I don’t know how things got so out of control, or I do. This is my refrain. Losing control of my body was a matter of accretion. I began eating to change my body. I was willful in this. Some boys had...
I don't save lives, but I try not to ruin them.
I disavowed feminism because I had no rational understanding of the movement. I was called a feminist, and what I heard was, „You are an angry, sex-hating, man-hating victim lady person. This caricatu...
I did not know if I would ever find my way past that shame and toward a place where I could face my body, accept my body, change my body.
I belong with these things, they are mine, so I do not stay long.
I am no stranger to dieting. I understand that, in general, to lose weight you need to eat less and move more. I can diet with reasonable success for months at a time. I restrict my calories and keep...
I am a bad feminist because I never want to be placed on a Feminist Pedestal. People who are placed on pedestals are expected to pose, perfectly. Then they get knocked off when they fuck it up. I regu...
How helpless are willing to be for the greater good? That question interests me most.
How do we reconcile the imperfections of feminism with all the good it can do? In truth, feminism is flawed because it is a movement powered by people and people are inherently flawed. For whatever re...
Her skin flushed darkly and she licked her lips over and over. Imagining me being used turned her on. She’s overeducated and has taken too many women’s studies classes. She uses words like empowerment...
Gender Trouble, Judith Butler asserts that gender is a performance, an unstable identity that forms through how it is performed over and over. She writes, Gender ought not to be construed as a stable...
For years at a time, there was me, and the woman I saw myself as while living in my head, and the woman who had to carry around my overweight body. They were not the same person. They couldn’t be, or...
For every step forward, there is some asshole shoving progress back.
Few things work in practice as well as they do in theory. Justice is anything but blind. All too often, the people who most need justice benefit the least. The statistics about who is incarcerated and...
Feminism has certainly helped me find my voice. Feminism has helped me believe my voice matters, even in this world where there are so many voices demanding to be heard.
Every woman I know is on a perpetual diet. I know I don’t feel comfortable in my body, but I want to and that’s what I am working toward. I am working toward abandoning the damaging cultural messages...
Doctors generally adhere to the Hippocratic oath, where they swear to abide by an ethical code, where they swear to act, always, in their patients’ best interests. Unless the patient is overweight. I...
Deal with your resentment. Deal with your biases. Vigorously resist the urge to dismiss the gender problem. Make the effort and make the effort and make the effort until you no longer need to, until w...
Celebrities understand the economy of thinness, and most of them are willing to participate in that economy, taking to social media, where they pose for selfies with their cheeks sucked in to make the...
But I also like myself, my personality, my weirdness, my sense of humor, my wild and deep romantic streak, how I love, how I write, my kindness and my mean streak. It is only now, in my forties, that...