To move onto what I wanted to write about, I believe that this should be prefaced with the fact that I've been trying so hard to be girly. I do my make up almost every morning. I'm getting better at shopping and coordinating outfits. I don't sit in a skirt with my legs open. I'm trying to make up for the greater portion of my life where I was a tomboy. I hated it. Girls never treated me nicely, and guys thought of me as one of them, which leads to some GREAT disappointments in the love life department. Plus some of them think it's ok to rough-house with you. Sorry, but no; that's never ok. But after 3 years of trying, I feel like in college I'm producing results. People give me almost shocked looks when I tell them I was on drumline and didn't own a skirt until senior year of high school. Almost no one here knew me in high school, so I could be whoever I wanted to be when I showed up to UT's front door.
Well, I've spent most of my time this semester up at the TSTV station working on VideoGame Hour Live. Needless to say, it's mostly men. There are, including me, 3 girls. I don't get much airtime, and when I do, they're telling me to go play cooking mama, or just in general making jokes about how inept I am because I'm a woman. I get the fact that girls and videogames don't mix well (even though they'd probably poop their pants after seeing me play left4dead. Last time I got 50+ head shots. but whatevs). For pretty much our entire viewing audiences, it's funny and goes over well when they make fun of the girls. But you know what? I'm getting a bit sick of it. It goes beyond what you see on screen. None of the producers listen to me or my ideas. They don't listen when I try to chime into conversations and joke along with them. I have a lot more in common interest-wise then they know. But they'll probably never know. I've worked with them at the station, I've partied with them, I've even worked with some of them in class. No matter how nice and sociable I am, they still treat me like I'm just a space filler. I feel very underestimated and invisible sometimes. And what makes me feel even worse sometimes is the fact that Lea and Tabitha, while being the nicest girls at the station, get more airtime than me and it makes me jealous of them. Honestly, I believe that they've gotten to host the show multiple times solely because they're pretty. They're the skinny tan girls, while I'm the not skinny pasty white girl.
This all leads me to a dilemma. I don't want to work even harder on my appearance to try to be the same kind of pretty the other girls are. I don't want to spend hours at the gym or in a tanning booth so a group of guys will listen to me. And come on, they wouldn't really be listening. I'd just be a pair of tits. But it seems my only other option is to demand attention. And for a woman to do that, well then she's butch. I've had experience with this on high school drumline; they hated me, rebelled against me every chance they could, and ridiculed me. To them, I was a bitch, and I just wanted to get things done as section leader. I really don't want to go back to who I was in high school. I don't want to spend my entire life convincing people I really am I girl. My options it seems like is be the bitch, the hot dumb girl (let's face it, I'm never going to be stereotypically hot), or invisible. I hate sexism. I just don't know how I'm going to make it as a woman in this business if I can't even get my opinions across to 10 college guys (which btw, the 3 producers are freshman. wtf?). I hate that this makes me doubt myself.
"She puts on her makeup, puts on her new dress, holds her head high and gets in the car. Tells herself that no one will notice; assuming that she can make it that far. "
- She Will Always Be a Broken Girl, She Wants Revenge
