I am still waiting for the movie that tells us that nothing a woman can do or wear earns her that kind of treatment, that presents the concept of a slut as the battering ram it is, used to keep women isolated from their own pleasure, their true selves, and one another, and to prevent them from challenging any aspect of male domination.

The more I know my own worth, the less I have to fling myself against anything.

“Patriarchy colonizes our brains like a virus,” she said. It was an apt comparison. Like a virus, patriarchy harms the systems that it infects and relies on replication to survive. It flourishes in those who are not aware of its presence, and sometimes even in those actively working to expel it.

There is a part of me that still can’t bear to see it in other women—the slut you are bent on becoming—that shimmer, that man-sourcing of self, that vaporous need to please, to fill the invisible belly with the thing they told us was food. It hurts to look at them, and even I feel a twinge of that muddy desire: to punish them, to prevent them, to

slut is a word that men invented, like witch, to maintain power over women and to keep them in service to men. Hatred and fear of female sexuality is baked into the foundation of civilization as we know it, and sluts are most often women who threaten the colonial regimes of patriarchy and white supremacy.

The instinct in me to hide it was so strong that I lied in my diary. I wanted no record of that wreck.

It used to scare me that I wanted things my mother wouldn’t understand. I think we both feared our difference. In hiding it from her, I often created exactly the thing I wished to avoid. It’s not that I should have told her everything; that would have been its own kind of cruelty, though I could have trusted her more.

“people can recover from trauma only when the brain structures that were knocked out during the original experience are fully online.” Anyone who has conducted successful psychotherapy knows from experience that being grounded in the present while revisiting the past is fundamental to its potential for healing, and “opens the possibility of deeply

ancient Roman weddings, the vows would be taken between the husband and the bride’s father. A woman was traded like chattel for her value, for breeding purposes, for an alliance between two families, not ever for her own fulfillment. It wasn’t until a thousand years after Christ’s birth that a pope decreed that the bride ought to be the one who