The worst criticism seeks to have the last word and leave the rest of us in silence; the best opens up an exchange that need never end.

The pandemic of violence always gets explained as anything but gender, anything but what would seem to be the broadest explanatory pattern of all.

But explaining men still assume I am, in some sort of obscene impregnation metaphor, an empty vessel to be filled with their wisdom and knowledge.

At times, thinking is an outdoor activity, and a physical one.

This should remind us that violence is first of all authoritarian. It begins with this premise: I have the right to control you.

At my glummest, I sometimes think women get to choose—between being punished for being unsubjugated and the continual punishment of subjugation.

Having the right to show up and speak are basic to survival, to dignity, and to liberty.

Not uncommonly, when a woman says something that impugns a man, particularly one at the heart of the status quo, especially if it has to do with sex, the response will question not just the facts of her assertion but her capacity to speak and her right to do so.

billions of women must be out there on this seven-billion-person planet being told that they are not reliable witnesses to their own lives, that the truth is not their property, now or ever.