Girlhood by Melissa Febos
"There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors." -Adrienne Rich
Writing has always been a way to reconcile my lived experiences with the narratives available to describe it (or lack thereof).
You known the need to engrave things.
Remember: this is a hard hustle to break. It is difficult to keep some secrets and not others.
It is better to choose your pain than to let it choose you.
Like you, he is part feral, part vessel.
Remember this supernova, you black hole, you cosmic shard, your dark matter spilling out.
I learned to hold a gaze.
We are all unreliable narrators of our own motives. And feeling something neither proves nor disproves its existence.
I was a magician with a single power: to disappear the world. I emerged from whole afternoons of reading, my life a foggy half-dream through which I drifted as my self bled back into me like steeping tea.
my new body with its power to compel but not control
I was smart and strong and my power lay in these things alone.
When he was home from sea, my father taught me how to throw a baseball and a punch, how to find the North Star, and start a fire.
Children know so little of the world. Every new thing might be our own creation.
I was the daughter of a sea captain. I would not be rescued.
That I can give my body to a lover and still keep it for myself.
We don't need the truth to survive, and sometimes our survival depends on its denial.
Mnemosyne, a Titaness and the mother of the Muses. According to fourth-century B.C. Greek texts, the dead were given a choice to drink either from the river Lethe, which would erase their memories of the life before reincarnation, or from the river Mnemosyne, and carry those memories with them into the next life.... Whatever river you drink from, forgetting does not erase your past. It only hides what wrecks you carry into the next life.
Just think of all the things a woman could do rather than clean. Which is to say, think of all the pastimes that might make her a slut: reading; talking; listening; thinking; masturbating; eating; observing the sky, the ground, other people, or herself; picking a scab; smoking; painting; building something; daydreaming; sleeping; hatching a plan; conspiring; laughing; communing with animals; communing with God; imagining herself a god; imagining a future in which her time is her own.
Make sex a moral duty, too, but pleasure in it a crime. This way you can punish her for anything.
"'Slut' serves as an all-purpose insult for any female outsider. All the social distinctions that make a teenage girl 'other' are collapsed into a sexual distinction." -Leora Tanenbaum
The same sense, when he touched me, that I no longer existed. Not girl, but vapor. My body a thing in his hands, my mind a balloon bumping the closet ceiling.
"What is truth?" she asks. "Where a woman is concerned, it's the story that's easiest to believe."
What is a reputation but the story most often told about a person?
In addition to her femaleness, each aspect of identity that moves a woman further from white heterosexual manhood increases the impact of discrimination against her, the justification for men of doing anything they want to her.
We look up at stars and like the way their light falls on us, but if you try to touch a star it will burn you to nothing.
I hadn't known that women like her existed, that her kind of beautiful was an option.
slut is a word that men invented, like witch, to maintain power over women and to keep them in service to men
Our power may be innate, but we learn its meaning from others.
We competed to be the weakest and smallest and most infantile. We seemed to spend all of our resources withering ourselves to be attractive to males. The goal was to be as soft and tidy and delicate as possible.
This is what happens when you give your body away, or when it gets taken from you. Its physical form becomes impossible to see because your own eyes are no longer the expert.
The constant vigilance required outdoors rendered domestic spaces holy in their privacy. Every woman in New York, and perhaps any city, knows her bodily relief after the apartment door is shut and locked behind her.
Not all men! cry the good ones. They don't want to be feared, so it is our job to fix our fear. That is, sure, being a woman who gets assaulted and fears it at every turn sucks, but it's not as bad as getting your feelings hurt. It is the job of women to caretake the feelings of good men, even at the cost of our own safety. We are trained from birth to accommodate them and their uncontrollable urges.
If eros is lack, then it existed between us.
A myth is the memory of a story passed through time. Like any memory, it changes.
You can't crawl up to your mother from hell and not look like it.
Lies make fools of the people we love.
"Listen to me," she said, her voice as firm as a hand under my chin. "You could never lose me. I will love you every day of your life."
Psychologists call it "skin hunger" and posit that many experiences of depression are actually symptoms of touch deprivation.
empathy and accommodation are not synonymous
The body's truth, I'd learned, is indelibly engraved, whether behind a closed door or in a dark place. What happens in the dark still happens, even if you can't see it.
Like a virus, patriarchy harms the systems that it infects and relies on replication to survive. It flourishes in those who are not aware of its presence, and sometimes even in those actively working to expel it.
I was very confused for a long time about who my body belonged to.
Even the slight chance (and it didn't seem slight) that he wouldn't listen to my 'no' made me want to withhold it. It was my last opportunity to salvage any power, to decide what would happen and what it would mean.
It was just easier to have sex with them than to explain that I didn't want to or to make them angry.
In ancient Roman weddings, the vows would be taken between the husband and the bride's father....It wasn't until a thousand years after Christ's birth that a pope decreed that the bride ought to be the one who say, "I do."
What bodies are more docile, more reflexively policed, than women's?
We must not exhibit creases in our faces that indicate any critical emotion, because we should not express any critical emotion.
It is not a coincidence that the apex of feminine beauty is nearly identical to that of physical powerlessness.
It would be awkward, detractors of affirmative consent laws cry. As if having sex you don't want is not awkward. As if interrupting a man whose spontaneous desire is prompting him to remove your clothes or penetrate you is not awkward for women who have spent their entire lives being socialized not to upset or disappoint people. The only thing that renders the awkwardness of affirmative consent greater than any of these awkwardnesses is that the onus of it does not rest entirely on the shoulders of the most vulnerable.
Where we should draw the line between the abusive nature of a patriarchal society and abusive acts of individuals is not always clear.
Sympathy, from the Latin sympathia, meaning a fellow feeling, implies an emotional connection based in similarity between the sympathizer and her object.
That is the fear that every addict, ever person who hates themselves, shares: the terrible possibility that what torments you, what you loathe in yourself, is the truest part of you - the singed and poisonous center that can never be scraped out.
Foreign beauty is of no comfort to the homesick.
Of all drugs, opiates are the most effective (short-term) treatment of anxiety.
I already understood that masculinity was a volatile thing.
We were in a kind of love, I think. The kind that two lonely people with similar hearts and the same problem can fall in, that has nothing to do with sex.
Sometimes our best efforts at self-preservation look like a kind of violence.
I spend so much time with that younger self, her savage despair and fleeting reliefs, that I start to feel as though she is here with me.
Maybe the saddest landscapes are always the most beautiful.
Fearless Wives and Frightened Shrews: The Construction of the Witch in Early Modern Germany by Sigrid Brainer
Sex Object by Jessica Valenti
Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl by Jeannie Vanasco