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c67537b
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There is, I must admit, something very satisfying about making things from scratch, to know every dish in a meal was made by your own hands. As a lazy person, I'm a fan of premade things, but it was a lot of fun and deeply relaxing to make, for example, my own dough and my own cherry filling for a beautiful cherry pie. I felt productive and capable.
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feminism
cooking
food
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Roxane Gay |
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9c6cedc
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I still carry the weight of being a rape survivor, and of the demand that I forgive and forget to uphold the myth of the perfect black family. I carry the weight handed to me by the Black moral majority, who ignored my father's crimes and who knows how many other men's, who tried to buy off a terrified thirteen year old with a one-day trip to an amusement park. They were so desperate to project the image of the respectable, righteous, pictu..
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rape-survivor
rape-culture
survival
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Roxane Gay |
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17b3e45
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Unmoored and in flight, the refugee is vulnerable to every king of harm- from homelessness to fraud- but sexual violence is the most intimate and most public act of brutalization, and it erupts wherever laws and social norms are unraveled. As transit bodies drift in search of sanctuary, gendered violence can buttress a social taxonomy of dominance and oppression, demarcating the tapeable and those with the power to rape, siphoning spheres o..
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rape-culture
refugees
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Roxane Gay |
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94bb7a5
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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.
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Roxane Gay |
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a482af6
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If you survive, you have to prove it was that bad; or else, they think you are. Surviving is some kind of sin, like floating up off the dunking stool like a witch. You have to be permanently ecorchee, heart-on-sleeve, offering up organs and body parts like a medieval female saint.
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survivors-of-abuse
survivor
rape-culture
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Roxane Gay |
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1ea4754
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It is untenable to go through life as an exposed wound.
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life
triggers
hurting
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Roxane Gay |
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0bea658
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It is untenable to go through life as an exposed wound. No matter how well intended, trigger warnings will not stanch the bleeding; trigger warnings will not harden into scabs over your wounds.
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Roxane Gay |
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d961b19
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In the self-defense class, our teacher taught us that if we couldn't imagine doing something- cracking an assailant in the head with a stapler, opening up a can of pepper spray on an attacker, digging our keys into the eyes of a would-be rapist- we wouldn't be able to act in a real crisis. Wielding the stapler, the pepper spray, and the keys, our teacher taught us the power of visualization, and I learned to imagine in advance what I might ..
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Roxane Gay |
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908997c
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My amusement with the Fifty Shades series only goes so far. The books are, essentially, a detailed primer for how to successfully engage in a controlling, abusive relationship. The trilogy represents the darkest kind of fairy tale, one where controlling, obsessive, and borderline abusive tendencies are made to seem intensely desirable by offering the reader big heaping spoonfuls of sweet, sweet sex sugar to make the medicine go down.
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Roxane Gay |
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279480e
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It's not that I don't want to love unharmed people; I just don't understand them.
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Roxane Gay |
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d03d720
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Sometimes she forgets and leaves her house in a skirt or a tank top because it's a warm day and she wants to feel warm air on her bare skin. Before long, she remembers.
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Roxane Gay |
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2639833
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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.
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Roxane Gay |
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8e2c5b3
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why I mark my body like this, about what it means to have at least some measure of control over my skin. Here, in the middle of my life, I would do things differently if I had to d
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Roxane Gay |
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c4b121d
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There is something about the gaunt faces and sharply angled bodies of anorexic girls that at once attracts and repulses me. I wonder what holds their bodies together. I envy the way their flesh is stretched taut against their brittle bones. I envy the way their clothes hang listlessly from their bodies, as if they aren't even being worn but, rather, floating--a veritable vestment halo rewarding their thinness. The reporter speaks with disda..
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Roxane Gay |
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b919161
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More often than not, I feel hopeless. I give up. I cannot overcome myself, my body, these hundreds of pounds shrouding my body. It is easier, I think, to be miserable, to remain mired in self-loathing. I don't hate myself the way society expects me to until I have a bad day and then I do hate myself. I disgust myself. I cannot stand my weakness, my inertia, my inability to overcome my past, to overcome my body. This hopelessness is paralyz..
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Roxane Gay |
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e8bffe5
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The more successful I get, the more I am reminded that in the minds of a great many people I will never be anything more than my body. No matter what I accomplish, I will be fat, first and foremost.
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Roxane Gay |
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c8bb1a5
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If I died, I would leave people behind who would struggle with my loss. I finally recognized that I matter to the people in my life and that I have a responsibility to matter to myself and take care of myself so they don't have to lose me before my time, so I can have more time.
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Roxane Gay |
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69ebf4e
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Writing this book is the most difficult thing I've ever done. To lay myself so vulnerable has not been an easy thing. To face myself and what living in my body has been like has not been an easy thing, but I wrote this book because it felt necessary. In writing this memoir of my body, in telling you these truths about my body, I am sharing my truth and mine alone. I understand if that truth is not something you want to hear. The truth makes..
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Roxane Gay |
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2f11e3d
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Rather than solve the real problems the United States is facing, some politicians, mostly conservative, have decided to try to solve the "female problem" by creating a smoke screen, reintroducing abortion and, more inexplicably, birth control into a national debate. Women have been forced underground for contraception and pregnancy termination before, and we will go underground again if we have to. We will risk our lives if these politician..
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Roxane Gay |
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ab8f022
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It's okay if most of your friends are guys, but if you champion this as a commentary on the nature of female friendships, soul search a little.
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lift-each-other-up
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Roxane Gay |
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47e1722
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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 more often than not, that truth turns rancid. It spreads through the body like an infection. It becomes depression or addiction or obsession or some other physical manifestation of the silence of what she would have said, needed to say, couldn'..
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Roxane Gay |
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b25021d
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When I read, I could forget. I could be anywhere in the world except in the eighth grade, lonely and holding tightly to my secret. I often say that reading and writing saved my life. I mean that quite literally. At home, I tried to be the good girl my parents thought me to be, but it was exhausting. On so many occasions, I wanted to tell them something was wrong, that I was dying inside, but I couldn't find the words. I couldn't find a way ..
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Roxane Gay |
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d509843
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Food was the only place of solace. Alone, in my apartment, I could soothe myself with food. Food didn't judge me or demand anything from me. When I ate, I did not have to be anything but myself.
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Roxane Gay |
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5394bbb
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My family's concern became a constant chorus of nagging, always well intended, but mostly a reminder of how I was a failure in the most basic of my human responsibilities--maintaining my body.
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Roxane Gay |
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2d96cf3
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I hate my body. I hate my weakness at being unable to control my body. I hate how I feel in my body. I hate how people see my body. I hate how people stare at my body, treat my body, comment on my body. I hate equating my self-worth with the state of my body and how difficult it is to overcome this equation. I hate how hard it is to accept my human frailties. I hate that I am letting down so many women when I cannot embrace my body at any s..
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Roxane Gay |
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d7436c5
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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 track of everything I eat. When I first started dieting under my parents' supervision, I would do this in paper journals. In this modern age, I use an app on my phone. I recognize that, despite what certain weight-loss system commercials would ..
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Roxane Gay |
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ee54077
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Narratives about certain experiences are somehow legitimized when mediated through a man's perspective. Consider the work of John Updike or Richard Yates. Most of their fiction is grounded in domestic themes that, in the hands of a woman, would render the work "women's fiction." While these books may be tagged as "women's fiction" on Amazon.com, they are also categorized as literary fiction. These books are allowed to be more than what they..
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Roxane Gay |
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b3630b1
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In a Publishers Weekly interview with Claire Messud about her novel The Woman Upstairs, which features a rather "unlikable" protagonist, Nora, who is bitter, bereft, and downright angry about what her life has become, the interviewer said, "I wouldn't want to be friends with Nora, would you? Her outlook is almost unbearably grim." And there we have it. A reader was here to make friends with the characters in a book and she didn't like what ..
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Roxane Gay |
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2ba113d
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There is a before and an after...In the after I was broken, shattered, and silent.
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Roxane Gay |
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1d9be92
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Because oftentimes I'm the first or the only - so I cannot be the last.
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Roxane Gay |