley: There are a lot of feminist musicians who don’t call themselves feminists, like Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton…

Nona: Oh god, I love Dolly. My religion on Facebook is “Dollywood.”

Kelley: Haha, yeah, she’s awesome. But she doesn’t come out and say she’s a feminist.

Nona: What do you guys think about the term “girl band”?

Kelley: It can get really annoying. One time I saw us referred to as a “girl-only band” as our only descriptor in this listings magazine. Every other band was “electronica” or “rock” or something. Come on, “girl-only band”? That tells you nothing at all. You would never call a band a “boy-only band.” But for some reason, it’s still okay for women. Hopefully just the sheer number of women in bands will change that.”

Damn straight. Listen to a clip of the “The Whole Damn Thing” here. Is it a feminist anthem? You decide:

This rips open a wound for me–I spent most of 2007 contemplating this issue. But I’m gonna weigh in afresh now that I’ve just celebrated 2 years in my healthiest, post-high-school, Completely Committed Relationship (technically marriage, but that’s another story)–the sex-and-love “holy grail,” according to the many women’s and teen magazines Kate lists in her Salon piece. Before, it was my “sorta” this or my “fuck buddy” that or my “I wish I knew what he was thinking” friend-with-benefits. And I gotta say, no matter how much I railed against Laura Sessions Stepp and Dawn Eden and Miriam Grossman and all the other rightwing, anti-feminist cautionary matrons, the facts remained: I knew how it felt to agonize over a text message. I knew how much it hurt to hear that the guy I’d been hooking up with “didn’t do relationships.” And I knew what it was like to use sexuality to coax a guy into being with me, only to have it fail miserably.

Feminist or not, that shit sucks. And it happens a lot, to women and girls everywhere. And yet, if you consider me and the vast majority of America who eventually couple up, it seems to end up okay. What to make of all this?

Rachel asks in the aforelinked post:

Now, just to be clear, I’m all for the freedom to hook up. But let’s face it: despite our desire to give women the freedom to plunder the bar scene and flex their sexual appetites, it would appear a whole lot of them are pretty happy playing by old school rules, thank you very much. Incidentally, one of the women smart enough to figure this out just sold her 5 billionth book, or something like that.

Does that make me a right-winger? Can I still be a feminist and say that I’m against this brand of sexual freedom? I fear feminism has been backed into a corner here. It’s become antifeminist to want a guy to buy you dinner and hold the door for you. Yet – picture me ducking behind bullet proof glass as I type this — wasn’t there something about that framework that made more space for a young woman’s feelings and needs?

I do feel where Rachel is coming from. But those old models are based on the idea that girls are fragile, that they need to be sheltered from the ills of the world. They’re based on, as Kate says, being the girl that guys want. They’re based on, as Amanda outlines, sexism plain and simple. So if we don’t want to go the “Girls Gone Mild” route and start waiting for dudes to ask us on candlelit dates, does that mean it’s hopeless to find a happy sexual medium as teens and young, single women?

Kate says no. “[I]f we teach all kids that there’s a wide range of potentially healthy sexual and emotional relationships,” she says, “and the only real trick (granted, it’s a doozy) is finding partners who are enthusiastic about the same things you want, then there’s room for a lot more people to pursue something personally satisfying at no one else’s expense.” That’s one of the smartest statements I’ve ever read on this topic. Amanda, meanwhile, says we need to stop making women shoulder the burden of keeping men in check, and concentration on getting “boys to appreciate girls more as human beings.” A-fucking-men. (No pun intended.)

But there’s also this: We need to admit as a culture that teens are sexual beings, and that more often than not, sexual maturity has a completely different timeline than emotional maturity. This is, to be sure, skewed by sexism and restrictive gender roles to make sexual coming-of-age worse for girls. But beyond that, maybe discovering what you want sexually and emotionally is just part of growing up–and that’s okay.

And for that matter, what’s with this still-dominant narrative that all teen girls should want a monogamous, snuggly, worshipping boyfriend? I wanted relationships from fantastic fucks all through high school and college, but something tells me that I repeatedly confused lust for love and convinced myself that I wanted a boyfriend, when really I just wanted a screwfest (although I can’t be sure). For the record, I am not–I repeat, am not–saying that when girls write Rachel about the pain they’re going through, they’re not being honest with themselves. I know better than anyone how that pain feels. It’s just that we never consider the power of cultural messages amid the mysterious phenomenon of girls wanting relationships more often than boys. I agree with Amanda that I don’t think it’s biological–there are societal patterns at work here. If we’re told that casual sex is unfulfilling and that we’re going to want relationships, chances are we’ll end up wanting them. And why not? That’s what Seventeen, Glamour, and all my friends always told me.

The interesting thing about my particular sexual history–the kind of narrative that I have yet to read about in all these books and articles about hooking up–is that I had great, pleasurable, safe sex in high school and college with guys who were nevertheless emotionally immature and noncommital and who hurt my feelings all the time. Does that mean I shouldn’t have had sex with them at all–or does it mean I should have been honest with myself (and them, too) about what our relationship was really about? I do remember obsessing, crying, wishing he’d want a “real” relationship with me, as many girls who write to Rachel express. But do I regret the sex, do I feel like I “gave myself away” too early at 15? Hell No. It was one of the most exciting, fascinating, and interesting things about high school. Girls deserve to discover themselves sexually at their own pace, to be neither rushed into having sex nor shamed into not having it. They deserve to have their very own “This is bullshit” moments without wearing a chastity belt.

So, as Rachel worries: Was I permanently affected by this nebulous, masochistic phase, from accepting less than what I wanted emotionally? Yes, but not in a bad way. In fact, I’d venture to claim that without all those past experiences, I wouldn’t have been equipped to be in the honest, nuanced, decidedly modern relaish I am in now.

The “hookup culture” must not be that new of a phenomenon if I was experiencing this stuff in the late nineties–and now at 25, I can employ my 10-year-old hindsight. Today, I found a fascinating piece of writing in my diary about “E,” my first “boyfriend” and first lay in high school who made it perfectly clear he was not into a relationship. In a rare moment of clarity, my 15-year-old self wrote this:

“I think people are wrong when they say that sex and love HAVE to be together. I figured out why me and E have good sex. Physically, we’re in love. Our bodies are perfect for eachother, we satisfy eachother’s sexual urges like we were born for one another. And we’re not really like that personality-wise. But that’s okay! I don’t know why that’s a bad thing, and why everyone looks down upon it. Just because mentally we’re not in love doesn’t mean it’s emotionless sex. It’s not. It’s kinda like our bodies have emotions. Like our minds don’t particularly click, but our kisses and heartbeats and waves of sex drive do. What’s wrong with that???? We’re not USING eachother; we just have a connection that is very hard for people to understand. If they saw us together, they would know what I mean. I’m fine with it, and I think it will go on as long as it takes for me to find someone I have mental AND physical perfectness with, because that’s what I need to be in a relationship…And as long as I got one half, why give it up because OTHER people think its morally wrong? I mean, I wish me and E had both, but it’s been clearly established that we don’t, so fine. It doesn’t automatically turn into a bad thing.”

There you have it. Love and sex don’t always go together, especially for horny 15-year-olds. I could be totally off-base, but I don’t think I was a freak for thinking this. If you’re comfortable with accepting that teens are sexual people with their own desires, there’s no getting around that boys and girls sometimes feel this way. I said this in 2007 and I still believe it now: Sex is the ultimate risk, a risk that makes human relationships complicated, intoxicating and wonderful. It’s an emotional risk when you’re 18 the same way it’s a risk when you’re 40. Each time, as long as you’re safe and armed with the right info, it’s amazing to feel alive and take that risk.

Granted, I was armed with the right info. I had good sex education and candid parents. But many girls are getting scolded by their elders and pressured by their peers. Some are in abstinence-only education classes and told they’ll be too “used” or “dirty” for their future husbands if they have sex. The vast majority are not given the space they need to figure out what they truly want from their sexual relationships.

I agree with Rachel that it feels awful to have to compromise yourself, but testing out your sexual and romantic bottom lines may just be a rite of passage for teenagers experimenting with their sexuality–which is what the sexual revolution should have been about, rather than expecting women to simply indulge men’s fantasies. I doubt things will ever be perfect the first time a girl tries to define a sexual reality that works for her–especially if she’s told to follow age-old dating rules that clearly didn’t work the first time around. What I do hope for the future is that young women be allowed to take moments of sexual confusion in stride without conservatives breathing down their necks, without being called sluts by their peers, without feeling like they’ve ruined their chances at marriage forever, without being made to think that boys are emotionless sexbots, without letting an unsatisfying relationship cross over into the abusive zone–all while getting factual information about sex and STIs from their schools and families. Don’t girls deserve that much?

*Most of the freakouts over the “hookup scene” happens in the context of heterosexual relationships, since according to the majority of sexual conservatives, queer teen girls don’t have peen-in-vadge sex and therefore, as Kate puts it, “don’t exist.”

Her thoughts on disability and motherhood

Her piece about the feminist movement and how they deal with disability

Her interview with painter Sunny Taylor (posted just yesterday)

(Not to mention the piece she wrote about Girldrive in Bomb Magazine.)

*Emma took the photo on the left at our interview!

Hello Girldrive readers!

My name is Lachrista Greco, which literally translates from Italian to the “Greek female Christ,” which couldn’t be more appropriate (not because I’m Christ-like, but because of my strong feminist beliefs). Anyway, I am a 24-year-old grad student in the Women’s and Gender Studies program at DePaul University in Chicago. Aside from school, I have a Graduate Research Assistantship within my program, in which I am co-authoring a book about the Illinois Coalition Against Domestic Violence with Dr. Irene Beck and Dr. Beth Catlett. I have many interests within feminism, including: violence against women, the links between domestic violence and pornography, Italian women’s visual culture and identity, feminist literary criticisms, young women and pop culture, the influence of Riot Grrrl and more! I have a website and blog where I discuss my feminist views at Eau D’Bedroom Dancing.

Thanks to my mom (and Bikini Kill), I have been a feminist for quite some time. I was born and raised in Madison, Wisconsin, which made it difficult to fully engage in my feminist identity, however, I was fortunate enough to meet a few great like-minded people whom I felt I could really explore my feminist consciousness with. I went to a private Catholic college for undergrad and started the first (and only) feminist group, which was basically a consciousness-raising group for feminist-identified students. I majored in English-Writing and minored in Women’s and Gender Studies. After undergrad, I moved to Chicago to start a Master’s program.

Feminism within the academic and activist realms is incredibly important to me. Since being at DePaul, I have been an active member in the campus group, Feminist Front, and I participate yearly at the Take Back the Night rally and protest. Once I graduate, I hope to stay in Chicago and increase my involvement with feminist activism.

I’m very thankful to Nona Willis Aronowitz and Girldrive for allowing me this guest-blogging opportunity. I couldn’t be more excited!