On her frame, angular but soft, a baggy T-shirt is coded as “low-maintenance,” not “sloppy”; a ponytail is “sleek,” not “tennis ball on top of a mini-fridge.” Not only can she pull off ugly clothes, like sports sandals, or “boyfriend jeans,” they somehow make her beauty thrum even more clearly.

They talk to you this way until you make them stop.

“Everything has repercussions. If you’re talking about legal repercussions, yeah, I do not think that comedy should be censored, and we’re not here to talk about censorship, and”—I gestured to Jim—“I’m pretty sure we agree.” The censorship argument is a boring red herring—I wanted to knock it down early. Rape joke apologists are quick to cry “free

The game is rigged. There is no perfection.

Denying people access to value is an incredibly insidious form of emotional violence, one that our culture wields aggressively and liberally to keep marginalized groups small and quiet.

Challenging myself to absorb more and more hate is a masochistic form of vanity—the vestigial allure of a rugged individualism that I don’t even believe in. No one wants to need defenses that strong. It always hurts, somewhere.

she taught me to cope with pain by chopping it up into bits small enough to laugh at.

There is nothing novel or comedic or righteous about men using the threat of sexual violence to control noncompliant women. This is how society has always functioned. Stay indoors, women. Stay safe. Stay quiet. Stay in the kitchen. Stay pregnant. Stay out of the world. If you want to talk about silencing, censorship, placing limits and consequences

You have to swallow, every day, that you are a secondary being whose worth is measured by an arbitrary, impossible standard, administered by men.