Guest Blogger: You're Like a Sister to Me by FudgesicleJunkie

Another weekend has come! Woo hoo! It's Friday...that means Guest Blogger Day! Tonight, we break two barriers here on MGF Blog. Not only do we have our first MALE contributor, but it's our first INTERNATIONAL contribution. Who better to bring the male perspective than one of my favorite guy friends, FudgesicleJunkie? Hope you enjoy FJ's contribution. Have a good one, gang! - Lily

I’ll start by saying what an honour it is to be the first male contributor to this site. As I recently said to its founding author: “good site, but it could use more testosterone”. Which I don’t mean in any defensive way, but simply because variety is always good. Back when I worked in an office – full of annoying alpha male oafs who prowled around like sexual predators with a flip chart – I used to say the opposite: “this place needs more oestrogen”.

It is a preference for hormonal balance that probably comes from growing up in a large, combative family that was evenly split between males and females. As a child, I was inseparable from my two older sisters who, in turn, were inseparable from each other – so much so that in my under-developed toddler brain, I thought of them as a single person in two bodies. They weren’t Martha and Lara to me, but Martalara. I never called for one or the other. It was always both and always by their collective name. Martalara! Martalara! Bless them – they always came.

I remember none of this, of course, so I am going simply on the lies my mother told me. She also told me that, like many children, I had a minor freak-out the first few times she dropped me off at baby-jail (otherwise known as pre-school). Fortunately, by day three the warden had figured out that I immediately calmed down if she sat me between two girls, who I instinctively called Marta and Lara, irrespective of what their actual names were. I wasn’t a bright kid. But as far I was concerned, I had Martalara back. All was right with the world again. The monsters couldn’t get me anymore.

It’s a pattern that’s repeated my whole life, not least because I’ve moved around a lot and have had many new schools, new jobs, and many first days in a strange new town. Every time – without exception – I have stumbled by accident rather than design into a relationship with female friends. Never one or three female friends, mind you. Always two. And always strictly platonic.

That said, Martalara has taken different forms over the years. When I was in the navy, Martalara was a set of identical twins who were posted to the same ship. It’s difficult enough to tell identical twins apart under normal circumstances – when they wear the same uniform it’s almost impossible. The first couple of times that I spoke to them, I managed to embarrass myself by getting them mixed up. Never one to persevere when giving up is an option, I just wrote them off. “Well, that’s it,” I said. “I guess I won’t be friends with them.” But Martalara is too charming to ignore. Too sharp, too kind, too witty, too much fun to be around. We eventually became so close that I could tell them apart at ten paces by tip-offs as subtle as the different way they smiled.

At university, Martalara was a pair of Italian friends who were so appalled by my diet that they took it in turns to have me over for a proper feed. I went home with Tupperware containers full of leftovers. When I developed an interest in another girl, they were more obsessed with the courtship than I was. They virtually stalked her on my behalf. They gathered intelligence, coached me on what to say, they interpreted the “signals” for me. And thank God for that, because she was sending out so many confusing signals that small aeroplanes were landing around her. Honestly, what does it mean when the girl you like offers you a bite of her carrot? Is she just being polite? Is it a gesture of intimacy? I didn’t know! To be fair, neither did Martalara, but at least they were willing to spend two hours discussing it.

I had a girlfriend who called all this a “surrogate-sister complex”. She should have been a psychologist. She also had me pegged as a schizophrenic. One of my personalities was called the Young Cool Elvis (fun, sociable, outgoing and quick to take the guitar out of the closet to jam with friends). She called the other personality Old Fat Elvis (grumpy, reclusive, prematurely senile and comfortable chatting on-line, watching TV and eating cheese whiz and crackers). She would call me at the office on Friday afternoons and ask, “Who are you gonna be this weekend?" Young Cool Elvis or Old Fat Elvis?”

So I am grateful to the current Martalara – a former roommate and her cousin – for saving me from myself. Recently single again and working from home, I could easily lapse into a hermitic existence. But for Martalara dragging me out and frogmarching me through the great outdoors now and then, the Old Fat Elvis would probably kill the Young Cool Elvis once and for all.

And such it was with cyberspace, where I peeked in out of pure curiosity and didn’t much like what I saw. Were it not for a virtual Marta and a virtual Lara that I found there, I probably wouldn’t have stuck around.

All of which is a long-winded and brazenly self-indulgent way of saying that I don’t much see the sense of “lad” or “ladette” websites, just like I don’t read Maxim or FHM and I don’t watch Sex and the City. I have more fun at weddings than I do at stag parties. I don’t see the point of “guy’s night out”. Why should we exclude the only women who will give us the time of day just to spend the whole night talking about other women who won’t? Without a good balance of both oestrogen and testosterone we are prone to unhealthy extremes. Witless male-bashing on one hand or gormless chauvinism on the other. It’s a slippery slope in both directions.

I’m not saying that sexism doesn’t exist or that sexual politics isn’t important. I’m not a gender war “denier”. I’m just not all that interested in it. To the extent that war can entertain, I find the Battle of the Sexes about as compelling as the Falkland Islands. At least World War I gave us some great poetry. World War II gave us Slaughterhouse 5 and Catch-22, the Great Escape and Hogan’s Heroes. Even Vietnam gave us Apocalypse Now and Fortunate Son. What has the Gender War ever contributed besides the same facile jokes about women going to the bathroom in pairs and men leaving the toilet seat up? Men won’t ask for directions and women can’t parallel park. I’m less offended by it all than I am bored to tears.

I’m probably in the minority, mind you, because Maxim and FHM sell like hotcakes and Sex and the City is a hit show and that guy who wrote about Women from Venus and Men from Mars is rich and doing book tours and I’m not. And there is certainly no shortage of male-bashing feminist websites or women-hating chauvinist ones.

So I tip my hat to a site that welcomes contributions from both sides of the front. This leaves me, however, in a bit of a jam. What on earth does a 32 year-old guy have to say that could be of any interest to the readers of a site called Modern Girl Friday, which – according to its founding post – “seeks to redefine who this woman can be”? Who this woman can be!? I’m not touching that question until I’ve figured out what it means when a woman offers you a bite of her carrot. So for now, I guess I’ll just read, because it’s well-written and funny. I’ll comment when appropriate and contribute when invited. But I won’t be the “he said” in a “He said/She said” argument. I’ve got nothing to debate. You call her a Modern Girl Friday, I call her Martalara. Either way, I just like having her around. It keeps the monsters away.