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“The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world,” said Edgar Allan Poe, who must not have imagined it from the perspective of women who prefer to live.
“Part of what keeps you sitting in that chair in that room enduring harassment or abuse from a man in power is that, as a woman, you have rarely seen another end for yourself. In the novels you’ve read, in the films you’ve seen, in the stories you’ve been told since birth, the women so frequently meet disastrous ends.”
back when I was trying not to be that despised thing, a girl,
There is a thread of continuity. The child is mother of the woman, but so much happened, so much changed, that I think of that spindly, anxious young woman as someone I knew intimately, someone I wish I could have done more for, someone I feel for as I often do for the women her age I meet now; that long-ago person was not exactly me, not like me at all in crucial ways, but me anyway, an awkward misfit, a daydreamer, a restless wanderer.
As I get older now, even people in their twenties seem like children to me, not in ignorance, but in a kind of newness, a quality of discovering many things for the first time, and of having most of their life ahead of them, and most of all of being engaged in the heroic task of becoming.
There are so many ways people are forced to disappear, uprooted, erased, told that this is not their story and not their place. They pile up in layers like geological strata;
after Ronald Reagan’s inauguration. The nation, having reached its maximum of economic equality, had voted in someone who was going to reverse direction, stop black progress, reconcentrate wealth in the hands of the few, dismantle the programs that had helped so many rise, create mass homelessness.
the drug you took when you hit the wall built to keep you out.
The texture of that bygone life seems hard to convey now: the solitude of a wanderer in the city who could wait for a bus or a taxi to come by or find a phone booth to call a taxi or a friend from a memorized number or by asking the operator or by looking it up in the ruffled tissue-thin pages of the phone book if there was one there, dangling in its black case from the metal cord; who’d look for what she wanted in many stores before the internet meant that you could pinpoint things without getting out of bed, back when there were fewer chain stores and more variety. We were subject to the
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in order to see change you had to be slower than it,
accumulated small souvenirs, treasures, and artifacts that made the place gradually come to resemble an eccentric natural history museum, with curious lichen-covered twigs and branches, birds’ nests and shards of eggs, antlers, stones, bones, dead roses, a small jar of yellow sulfur butterflies from a mass migration in eastern Nevada, and, from my younger brother, a stag’s antlered skull that still presides over my home.
Even if you weren’t killed, something in you was, your sense of freedom, equality, confidence.
In war the people who try to kill you are usually on the other side. In femicide, they’re husbands, boyfriends, friends, friends of friends, guys on the street, guys at work, guys at the party or in the dorm, and, the week I write this, the guy who called a Lyft and stabbed the pregnant driver to death and the guy who went into a bank and shot five women and the guy who shot the young woman who took him in when his parents kicked him out, to name a few examples
Mostly when people write about the trauma of gender violence, it’s described as one awful, exceptional event or relationship, as though you suddenly fell into the water, but what if you’re swimming through it your whole life, and there is no dry land in sight?
Her annihilation was his realization.
In the video gaming world, young women who criticized the misogyny in video games were for years harassed with doxing and death and rape threats.
“Sexual harassment is the great male performative, the act through which a man aims to convince his target not only that he is the one with the power—which is true—but also that his power and his sexuality are one and the same thing.”
It was a kind of collective gaslighting. To live in a war that no one around me would acknowledge as a war—I am tempted to say that it made me crazy, but women are so often accused of being crazy, as a way of undermining their capacity to bear witness and the reality of what they testify to. Besides, in these cases, crazy is often a euphemism for unbearable suffering.
it didn’t make me crazy; it made me unbearably anxious, preoccupied, indignant, and exhausted.
had a sense of dread in those days, a sense that the imminent future of my body might be excruciating and horrifying.
I grew up in an inside-out world where everywhere but the house was safe,
There are absences so profound that even knowledge of their absence is absent; there are things missing even from our lists of the missing.
How do you walk right up to someone with an open heart and open arms amid decades of survival-by-evasion?
When no one else seems to trust you, it’s hard to trust yourself,
I connected the dots, saw an epidemic, talked and wrote about the patterns I saw, waited three decades for it to become a public conversation.
What is armor after all but a cage that moves with you?
What is rape but an insistence that the spatial rights of a man, and by implication men, extend to the interior of a woman’s body,
Having a body of my gender was a vulnerability and shame so vast that I still find myself casting about for defenses,
you could always measure your distance from the ideal, even if it was not a great distance.
Men told me to smile, to suck their dicks, and when I owned an old car with loose battery cables, men would wander by to tell me what needed fixing when I threw up the hood to wiggle the battery cables, and the ones who spoke were always wrong and never seemed to notice I already knew what I was doing.
There’s an austerity to thinness, to having a hard body, to being closer to the solidity of bone than the softness of flesh.
“I tried diminishing myself in such a way that I wouldn’t provoke him, wouldn’t anger him, tried to bend myself according to his pleasure so that he would like everything I did and said and thought. It didn’t matter, because no matter what I did, it was never enough. I kept at it anyway, until there was almost nothing left of me, of the person I had been. And that person I became, who was barely a person of her own, is the version of me he liked best.”
heart attacks were described by how they affected men, so that women’s symptoms were less likely to be recognized and treated, a situation from which many women died;
The Stanford Prison Experiment of 1971 presumed that the behavior of young men at an elite university could be universalized to stand for that of all humanity,
If men were everyone, then women were no one.
Women were allegorical figures—liberty and justice—but not actual people.
wrote in praise of darkness, sometimes trying to reverse the metaphors in which good is light or white and black and darkness are evil, with their problematic racial overtones,
My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy.
suicide in her kitchen at thirty must have been in part from the confinement of women in domestic spaces and definitions.
darkness—the failure of sight, the most rational of the senses,
In the myths, women keep turning into other things, because being a woman is too difficult, too dangerous.
On a pillar there’s nothing to do but stand still or fall.
Sometimes when you are devastated you want not a reprieve but a mirror of your condition or a reminder that you are not alone in it.
You should be yourself some of the time. You should be with people who are like you, who are facing what you’re facing, who dream your dreams and fight your battles, who recognize you. And then, other times, you should be like people unlike yourself. Because there is a problem as well with those who spend too little time being anyone else; it stunts the imagination in which empathy takes root, that empathy that is a capacity to shape-shift and roam out of your sole self.
A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continuously accompanied by her own image of herself.
You learn to think of what you are in terms of what they want, and addressing their want becomes so ingrained in you that you lose sight of what you want, and sometimes you vanish to yourself in the art of appearing to and for others.
the task of finding one’s own way must be immeasurably harder when all the heroes, all the protagonists, are not only another gender but another race, or another sexual orientation, and when you find that you yourself are described as the savages or the servants or the people who don’t matter. There are so many forms of annihilation.
I was anyone and no one and nothing and everywhere in those hours and years lost in books.
Servitude and obedience were described, of course, as liberation.
The conduct of the frisky artist seemed to come from something very familiar to me, a sense that since young women are nobody, nothing you do with them is on the record,
