the shining

2 Fast 2 Furious dir. John Singleton || 2003

me going through a depressive episode vs recovering

EROS Issue 8: Self/ Love

Don’t be angry if I tell you that it is the aim of my life to get people to look at me. Why should you be angry about things that don’t concern you? I’m angry when I do something wrong, but when somebody else behaves badly I’m pleased.

1. When Jesus got out of the boat, a man with an impure spirit came from the tombs to meet him. This man lived in the tombs, and no one could bind him anymore, not even with a chain. For he had often been chained hand and foot, but he tore the chains apart and broke the irons on his feet. No one was strong enough to subdue him. Night and day among the tombs and in the hills he would cry out and cut himself with stones.

2. A man preoccupied by his skin who believed that it was too loose. He used a staple gun on both sides of his face in an attempt to keep his skin tight. The staples fell out after ten minutes and the man narrowly avoided piercing his facial nerve.

3. A man who was preoccupied by the appearance of his chin deliberately cycled into the back of a lorry in an attempt to fracture his jaw so that it could be reset in his desired position. At the last moment he decided against the plan and dropped his head, fracturing his skull.

4. In an unnamed European country, a medical case study refers to a man who was obsessed by the shape of his nose. Lacking the means to get cosmetic surgery, he carefully chose and cleaned a piece of chicken cartilage. Looking in the mirror, he makes a deep cut down the centre of his nose and goes about trying to replace the bones with the chicken cartilage, which he has moulded to his ideal shape, thinking “Finally, finally, finally I’ll be free, oh do it you motherfucker, finally, finally, finally”.

Once I fell in love with a boy and gave him what was left of my body and the rest of me too. I made a decision to be a wife- in action if not by law- because a wife was the thing I felt least like. A wife was as different to me as a bird of prey, or a tree, or a car. To be one was as far removed from my natural state of being as I could imagine, and was therefore desirable. What mattered was to give my body to him, and it didn’t matter what he did with it- whether that meant loving it or doing it unimaginable evil. What mattered was that he would take it, and we could both agree it was no longer mine.  When we could do so, my suspicions that I was not a real girl at all were muted for a time.

Do you believe that you are alive?

I have never been truly convinced from within myself for a single instant that I am alive. I dread to become alive because in doing so the potential to be destroyed is immediately realised. If I never believe that I am alive, I can also never believe that I will die. What this means is that symptoms of severe physical illness can pass through my life like a dream through the head. I can easily ignore indignities and suffering of almost any imaginable sort, whether a simple skin infection or a foetus growing cancerously in the womb.

When I was young I had chronic stomach pain and vomited blood after most meals which I learned to tolerate with incredible ease. I would rather simply die of an illness than be told that I had one; to be forced to accept that I have a body and it fails.

Back then I was hungry all the time and liked to feel the thin acids wash around my stomach. I liked to feel cleaned and soured by them, as though being boiled sterile from the inside out. Back then my body was no longer sweaty and bloody and warm. I did such good work that instead of flesh and sinew I was made of cords and rope and muslin. I was beyond body, the insides clean of mess, the veins filled with hardening concrete. I felt strong and inhuman and read compulsively of dissection, of marrow and pus and disaster. I bought books about autopsies and memorised phenomena which occur depending on the method of death.

I read about the messy corpse of a man who had thrown himself off a building. A witness reports that without fuss or warning, he neatly dips forwards as though he had merely dropped something beneath a table and was attempting to retrieve it. When a doctor arrives, he must check as a matter of course that the heart has stopped, and using a stethoscope hears and then feels a strange crackling sensation throughout the man’s chest. It sounds like Rice Krispies when the milk is first poured on. The man’s lungs had exploded upon impact, and all the pockets of air normally contained within them were now travelling around the body at speed, trying to settle.

Lungs are light as spirit because their tissue is so thin and delicate; the membranes within them arranged so as to maximise exposure to breath much as the leaves on deciduous trees maximise exposure to air.

When you do not believe that you are alive, you live psychotically, pretending to have no body. The implicit meaning in my way of life is: “I am only what others regard me as being”. My way of seeking to obtain conviction that I exist is to position myself as an object in the world.

Because my world is unreal, I must become an object in the worlds of other people, for objects seem to other people to be real, and sometimes even calm and beautiful. But to be an object for someone else necessitates the presentation of myself, a constant unveiling, an offering of my utility in all its forms. In a world full of danger, to be a visible object is to incite violence. The fact of being seeable exposes an animal to the threat of attack from its enemies, and no animal is without enemies.

Since I know that I am not alive, to be looked on as though I am pains and bewilders me. To be seen is such violence- because I can never truly become an object, which is unchanging and knowable, to be seen is such violence. My face feels flayed, an eyesore, and I’m constantly boiling with anger at the people who accidentally look upon it. I find my ways of playing possum and trying to disappear or fade as completely into my surroundings as I can.

When I was a teenager I conquered the disturbing reality of my own boundless greed by denying that appetite existed at all. Both greed and starvation are of the same cloth to me- in either case an absolute refusal of need. When I am greedy, the abstract notion of feeling hunger at some time in the future is so unacceptable and frightening to me that I am unable to allow for its possibility and must eat constantly as precaution. When I am starving, I am saying to myself that there is no need, that I have moved past it.

I was physically vulnerable, easily smashable. Because I am not real, I have always enjoyed overt examples of incongruity, real-world illustrations of the fact that there is no single knowable part of my self. I liked being thin and knowing that nobody who looked at me from outside would know how wicked and greedy I truly was. I liked that on my lunch break from school, still wearing the uniform, I would go to an older boyfriend’s house to have sex and be hurt. I liked to find the purple marks from his teeth on me when I went back to class. It was good to be hit by him because it was so outrageous, so disrespectful, that it confirmed the feeling that everything was insane and that there was no real way of ever knowing in what way a human being could expect to be treated. Eventually I would learn to take comfort in the prescriptions of S and M, where there is no ambiguity about what personality to have. Even without the accompanying fluff of handcuffs and whips, which I find embarrassing and too openly acknowledging of performativity, there is comfort in shared agreement about who is the giver of violence.

                                 ——————————————————-

Pt 2

1. Patient suffers from a monothematic delusion, denies ownership of a limb or an entire side of one’s body. Even if provided with undeniable proof that the limb belongs to and is attached to their own body, the patient produces elaborate confabulations about whose limb it really is, or how the limb ended up on their body. In some cases, delusions become so elaborate that a limb may be treated and cared for as if it were a separate being. Patients may, for example, mistake their arm for the doctor’s arm.

2. A man preoccupied by his facial skin said he would use sandpaper as a form of dermabrasion to remove scars and lighten his skin.

3. A man who was preoccupied by redness on his skin repeatedly exsanguinated himself by a syringe and needle or, when he was accepted, by going to blood transfusion clinics to ‘make himself look paler’.

4. A woman who was preoccupied by the ugliness of multiple areas of her body who desired liposuction but could not afford it used a knife to cut her thighs and attempted to squeeze out the fat.

I had lived in England for nine weeks and steadily was becoming more strange to myself. Because I had come here more or less alone and for no good reason, all of my minor humiliations and losses had no narrative or audience. The things that happened to me were public, but not in any meaningful reality of mine as the people who witnessed them had no connection to my life. My feelings were suspect and dream-like, merging as they did with half-forgotten adverts and television shows. I stood at Waterloo Bridge one night after work and was quietly excited but felt that I would never again be sure if such things were real or were absorbed from tourist boards and cinema in an effort to cope with the trauma of existing here.

The person I was in love with had moved suddenly to another country. Other men, who I hated, were boring but necessary consolations to pass the time. I worked 60 hours a week for minimum wage, ate packaged carrot sticks and hummus for dinner at 11pm. I felt numb and self-perpetuating except in transit when I broke down frequently and with  unattractive self pity. There was an evil pushing at the world and all it needed was a little give, a little slipway. It was when I travelled it seemed in greatest danger of reaching through- when I ran until I was nearly sick but missed the last train home anyway, when a display board said my bus was coming in 2 minutes, but kept saying this perpetually, unchanging. In these moments the great and pointless dread of London seemed most apparent and intolerable.I felt my body growing apart from me, swaying in these stations at night, trying not to be where it  was.

I went on some dates with a sweet and oafish boy who seemed several decades younger than me, though it was just that he was happy and reliably employed and somewhat stupid. He did odd things, like steal the garnish from my cocktail when I had excused myself. When I failed to notice and a dozen minutes had passed, he unfurled his clenched fist to reveal a wilted mint leaf and a crushed and bleeding cherry, saying “surprise”, and more faintly “gotcha”.

Housesitting for a married couple I know, I went a little more nuts, alone for too many days in a row. I raided their liquor cabinet and watched Scream 1, 2 and 3 on their projector and call in sick to work. I was chatting with an old boyfriend one night, telling him about my increasing indifference to my own welfare. “It sounds like you’re suffering from depression,” he said. “No,” I replied, “I think I’m just suffering.” Then he said an odd thing; that if I was meeting strangers to have sex with them, I should stop doing so. He said I was vulnerable and physically weak and that the city was full of people whose motives could not be predicted. Well Ok, I thought, lets go- like it was a dare.

I joined a popular fetish site and dispassionately ticked the preference boxes. Submissive. Not into pain. Soft yes. Hard no. I try to remember what my soft yeses and hard nos were when I was sleeping with someone I loved, how different they might be with a stranger.

It is not hard to find a taker when what you are offering is a woman willing to be hurt.

On the train there I checked my makeup and felt ashamed that I have blurry tattoos and short hair and am a little bit fat. I wished I was completely blank in the way generically beautiful women are, able to exist without scrutiny in the way they can, where beauty exists to neutralise the squalor of being a person. I am sick of the feeling my guts are going to leak through some unforeseen split in my casing, that the shabbiness of what I call a body will become clear to everyone.

The man lived in Hampstead and was a lawyer, his house incredibly beautiful and tasteful and completely without characteristic. It seemed eerily sealed, contained, in a way that implied secrecy and, feeling this, I realised I was frightened and that being frightened was the whole point of my being there. The man asked me if I had told anyone that I was coming to meet him. I told him I had, but I hadn’t. I had orchestrated the situation to be as dangerous and foolish as possible, to be a red flag waved in God’s face, saying: I’m here, I’m finished being able to take care of myself, so whatever happens now is up to you.

Thinking of the fact that nobody in the whole world knew where I was at that moment suddenly brought tears to my eyes, the acrid loneliness of my new life, all the people at home I had left and rejected in order to get it. Being there, in this lawyer’s beige living room was the proof I was seeking that my body is extraneous to the goings-on of the city, that it moves around unnoticed, that it is not a thing which can be needed or missed. When he touched me and restricted my movement I began to shake with fear. For both of us the game is this actualised potential of violence- that he really could kill me, that I really could be killed. And this was enough for both of us, what we had come there to do. I tasted hot metal in my mouth, my pulse soaring like an ocean. I thought parts of poems, prayers, thought of the person I love, thought: Oh God, give him back to me, I will not stop asking you.

I thought of other people I have loved, of my my sweet first boyfriend, the son of a famous actor, who was the first person I ever knew to be both rich and unhappy. We walked together through a river behind his house after having our immeasurably careful sex.  Between our feet, salmon swam- beautiful slick salmon, silver- and I laughed with pleasure to feel them slide cool against me. There they were, touching off of us, and yet from a different world to ours. Their world was one we couldn’t be a part of, one where air and weight meant different things; one which, like ours, seemed to be held together by absolutely nothing.

Afterwards the lawyer led me to the door and somehow that was the worst part, anticipating him turning around with a grin and refusing at the last moment to let me leave. The moment the lock clicked I pushed past him and ran through Hampstead Heath, my face hot and thinking go go go. I knew from the animal spite in my heart when I saw that he wanted to hurt me that I just dont want to die, dont want to, and so I ran and ran, and as I did I thought to myself what I wished for someone to say to me, what I wished the person I love would say to me, what I wanted to say to him for the rest of our lives, which is simple but also everything and is Dont die dont die dont die, rushing with the blood sea crashing in my ears, dont die.

In May of 1998 a seventy-nine-year-old man from New York traveled to Mexico and paid $10,000 for a black-market leg amputation; he died of gangrene in a motel. The man had Bodily Integrity Identity Disorder, a condition in which the sufferer is persistently obsessed with the idea of amputating one or more of their limbs. The man saw his healthy leg as an aberration.

Sufferers believe their body is incomplete with its full complement of four limbs, and they will only feel normal when they have three. “I have always felt myself to be an amputee” they say. Of thwarted attempts at self surgery, they say “It was an attempt to see myself, to be myself, as I have always known or felt myself to be.” “My left foot was not part of me,” said one amputee, who had wished for amputation since the age of eight. “I didn’t understand why, but I knew I didn’t want my leg.” A woman in her early forties wrote to me, “I will never feel truly whole with legs.”

A man who had packed his leg in ice hoping that doctors would be forced to remove it said: “I knew not my leg. It was utterly strange, not-mine, unfamiliar. I gazed upon it with absolute non-recognition. The more I gazed at that cylinder of chalk, the more alien and incomprehensible it appeared to me. I could no longer feel it as mine, as part of me. It seemed to bear no relation whatever to me. It was absolutely not-me — and yet, impossibly, it was attached to me — and even more impossibly, continuous with me”

I spoke to a man who owned a farm in Iowa who told me: “There was one time I had a laborer working here on the property and I started my chainsaw to cut off a small tree close to the ground so he could easily remove the stump. I was standing on the side of the hill with this chainsaw in my hand and I just thought, Oh, it would be so easy. The temptation was very real.”

I’m waiting for the person I love to come home. There’s a dull sticky pain throbbing beneath my pyjama bottoms, up in the soft part of where the upper thigh branches into bone. I’ve sat for a long time on the cool white tiles of our bathroom, with my back against the toilet bowl rounded and heaving slowly. Almost erotic when I feel this way, so totally empty and worn and projectile, like my insides have been pulled clean through my mouth. When he left this evening I came here and fell to my knees, crashing against the towel rack, and having steadied myself quickly- one, two- cracked my head against the cistern so that the itching inside my brain quieted a little from the thump. This dulled the immediate panic enough that I was able to collect myself and prepare the tedious little routine he so hated. Once ready I undressed and began to cut through the old healed scar tissue in that spot. I keep it to that area now- my arms are already dotted with silver wormy scars from years ago and I can’t afford any more. I begin in a rush, trying to open as much flesh as possible as quickly as I can, to get a steady stream of blood, and then when it’s all flowing at the right pace I start to take my time. It’s almost operatic now, or- what am I talking about, I’ve never even seen an opera. I know what I mean, I mean like in Silence of the Lambs when Hannibal Lecter is beating one of the prison guards to death with his own truncheon. The camera is focused tightly on him as he kills the cop, his movements elegant and rhythmic. Blood is spattering increasingly onto his face, and on it you can see- you can see just, ah, bliss.

The Harris's Foam Corner Joke Masterpost

Here are all of the jokes from Harris’s Phone/Foam Corner 

Keep reading

Who is Tom Barry TD?

Who?

The lad drinking pints while the Dáil debated abortion legislation before deciding to harass a female colleague in the chamber of parliament.

Oh that gobshite. Did it on live television and all didn’t he

Indeed

Haven’t heard much from him. What’s he done now?

Talking rubbish about rent controls in today’s Daily Mail. Says he is being forced to sell his ten rental properties.

A landlord? I thought he claimed to be a real businessman.

Well there you go. Property speculation. Curiously though the Oireachtas Register of Member’s Interests only lists nine properties. Maybe he forgot to tell them about one.

He owns substantial agricultural land also which he collects rent on and is sitting on a site in Mallow. Five of the apartments are in one Cork building and he has four houses in another estate in Kerry.

He is the director of the Cork complex management company.  According to the companies office it made tidy profit on last year’s rents so, even discounting the fact that Labour failed to deliver anything meaningful on the issue, this is just posturing rather than something that was ever going harm his income. But then again he also a director of Absolute Property, a management, letting and sales company in Cork.

Letting agents. The lowest of all breeds. Parasites working for vultures.

The gombeen man lives on.

He’s been posturing before hasn’t he?

In 2013 he accused the Labour deputy of wanting “a communist state” in Ireland.

Sounds very serious?

Well, Ruairi Quinn was hoping to means test farmers with regard to their children’s third level grants. The idea was actually to reduce public involvement in the funding of education.

Isn’t that basically the opposite of communism?

Well there you go.

Anything else?

In the Dáil last week he claimed

So he is full of shit as well as ignorant.

Not for the first time either. He was on Vincent Browne a few years ago puffing his chest about ‘entrepreneurs’, ‘risk takers’ and his own supposed business acumen.

Sounded like lad who would get fired off ‘The Apprentice’ on the first week.

He’s been in the Dáil for five years praising Joan Burton and jobbridge. Can’t speak highly enough of the scheme. Uses it frequently in his warehousing business.

Hang on? So this lad has a heap of rental land, several rental properties, directorship of a property management company, owns a warehousing business, collects a generous Dáil salary and expenses for himself but still using unpaid labour?

He uses jobsplus too, where employers can collect up to ten grand of taxpayer’s money for hiring someone.

Will this chancer get re-elected?

Fine Gael took two Cork East seats in 2011. They don’t have a hope next time.

This will be last we hear of him so.

Most definitely.

So who is Tom Barry?

A complete clown, that’s who.

fuck you, buzzfeed

look friend, life is full of impossible choices

break drakes heart is such an obvious answer

i cant believe she posed for a selfie

This comic was produced in partnership by Years of Living Dangerously and Symbolia Magazine. For more amazing real life comics, get Symbolia on your iPad or via PDF. And for more information on the biggest story of our time - check out YEARS.

It Was Easier to Give in Than Keep Running

By Anonymous

In first grade, a boy named John— a notorious troublemaker—systematically chased every girl in our class during recess trying to kiss her on the lips. Most gave in eventually. It was easier to give in than keep running. When it was my turn, I turned and faced him, grabbed his glasses off his weasel face, and stomped on them on the hard blacktop. He ran to the principal’s office and cried.

In fifth grade, I was asked to be a boy’s girlfriend over email. It was the first email I ever received. He actually told me he wanted to send me an email, so I went home and made an AOL account. We went to a carnival and he won me a Garfield stuffed animal, and then he gave me a 3 Doors Down CD. A few days later, he broke up with me, and asked for Garfield and the CD back. I said no.

In sixth grade, a girl in my year gave head to an eighth grader in the back of the school bus while playing Truth or Dare.

In the summer after sixth grade, I kissed a boy for the first time at sleep away camp. He was my summer love. During the end-of-the-summer dining hall announcements, where kids usually announced lost sweatshirts and Walkmen, an older girl stepped up to the microphone, tossed her hair behind her shoulders, and proudly stated, “I lost something very precious to me last night. My virginity. If anyone finds it, please let me know.” The dining hall erupted into laughter and cheers. She was barred from ever coming back to the camp again, and wasn’t allowed to say goodbye to anyone.

In seventh grade, I told my brother I decided when I was older wanted a Hummer. What I really meant was I wanted a Jeep, but I didn’t know a lot about cars. My mother overheard and screamed at me for “wanting a Hummer.”

In the summer after freshman year of high school, I went to sleepaway field hockey camp with many of my close friends. One of them, named Megan, I had been friends with since kindergarten. One night when I was showering, she ripped open the curtain and snapped a photo of me on her disposable camera. I screamed. She laughed. We both laughed when I got out of the shower a few minutes later. After camp was over, her father took the camera to the convenience store to get it developed. When he gave the finished photos back to her, he said, “Your friend [Anonymous] has grown up.”

Sophomore year of high school, one of my best friends Hilary had a party in her basement while her mom was away. We invited some of the guys in our grade and someone’s older brother bought us a handle of vodka. One of the boys who came sat next to me in Spanish class. His name was Thomas. I remember playing a simple game, where we passed the bottle of vodka around in a circle and drank. I remember being happily tipsy and having fun, to suddenly being very drunk. Thomas and I started chanting numbers in Spanish, and he leaned towards me and kissed me. We kissed in the middle of the party, with all of our friends cheering. Then we went into Hilary’s bedroom.

Hilary’s bedroom was in the basement, on the ground floor, with a large window next to her bed. When someone went outside to smoke a cigarette, they realized it was a front row seat to what was happening in the bedroom. It was dark outside, and the light on was in the bedroom. They called everyone outside to watch. I don’t remember getting undressed, but apparently we were both completely naked in Hilary’s bed. A friend of mine told me later she tried to open the door and stop what was happening, but Thomas must have locked it. They said they pounded on the door. I don’t remember hearing them pounding. I don’t remember seeing everyone’s faces outside the window.  I remember Thomas holding my head down, and shoving his penis into my mouth. I remember trying to resist, pulling back, but he held his hands firmly on my head, pushing my face up and down. That’s all that I remember.

The next day, my friends and I went out to dinner at one of our favorite local restaurants. I couldn’t eat anything, and it wasn’t because I was hung over. Every time I tried to put food in my mouth, I felt like I was choking. Anytime a flash of the night before appeared in my mind, I felt like vomiting. My friends sat with me in silence. Then they told me a girl named Lindsey, who had briefly dated Thomas freshman year, had stood outside and watched the entire time. Even after everyone else stopped watching. My friends said they didn’t watch.

On Monday, Thomas and I sat next to each other in Spanish. We didn’t speak. We didn’t make eye contact. I went to the girls bathroom and threw up. I hear Lindsey and Thomas live together, now, ten years later.

Junior year of high school, my teacher for Honors Spanish was named Señor Gonzales. Señor Gonzales had all of the girls sit in the front row. Señor Gonzales called on any girl who was wearing a skirt to write on the chalkboard. Señor Gonzales asked a friend of mine, who had broken her finger playing an after school sport, if she broke her finger because “she liked it rough.” Señor Gonzales was a tenured teacher.

Senior year of high school, I got my first real boyfriend. His name was Colin. He was on the lacrosse team with Thomas. He told me that sophomore year, Thomas told everyone on the team what happened that night at Hilary’s. Everyone cheered. Colin said that, even then, he had a crush on me. Even then, he wanted to punch Thomas.

Colin and I lost our virginities to each other. Colin said if I got pregnant, he would make me have the baby. He didn’t believe in abortion. Colin said if I got pregnant, he would make me have a C-section. Colin said that if I didn’t have a C-section, my vagina would be too loose for him to ever enjoy having sex with me again. Colin said that he wouldn’t let our child breastfeed. He said his mother gave him formula, and that he turned out just fine. I didn’t get pregnant.

Junior year of college, I lived in Denmark for the spring semester and studied at the University of Copenhagen. Copenhagen is one of the safest cities in the world. Guns are illegal there. Pepper spray is illegal there. One night, my friends and I went to a concert at a crowded club in a part of the city I didn’t know very well. I brought a tiny purse with money, my apartment key, and my international cell phone. For some reason it made sense at the time to put my purse inside my friend’s purse. Maybe I didn’t feel like carrying it. We were both drinking. My friend left the concert to go home with her boyfriend. One by one, everyone I was there with left the concert, until I was suddenly alone and I realized I didn’t have my purse, or any money for a cab ride home.

I started walking in the direction that felt right. I walked for a long time. I had no idea where I was, and didn’t recognize the area. It was almost 4 am. I was on a residential street when a cab pulled up next to me. I asked the driver if he could drive me to an intersection down the street from my apartment.

I don’t have any money, I said.

I really need your help, I said.

I will do it for free, he said.

Sit in the front, he said.

I sat in the front. We drove in silence for some time, until he pulled over on the side of a dark street.

I don’t want to do it for free anymore, he said.

He locked the car doors and reached across the center console and slipped his hand up my skirt. He grabbed my vagina. Hard. I pushed his hand away and unlocked the door. I ran down the street and realized he had taken me a block away from the intersection I wanted. I walked to my apartment and threw rocks at my roommate’s window until she let me inside. She yelled at me for waking her up. I escaped. Nothing happened. I was fine.

The summer after I graduated college I helped Hilary find an internship. She was an art major and wanted something for her resume besides waitressing. We found a posting on Craigslist to be a studio assistant for a painter in the Bronx. It was listed as an unpaid internship. The toll for the George Washington Bridge was twelve dollars, plus gas, but she got the internship anyway. She wanted the experience.

The artist was a 38-year-old Canadian painter named Bradley. Hilary was 22.There was another intern there, an art student from Manhattan named Stella.  Bradley needed assistants to help him make bubble wrap paintings. Stella and Hilary would take a syringe and fill the tiny bubbles with different color paints until it formed a mosaic. Bradley always had Hilary stay after Stella left to clean the paintbrushes and syringes. He told Hilary she was beautiful. More beautiful than his wife, who he only married for citizenship. He told Hilary they had a loveless marriage. He told Hilary he wanted to have her beautiful children. They began an affair. He told Hilary has wife knew and didn’t care. He told Hilary he was going to leave his wife soon.

Everyday Hilary drove to the Bronx, cleaned Bradley’s paintbrushes, and had sex on the studio floor. Everyday she went home with no money, and everyday she paid the toll at the George Washington Bridge. She needed the internship for her resume, she said. It was too late to find a new job, she said.

I could go on. I could tell you a lot more. About the whistles on the sidewalk, the kids who sat at the bottom of the stairs in high school to look up our skirts, my friend who was a prostitute in South Carolina, the men who’ve cornered me in parking lots and bars calling me a tease, the unwanted grabbing on the subway, the many times my father has called me fat, the time I traveled to the Philippines and discovered Western men pay preteen locals to spend the week in their hotel, the messages on OKCupid asking to “fart in my mouth.” About how I wasn’t sure if I had been raped because I was drunk and kissed Thomas back. How he raped my mouth and not my vagina, so that must not be rape. How easy it was for me to escape the dark street in Copenhagen, and how that made it not matter since “it could’ve been worse.”

Men have no idea what it takes to be a woman. To grin and bear it and persevere. The constant state of war, navigating the relentless obstacle course of testosterone and misogyny, where they think we are property to be owned and plowed. But we’re not. We are people, just like them. Equals, in fact, or at least that’s the core of what feminism is still trying to achieve. The job is not over. We’ve made great progress. There are female CEOs, though not very many. There are females writing for the New York Times and winning Pulitzer prizes, though not very many.  There are female politicians, though not very many. But these advances are only on paper. The job won’t be over until equality permeates the air we breathe, the streets we walk and the homes we live in.

I think back to how easy it was for me, in first grade, to feel fearless and strong in my conviction to stomp on John’s glasses. I felt right in reacting how I did, because John’s behavior was wrong. But his was an elementary learning of the wide boundaries his gender would go on to afford him. For me, it would never again be so easy.

- Anonymous, age 25