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 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...
Here's the thing about history - it repeats itself over and over and over. The witch hunts, and the demonization of contraception and abortion and the women who provided these services from the fourte...
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...
Amy talks about the temptation of being the woman a man wants, but ultimately she doesn’t give in to the temptation to be the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain. Unl...
All too often, when we see injustices, both great and small, we think, That’s terrible, but we do nothing. We say nothing. We let other people fight their own battles. We remain silent because silence...
A maioria de nós tem versões de nós mesmos que nos deixa apavorados. Temos esse corpo imperfeito e não sabemos exatamente como lidar com ele. Temos essas vergonhas que guardamos para nós, pois mostrar...
A different day has come, though. I flinch less and less when I am touched. I don’t always see gentleness as the calm before the storm because, more often than not, I can trust that no storm is coming...
Two years ago, Hanna said she was going on vacation with Laura downstate and instead drove to Marquette and had her tubes tied. She wasn't going to end up like her mother, with too many children in a...
Social media is a curious thing. On the one hand, it offers an endless parade of ephemera from the daily lives of friends, family, and strangers—discussions of a fondness for yogurt, a picture of a ba...
I was always very high-strung about school for many reasons, not the least of which was a pressure to perform and the comfort of knowing that schoolwork, at least, was something in my control. I knew...
I loved that feeling, that I was interesting enough to break rules, to believe rules did not apply to me.
I don’t want my lover seeing only a moment from my assault when they look at me. I don’t want them to think me more fragile than I am. I am stronger than I am broken. I don’t want them, or anyone, to...
He said/she said is why so many victims (or survivors, if you prefer that terminology) don’t come forward. All too often, what he said matters more, so we just swallow the truth. We swallow it, and mo...
For heaven’s sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? Oscar Wao?...
Anger is the privilege of the truly broken, and yet, I’ve never met a woman who was broken enough that she allowed herself to be angry.
Whenever I am near other people, I try to fold into myself so that my body doesn’t disrupt the space of others. I take this to extremes. I will spend five-hour flights tucked against the window, my ar...