A Helpful List
Mar. 31st, 2006 09:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miss_ytA friend of mine recently expressed her fear of questions along the lines of "Do you go to church?" "Do you have a boyfriend?" "Do you have kids?" She lives in an area where she gets those kinds of questions (mostly from women) a lot, and she is afraid of being judged because she doesn't give the "correct" answers.
So, as a public service, I drew up a list of possible answers to these questions, the aim of which is to make the interrogator sorry they ever asked. Pick the ones you like or make up your own!
1. "You go to church, don't you?"
a) "No, because I think God is the product of a kind of mass psychosis."
b) "No, but on nights when the moon is full I go into the woods with my coven and we dance skyclad to celebrate the Mother Goddess."
c) "Yes, but only at midnight to hold Black Mass."
2. "Do you have a boyfriend?"
a) "Yes. We're going to get married when he gets out of prison."
b) "Yes, and I have a girlfriend too!"
c) "I don't need a boyfriend. I have a perfectly good vibrator."
3. "You got kids?"
a) Look like you're on the verge of breaking into tears and say, "I'm not able to have kids."
b) "My partner and I are trying to adopt."
c) "If the cloning experiment works, then I will soon!"
So, as a public service, I drew up a list of possible answers to these questions, the aim of which is to make the interrogator sorry they ever asked. Pick the ones you like or make up your own!
1. "You go to church, don't you?"
a) "No, because I think God is the product of a kind of mass psychosis."
b) "No, but on nights when the moon is full I go into the woods with my coven and we dance skyclad to celebrate the Mother Goddess."
c) "Yes, but only at midnight to hold Black Mass."
2. "Do you have a boyfriend?"
a) "Yes. We're going to get married when he gets out of prison."
b) "Yes, and I have a girlfriend too!"
c) "I don't need a boyfriend. I have a perfectly good vibrator."
3. "You got kids?"
a) Look like you're on the verge of breaking into tears and say, "I'm not able to have kids."
b) "My partner and I are trying to adopt."
c) "If the cloning experiment works, then I will soon!"
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no subject
Date: 2006-04-02 01:01 am (UTC)The friend I am talking about comes from a conservative Christian family and lives in a conservative Christian part of the country. Her honest answers to the three questions would be: I don't go to church because I'm an atheist, I have a girlfriend, and I don't plan to have kids until I earn a graduate degree, in that order. Where she lives, those answers would brand her as one of "the wrong kind of people." She doesn't want to lie when she's asked this kind of stuff, but is too scared to tell the truth. She hasn't really learned that the opinions of narrow-minded people shouldn't bother her.
So don't blame her for being scared of "innocent attempts to make conversation," because that's not all they are: they're also a way of gauging whether she's "normal" or not. She's aware of that and it puts a lot of pressure on her.