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Apr 2012 23

by SG’s Team Agony feat. Lexie

Let us answer life’s questions – because great advice is even better when it comes from SuicideGirls.


[Lexie in Speres]

Q: I have a question for you geek goddesses and suicidal scarlets. I am pretty good at introducing myself, making friendly, and getting a girl’s number, but I am not good at what happens next. Sometimes I feel like I don’t wait long enough and other times I feel like it’s way too late for me now. But even worse, what do you do? Call? Text? What to say or write? How do you even get to asking her out on a date? How do I use a girl’s number to my advantage?

Much love and respect.

A: You’ve done the hardest part, gotten the girl’s number. Bravo to you on that. A lot of the time sucking it up and making the first move is the hardest part. Everything that comes after should be natural. It sounds like you’re putting too much pressure on yourself to have the “go to” next step as far as dating is concerned. Every person is different, and they handle dating differently. Some people like to move with the speed of a jack rabbit while others are slow and steady like a tortoise.

From this gal’s point of view, after you get a girl’s number, two to three days seems like a good amount of time to wait before reaching out and making contact. This day and age I don’t know of very many people that actually talk on the phone, so texting may be your best bet. Let’s be real, even if you called you may have to leave her a voicemail, now that could get awkward.

So, give it two to three days, shoot her over a text to show a little interest and take it from there. If she seems receptive, ask her out to a movie, dinner, drinks, hell whatever you want. If she doesn’t seem receptive, lay off for a while. She’ll either come around, or it’s a lost cause.

Either way, happy texting!

Lexie

***

Got Problems? Let SuicideGirls’ team of Agony Aunts provide solutions. Email questions to: gotproblems@suicidegirls.com

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Apr 2012 18

by Jen Friel

I talked about this on a recent SuicideGirls Radio Show (thanks again for having me!!) – but I believe in it so freaking much for it’s culturally disruptive components that I wanted to mention it in my blog as well.

What am I talking about? Oh! Mirror.net!

Mirror is the world’s first relationship review application. (And coming from someone who went out on 103 OkCupid dates in 9 months – TRUST ME – this is going to change the dating world.) First up though, some of the deets about Mirror and what a “relationship review application” really is…

The web is currently inundated with online profiles. From your Twitter account and Facebook profile to your Match.com or OkCupid account – there has never been a time where people have been so well represented digitally.

The problem with this human digitization however is the fact that the profiles are created by the person being represented; how can you ever have a true representation of self if the person creating the account is also the one saying how awesome/smart/talented/witty they are.

Mirror solves this problem. They place your profile in the hands of your ex-boyfriends/girlfriends, friends, and soon co-workers, creating a mosaic profile of who you “truly are” not just your highlight reel.

Look at this picture:

Facebook shows you with your best foot forward while Mirror is simply the reflective surface showcasing your ENTIRE personality from head to toe – not just one foot. It shows your positive attributes at the same time as things you may need to work on.

Sound scary?

Kinda, but isn’t that what cultural disruption is all about?

***

Jen Friel is a lifecaster and corporate sponsored minimalist. She went out on over 103 dates in 9 months while couch surfing for a year building her website and bartering social media to live. Consequently, she’s an accidental expert on online dating. You can read all about her ongoing adventures on OKCupid at TalkNerdyToMeLover.com and follow them on Twitter.

Related Posts:

Talk Nerdy To Me Lover: Tips For Guys From A Nerdy Girl On How To Optimize Your OKCupid Profile

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Apr 2012 16

by SG’s Team Agony feat. Atlea

Let us answer life’s questions – because great advice is even better when it comes from SuicideGirls.


[Atlea in Temptation Waits]

Q: I’m head over heels in love with him. We have a rich, intoxicating, romantic, sexual energy between us that I’ve never experienced with anyone else before. I’m smitten. He makes me smile, laugh, swoon, and my stomach fill to the brim with butterflies every time our eyes meet. The only problem is, he’s my roommate. And he has a girlfriend.

Let’s call him “Blue.”

Blue and my relationship extends back about 8 months now. I was living in my own place, with different roommates. We met in the summer, via mutual friends, at a cookout and later a party. A party where I proceeded to get rather intoxicated, and we became inseparable for the rest of the night. He was in the middle of teaching me a card game when I felt a puke coming along. I nonchalantly excused myself and scurried away to the porcelain god and began my worship in private.

Moments later he was there, taking care of me. Rubbing my scalp, hair, my back with a firm, confident delicacy, warm with affection. I remember, in a state of drunkenness that was beginning to fade to sleep, looking up at him, with his sheepish, clever smirk. Now I remember thinking to myself, and honestly I really don’t know even to this day if I actually spoke this aloud, but I remember looking up in those beautiful brown eyes and knowing “I’m probably falling in love with you.”

Ding, ding, ding! Right-o!

Over the next few days numbers were exchanged, the texting and phoning frenzy ensued, and the “platonic” sleepovers began. Platonic = nibbling, cuddling, poking, and prodding, tickling and giggling, massages, caresses.

Well, the platonic sleepovers digressed (or progressed, depending on how you look at it) into something a little less than innocent. Roving hands, love bites on the back of our necks. But he was still the with girlfriend.

We’ll call her “Pink.”

I interrogated him. I pushed him. I demanded a solution, because I had no intention of being anyone’s mistress. He said he “didn’t know how to breakup with her.” Personally, this girl and I have very different in values, interests, and lifestyles. I really don’t care for her.

He said he felt bad breaking up with her, because he was the only friend she had. It had been a few years, but it finally started to crumble and she wouldn’t have sex with him. She was very uninterested in sex, and Blue is quite the opposite. He said to me: “What’s a relationship without sex or passion? A friendship.”

The days oozed by, still, nothing done about Pink. Sexual tension began mounting. We addressed it by deciding to try to avoid being alone with one another. We tried to establish a “no-touchy” agreement, and kept things on a “just friends” basis while he was in a relationship. However, we’re both creatures of passion, and self-control is a fleeting thing.

We’d drunkenly make out in the conveniently empty kitchen at parties, play footsie and hold hands under the table, whisper dirty words in secret, and then the following day we’d “have to talk about it” again, say we’d be good, this can’t happen again, etc. The cycle repeated and repeated.

There were indiscreet butt-grabs, exploring fingers in backseat car rides, dirty texts. We even ended up back at my place one night after a night out at the bars and the inevitable happened.

Time passed, my lease approached its end, I began looking for a new residency and still nothing was done about Pink. My feelings only intensified. Our scandalous secret remained.

Everything happened so fast. His house had an open room, I’d be saving tons of money on rent, I’d be just blocks from work, plus his other roommates were my best of friends. I went for it. We talked it over, we both agreed we could be roommates. I tried to have no expectations, aside from two hopes:

1. We’d move past all this BS, cultivate a great friendship, and forget any of this ever happened. I’d start dating someone else and things would be dandy.

2. Blue and Pink would separate. Blue would express his undying love for me and we’d get married and have babies and live happily ever after. (I tried to avoid admitting this one to myself).

So that was then. Now, here I am, sleeping just 25 feet away from him (and usually his girlfriend) every night, my heart aching. I love him more than ever. We’re badder than ever. We’ve had sex, we’ve fooled around, and kissed, and touched, but furthermore we’ve grown even closer emotionally, yadda, yadda yadda…

I’ve lived here for some months now, and I live with my love moment-to-moment. Pink is still around. Blue seems unhappy in his relationship. I can’t say anything. I’m his “roommate.” I want to tell him more than anything that I love him, but I entertain the idea that it would be wise not to. I’m back and forth between treating him with indifference, to trying to express my love in silent ways. Some days I feel used. I feel like I’m lying to Pink every time I see her, chat and pal around with her. Some days I feel as if I should be patient. A part of me feels – and pardon the cheese – that we’re meant for one another.

SG lovelies, am I a fool to think that we may end up together in some perfect fairytale one day? Do I express my feelings and risk freaking him out and creating an awkward living environment? Or am I making this too easy for him, letting him have me on the side while he avoids dealing with breakup?

My, what a mess I’ve made.

Xoxox

A: Wow, what a situation! While most people might decide to back away to avoid getting hurt, it seems you’ve actually made it so that you pretty much have to think about it all the time. I can’t even imagine how fast your little hamster must be running up in there.

It’s a little unclear to me if you guys are still fooling around on the downlow, or if the shenanigans have come to a stop since you’ve moved in. I’m going to assume they haven’t. Personally I think that, for you to get a clear perspective, they probably should for the time being. There’s no way to evaluate your feelings while he’s nibbling on your ear every time you walk by him, your brain can’t compete with that. At least mine wouldn’t.

Let’s first check out your two hopes post-moving in. On the one hand, you seem to want to cultivate a friendship. On the other, you want a happily ever after with Prince Charming in your arms. Let’s pretend that his relationship would fizzle, or that he would put an end to it. What happens next? You guys immediately go out? Would you start a courtship from the beginning, or just go into it as is? Would you feel that much better going into it right after the breakup, considering you already have guilty feelings towards Pink? As much as it may be true that their relationship isn’t good, they’re the only ones who can truly do anything about it. Believe me, I have friends in shitty situations that in my opinion should really not be dating, but it’s not my place to decide that for them, it’s something they need to resolve on their own to grow, and to keep themselves from making the same mistakes.

Putting Pink aside, and focusing on Blue, I think that you are definitely giving him too much of yourself. I’m in no way saying that he’s taking advantage of you and is aware of it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening. He’s got the comfort of a relationship, albeit not a great one, and when things go bad he’s got available you 25 feet away. When you’ve talked about your situation with him, did you ever discuss how he’d feel if you started bringing someone home? If you met someone and started dating that person, would the housemate relationship be strained because of past feelings on your part, and possible jealousy on his? Not that he’d have a right to say shit, but those feelings are still to be considered since you are both living under the same roof. And if we forget that you may meet someone else, being honest with yourself, could you live there knowing nothing’s going to happen between the two of you? It sounds like moving there was a great decision financially, but you should really think about what it’s doing to you emotionally. I know you’re friends first, and you don’t want things to get weird, but sometimes in life we have to think about ourselves first, because if we don’t we end up pushing people away anyway.



Finally, be true to yourself. It’s the only way to go. Going back and fourth between treating him with indifference and secretly showing him love isn’t fucking with him as much as it’s fucking with you. At the end of the day, he’s sleeping soundly with a warm body next to him, and you aren’t. Showing him contempt when he knows you have feelings for him isn’t having the effect you probably want it to. Instead, it’s probably working you up into over analyzing everything he does. Did that little smile he shot you while holding her hand mean anything? Did those footsteps sound like they stalled half a second when he walked past your door?

Honestly, if he’s incapable of dealing with the situation he has on his hands now, I highly doubt that he’d be ready for another relationship. At least not now. I think that if you are going to continue living there and being pals with him, you need to do just that. Set limits for both of you, and maybe ask him to not share what’s happening in his relationship with you. And if you guys are so close that you can’t handle that, maybe a bit of distance would do some good. If you’ve talked and talked about how bad his relationship is already, then maybe some sort of ultimatum is in order. Not for you to start dating or not, but for him, as a friend of yours, to get his life together. He won’t be any happier with Pink than he is now if they don’t deal with it, whether that means moving forward as a couple or calling it quits. But until they deal with it, try to get yourself to a place where you won’t be going crazy. Sometimes, unfortunately, that means admitting that nothing will happen. Being in a slump is a terrible, terrible thing emotionally, and you should do everything in your power to keep yourself from getting there.

Atlea

***

Got Problems? Let SuicideGirls’ team of Agony Aunts provide solutions. Email questions to: gotproblems@suicidegirls.com

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Apr 2012 09

by SG’s Team Agony feat. Leandra

Let us answer life’s questions – because great advice is even better when it comes from SuicideGirls.


[Leandra in Verdugo]

Q: I met the girl of my dreams a little over a year ago at work. I have a rule of not dating anyone I work with after past bad relationships. She defines SG to a T. Everything about her was perfect and we connected a ton, both at work and after she quit.

When she quit we started to talk. She always wanted to hang out with me but we never could get the timing right. We both felt we had a lot in common and should hang out but we never really did, though she did come to see me at home. We both said that we belonged together, and that we’re perfect around each other.

However, she got married to someone after only a few weeks of dating them and I feel lost without her in my life. I truly believe she was the one. I then messed up by telling her I felt mad about her getting engaged to someone after only a few days of dating, and that she could do better. I made her feel like shit and less of a person.

Now she won’t return my emails or calls. I just want my best friend back. She’s the only girl I felt truly about. She was someone that I didn’t just want to sleep with when I had her alone in my place and on my bed. She’s hands down the coolest chick I have ever met, and would want nothing more than to have my best friend back. She is the one.

A: I am so sorry for the pain you are feeling right now. Does it help any that I just went through something similar? It’s been months and he is the only man I cannot forget, the only man I was absolutely sure I was meant to be with. He was a man I was packed up and ready to move for. Then, five days before I was meant to drive to another state to move in with him, it was over. I guess I’m just saying, I know the pain, I know the agony. I know that sometimes you can feel everything is okay, and then suddenly it’s like a punch to the gut. And when something like this happen to you, you’re overwhelmed with emotion and sadness.

I have found the key to a situation like this though…

You can’t keep fighting for someone who does not return your feelings. I am not saying she doesn’t care for you, and, though I don’t know her, you do make it sound like she rushed into the marriage. Having said that, she is now married – she is a married woman. I am sure her husband would not be too happy about you guys talking. You need to respect that and give them their distance. What will be will be!

Please stop calling and emailing. Don’t text. She isn’t returning them for a reason – and this is the key – to force you to realize the truth of the situation, to help you let go and give in to it. You can’t change it. You’ve tried. You fought for her and did your best. You feel bad for what you said to her, and have obviously shown that to her. You need to do your best to let go my friend. I know it hurts. I know it’s painful. I know what it’s like to believe in the deep dark bottom of your soul that they are THE ONE. She’s not. He wasn’t. We move forward. Onwards and upwards. There ARE others out there. You’ll eventually find someone you mesh with even more and can settle down with, if that’s what you want.

I always wonder about the future, will I hear from him in months or years to come? Will you hear from her? Only time will tell, but for now you’re only torturing yourself by reaching out and getting nothing back. I think this reply to you would be a little different if she wasn’t taken, if she wasn’t married. But she is. You must respect that and respect their relationship, whether you agree with it or not. If you care for her as you say you do, then you will do this for her. It’s obviously what she wants since she is not reaching back out to you or replying.

Please try to move forward. Realize, although you care for her a whole damn lot, that she isn’t the only girl out there for you. The right one is out there and soon enough you will find her.

Stay strong. Time is a healer, a cliché but true.

Leandra
xxxxx

***

Got Problems? Let SuicideGirls’ team of Agony Aunts provide solutions. Email questions to: gotproblems@suicidegirls.com

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Apr 2012 06

by Laurelin

The old woman cupped my hand in hers. Narrowing her eyes and making a clicking noise in the back of her throat she looked up and smiled warmly. “You are untrusting in love,” she said. “Why? What is there to worry about, you have had two great heartbreaks in your life and they are over, it’s time to put the past behind you. I look in your eyes and see such warmth, too bad you cannot speak with your eyes.” She lets my hand go and it falls into my lap. I guess that lady gets paid to say those things, but at 2 AM in New York City it suddenly seems so real, and I walk back through Times Square to my hotel wondering about what she said. Was she right? Was I totally untrusting?

I went on a date the other night with a bartender from a trendy bar downtown. He wasn’t anything like me, and while once that would have really frightened me, now it seems really appealing, challenging, intriguing. I had a great time, and at the end of the night back home at my apartment I found myself smiling stupidly, wishing my roommate was home so I could talk her ear off about it. I never heard from that guy again, and it was a bit unsettling for a few days. What did I do wrong? This was so typical.

After a few days of not hearing back I moved on; not everyone gets an explanation as to why something doesn’t work out. I couldn’t help but laugh at myself a little bit — here I was wondering why everything seemed to click when it didn’t really. Who does that? “You do that,” my roommate points out. “You do that all the time. Have a great time and then freak out and run away and never tell the guy why. That’s like, your favorite thing to do!” I think about it and I can’t help but laugh, at myself, at the poor guys I have dated in the past five months, and at the whole situation in general. She’s right, I have an inability to tell the truth when it comes to wanting to end something before it really starts; I just slither back to my bar scene life and immerse myself in work. One can always trust the reliability of a 45 hour work week. Does that make me untrusting? Easily bored? Non committal?

I have always considered trust in relationships to be something that is created over time once you find someone who doesn’t drive you nuts. All of a sudden I realize that I’m looking at the cell phone you left on my nightstand when you were rushing to work and I roll over and go back to bed – instead of flipping through your texts. I’m left alone in your apartment and your computer is right there with your e-mail up on the screen, and I sign out and into mine without even a second glance. You want to go out with your friends to the strip club with an eight ball of cocaine in your pocket? Sure, have a good time. I trust you. See? I can be trusting.

That old lady was wrong. I have trust in a lot of things. I trust that my friends will get me through anything. I trust that I’m a good judge of character, and that even if something doesn’t work out that I chose that person or that path because I saw something good in it, because I thought that it would make me a better person. I trust that I will not always do the right thing but that I will know the difference between the two, and that I will do better next time, be stronger and able to learn from my mistakes. I might be untrusting in love, but that is only because a lot of times the way it’s ended up for me has left me feeling like I trusted something that wasn’t real, or that was only real for a little while and that is devastating. I was never mislead, nor was I ever misleading to anyone I ever called mine. If I mislead you, you were never mine, nor I yours.

Untrusting in love seems normal to me to an extent; it’s good to be cautious with your heart after you have spent so long learning to trust yourself. I’ll open up when the time is right. For now, the only trust I need is from the bartender shaking my martini or muddling my mojito. It’s almost summer time, and I smell some really poor life choices on the horizon. If there’s one thing I can trust in, it’s that.

[..]

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Mar 2012 26

by SG’s Team Agony feat. Rydell

Let us answer life’s questions – because great advice is even better when it comes from SuicideGirls.


[Rydell in Changing Seasons]

Q: I have been with my boyfriend for about three years, and to my face he seems sweet. However on the internet he ignores me and has no problem talking to sluts. I tried stooping to their level, but then he gave me shit for the smallest bit of cleavage! My next plan is to add and talk to hot shirtless men, but I don’t know if that’s the right plan. What can I do just for him to ‘like’ a photo or ‘comment’ on a status update?

A: Ok where to start with this…Firstly, if he is sweet to your face that’s great, but when he is not around you, including the internet he isn’t? Doesn’t that seem like a bright blinking red flag to you? If he isn’t acting how you expect a boyfriend to act then TALK TO HIM! I have said this I think in every question I have answered for SG’s Got Problems? column. We as people need to learn to talk to each other and not just be silent and think people are mind readers.

You have a voice, use it and express yourself. Be heard! Stop changing how you think you should be and just be you. You don’t need to change who you are, how you are, unless it is to better yourself. Don’t stoop to your boyfriend’s level with the plan you outlined. It’ll just come off as juvenile and desperate. Be yourself, be proud of who you are, and if he doesn’t appreciate you and doesn’t fit in with that lifestyle, there is always a man who will.

Secondly, stop placing your self worth and self esteem on how many Facebook comments and likes you have from others on a social media network. In the grand scope of things does that really matter? I mean it’s FACEBOOK!

All I can say is voice your concerns. If they fall on deaf ears, then you need to man up and either settle for mediocrity in your love life, or go out and find someone better suited for what you need in life.

Rydell

***

Got Problems? Let SuicideGirls’ team of Agony Aunts provide solutions. Email questions to: gotproblems@suicidegirls.com

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Mar 2012 23

There’s one group of people that has been strangely silent when it comes to the current War on Women, and more specifically legislation that requires women to have a state-mandated transvaginal ultrasound before an abortion. Before being allowed to practice, physicians take the hippocratic oath – a promise that they will do no harm. This politically driven policy clearly forces medical practitioners to violate that oath, since the procedure is invasive, uncomfortable, medically unnecessary, not to mention highly emotionally distressing for many women. Here, in a post that was first published on Whatever.scalzi.com, an anonymous doctor speaks out against what’s been dubbed “state-rape.” – Nicole Powers, SG Ed.

Where Is The Physician Outrage?

by An Anonymous Doctor

Right. Here.

I’m speaking, of course, about the required-transvaginal-ultrasound thing that seems to be the flavor-of-the-month in politics.

I do not care what your personal politics are. I think we can all agree that my right to swing my fist ends where your face begins.

I do not feel that it is reactionary or even inaccurate to describe an unwanted, non-indicated transvaginal ultrasound as “rape”. If I insert ANY object into ANY orifice without informed consent, it is rape. And coercion of any kind negates consent, informed or otherwise.

In all of the discussion and all of the outrage and all of the Doonesbury comics, I find it interesting that we physicians are relatively silent.

After all, it’s our hands that will supposedly be used to insert medical equipment (tools of HEALING, for the sake of all that is good and holy) into the vaginas of coerced women.

Fellow physicians, once again we are being used as tools to screw people over. This time, it’s the politicians who want to use us to implement their morally reprehensible legislation.

They want to use our ultrasound machines to invade women’s bodies, and they want our hands to be at the controls. Coerced and invaded women, you have a problem with that? Blame us evil doctors. We are such deliciously silent scapegoats.

It is our responsibility, as always, to protect our patients from things that would harm them. Therefore, as physicians, it is our duty to refuse to perform a medical procedure that is not medically indicated. Any medical procedure. Whatever the pseudo-justification.

It’s time for a little old-fashioned civil disobedience.
Here are a few steps we can take as physicians to protect our patients from legislation such as this.

1. Just don’t comply. No matter how much our autonomy as physicians has been eroded, we still have control of what our hands do and do not do with a transvaginal ultrasound wand. If this legislation is completely ignored by the people who are supposed to implement it, it will soon be worth less than the paper it is written on.

2. Reinforce patient autonomy. It does not matter what a politician says. A woman is in charge of determining what does and what does not go into her body. If she WANTS a transvaginal ultrasound, fine. If it’s medically indicated, fine… have that discussion with her. We have informed consent for a reason. If she has to be forced to get a transvaginal ultrasound through coercion or overly impassioned argument or implied threats of withdrawal of care, that is NOT FINE.

Our position is to recommend medically-indicated tests and treatments that have a favorable benefit-to-harm ratio… and it is up to the patient to decide what she will and will not allow. Period. Politicians do not have any role in this process. NO ONE has a role in this process but the patient and her physician. If anyone tries to get in the way of that, it is our duty to run interference.

3. If you are forced to document a non-indicated transvaginal ultrasound because of this legislation, document that the patient refused the procedure or that it was not medically indicated. (Because both of those are true.) Hell, document that you attempted but the patient kicked you in the nose, if you have to.

4. If you are forced to enter an image of the ultrasound itself into the patient chart, ultrasound the bedsheets and enter that picture with a comment of “poor acoustic window”. If you’re really gutsy, enter a comment of “poor acoustic window…plus, I’m not a rapist.” (I was going to propose repeatedly entering a single identical image in affected patient’s charts nationwide, as a recognizable visual protest…but I don’t have an ultrasound image that I own to the point that I could offer it for that purpose.)

5. Do anything else you can think of to protect your patients and the integrity of the medical profession. IN THAT ORDER. We already know how vulnerable patients can be; we invisibly protect them on a daily basis from all kinds of dangers inside and outside of the hospital. Their safety is our responsibility, and we practically kill ourselves to ensure it at all costs. But it’s also our responsibility to guard the practice of medicine from people who would hijack our tools of healing for their own political or monetary gain.

In recent years, we have been abject failures in this responsibility, and untold numbers of people have gleefully taken advantage of that. Silently allowing a politician to manipulate our medical decision-making for the purposes of an ideological goal erodes any tiny scrap of trust we might have left.

It comes down to this: When the community has failed a patient by voting an ideologue into office…When the ideologue has failed the patient by writing legislation in his own interest instead of in the patient’s…When the legislative system has failed the patient by allowing the legislation to be considered… When the government has failed the patient by allowing something like this to be signed into law… We as physicians cannot and must not fail our patients by ducking our heads and meekly doing as we’re told.

Because we are their last line of defense.

Reprinted with the kind permission of John Scalzi at Whatever.scalzi.com.