Maybe what’s at work is a kind of interior slut-shaming—if I suggest that such a damaging moment was the cause of my sexual activeness, then I disavow any good feelings I might have around my own sexuality. In other words, victimhood came to shape my own concept of my sexuality. When I sat down to write a memoir of my adolescent sex life, for

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As Summers notes, "horror belongs to women because we understand, on a gut-punch level, how it feels to be viewed as a monster [...] as well as how it feels to be reduced to body parts".3

i am making sure to eat a square of dark chocolate during my depressive episodes so they’ll sound sexy in my memoirs. even when i am ostensibly at my lowest, i am still filtering my experiences through the eyes of a consumer; the desire to editorialize our own experiences (to romanticize the unseen, to live for our biographies) has become an... See more