Loud: Accept Nothing Less Than the Life You Deserve

by Drew Afualo

I’d rather be my own best friend, other half, and best person I know than be met with subpar care and affection from a man who refuses to work on himself.

You should never have to outsource the foundation of your self-love.

The patriarchy’s goal is to make you want to shrink and hide, both physically and emotionally. It wants you to be nervous about what will happen if you don’t. What if operating at 100 percent capacity negatively impacts people, and what if they resent that, and everyone resents you by proxy?

the root of our fear of being bigger (both physically and metaphorically) than men is the message that it will emasculate them, but emasculation is gravely misunderstood to be a woman’s problem.

“Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them.”

We can’t make men respect us as people with agency and complex interiority when they only want to see us as objects. But we can embarrass them.