There is something deeply tragic about how love is spoken of today. Not love, really, desire. Lust dressed up in aesthetics, marketed as closeness. Infatuation that burns hot and fast, then vanishes with the first discomfort. We live in a time where the word “connection” is used so lightly, but experienced so rarely. Where the craving for bodies is... See more

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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