I did not call myself a feminist until I was nearly twenty years old. My world had taught me that feminists were ugly, angry, and ridiculous, and I did not want to be ugly, angry, and ridiculous. I wanted to be cool and desired by men, because even as a teenager I knew implicitly that pandering for male approval was what women were supposed to do. It was my best shot at success, or at least safety, and I wasn’t sophisticated enough to see that success and safety, bestowed conditionally, aren’t success and safety at all; they are domestication and implied violence. To put it another way, it
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