My sister says to me, "Can you help me change my headlight? I bought a headlight but don't know what to do."

I say, "Sure." We go outside and and while I look under her hood she says to me, "I don't know why the guy at the auto parts store couldn't just have replaced it for me." I tell her that's not really his job, and she says, "but still. He wasn't even nice. He could have at least been nice." My sister is so used to men bending over backwards for her that she has come to expect it. I look at her headlight and tell her that this guy not only didn't replace the headlight for her, he sold her the wrong one.

We go back to the auto parts store and I meet the guy who sold my sister the headlight. And he actually was a jerk. He didn't apologize for selling her the wrong thing, and he was just generally unpleasant. As we leave the store she says to me, "See? He is a jerk!" I agree with her. She then goes on to say that men who work at auto parts stores should be nice to us because we are girls. I give her a disbelieving look, although I don't know why I was in disbelief, it's right in line with her way of thinking. I say to her that maybe he should be nice to us because he works in customer service and it's his job. She says, "well, maybe. But he should be EXTRA nice to us because we're girls and we don't know anything about cars and other boy stuff." I ask her who is changing her headlight today? Because last time I looked, I don't have a penis. She says that I'm different, but still, if men would just be nicer to girls about boy stuff then I wouldn't have to bother learning how to change a headlight. So I say to her, "Yeah. Then I could spend my time doing woman things, like cooking dinner and shopping and applying makeup." She actually looked like she might agree with me until she realized I was being sarcastic.

She frustrates me so much sometimes. Even more than that one situation, she just embodies so many female stereotypes that make us seem like a weaker, dumber, gender. And she's perfectly happy to play the role of damsel in distress. How did she end up that way? It's a good thing she's my sister, because generally I HATE women like that.

A few weeks ago I left one of my Ani CDs in the stereo in our living room, and my sister listened to it. I came home and she declared, "I love Ani Difranco! That CD is so great! Do you have any others?" So I gave her a mix CD that a friend of mine made for me when she was trying to get me into Ani (obviously, it worked) and it's something of a greatest hits CD. It has Not A Pretty Girl on it, and I wonder if my sister listened to the words. I wonder if she thought they were stupid. I wonder if they made her think. I can just hear in my head what she'd say about it. "The only women who feel that way are women who aren't attractive enough to gain the attention of men." And then I'd slap her upside the head. But who knows? Maybe listening to Ani will raise my sister's level of consciousness.