Respect

I've always been a defender of guys.  Growing up with a brother who was only a year older than me and a handful of male cousins, I didn't actually meet another girl who wasn't an adult until kindergarten.  Maybe that's why I've always gotten along better with guys and still do to this day.   So as I got into high school, started making girlfriends and inevitably started talking to them about boys, I had a hard time with the theories going around about men.  That they were pigs, they were only after one thing.  They're just going to be nice to you until you sleep with them and then they'll lose respect for you.  I just didn't believe it.  I couldn't see any of the guys that I knew, who I was friends with, who I admired, treating me that way.  I couldn't really see any guy treating me that way no matter what I did.  Maybe I was just spoiled by growing up with my older brother as my best friend.  He would tell me what other girls were like, how they were never as cool as me.  Never as easy to talk to.  Never as laid back.  Because of this, I walked around imagining every guy saw this about me, thought this about me.  I just assumed that all guys had some built-in respect for me.  It took until college to realize this wasn't true.  But even then I figured the only reason a guy could lose interest in me like that was because he was just plain too good for me.  So I started dating guys who basically were not at all worth my time.  Because I figured they would know it, they would know I was too good for them so they would treat me well in order to keep me around.  Yeah, that didn't work either.  Funny that I would think guys who are kind of assholes would actually be nicer to me.  They lost interest just as fast  But still I couldn't say it, I couldn't say that all men were after one thing, that they're all pigs.  I just figured I wasn't meeting the right ones.  Actually it became more I don't deserve the right ones.  My counselor tells me that it's my fault really, this lack of self-worth.  She says guys don't respect me when I sleep with them early on like that.  Even she was saying it guys sleep with you and lose respect for you.  So I'm realizing she's right, and I really hate it when she's right.  By sleeping with guys right away, I am telling them I have no respect for myself so why should you respect me?  Yet still I am not ready to take all the blame.  If anything, I am ready to denounce my defensive stance on the male race.  I am ready to say Yes, they are all like that. And then sit down and eat an entire bowl of chocolate ice cream while knitting a sweater for my dog, secretly wishing that a guy was here, spooning me on the couch.