Women’s bodies are usually soft if they’re healthy, at least in some places, and if softness is equated to a moral failing, and virtue to a low-body-fat hardness of surface, then that’s another way in which to be a woman is to be wrong, one that people starve their way out of. Roxane Gay wrote in her book Hunger that “we should not take up space. We should be seen and not heard, and if we are seen, we should be pleasing to men. . . . And most women know this, that we are supposed to disappear, but it’s something that needs to be said, loudly, over and over again, so that we can resist
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