Febos knows how to dial into the crux of matters. Although some of her personal experiences may not vibe with everyone, I think every woman can relate to issues such as being objectified, feeling responsible for another's (read: male's) feelings of rejection, how our perception of our bodies lead to self-hate, promiscuity, shame, etc. Febos successfully weaves personal experiences, literature, and pop culture to examine the female experience. While she doesn't give easy answers, she provides a lot to consider and question.
To say: no person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to be so alone. There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors.
Author’s Note
I no longer think that the pains or darkness of my own girlhood were exceptional. It is a darker time for many than we are often willing to acknowledge. During it, we learn to adopt a story about ourselves—what our value is, what beauty is, what is harmful and what is normal—
Prologue: Scarification
It is better to choose your pain than to let it choose you.
Kettle Holes
In some inchoate way, I understood that desire led to fear that could lead to hate—all without ever obliterating that original want.
A mystery solved is always a death: that of possibility, denial, the dream of our own invincibility.
The true telling of our stories often requires the annihilation of other stories, the ones we build and carry through our lives because it is easier to preserve some mysteries. We don’t need the truth to survive, and sometimes our survival depends on its denial.
The Mirror Test
“The mirror represents the perspective of the others on my body: by taking over this perspective on myself, self-consciousness is constituted. An essential step in this process is marked by the development of shame.”
To be called a slut is tantamount to being one, she tells her daughter. Society creates you.
This is the brilliance of shame as a tactic of domination: it conditions us to maintain our own isolation.
I have since learned that recognizing the invisible parts of oneself in another person can feel like a radiant kind of love.
Wild America
Our power may be innate, but we learn its meaning from others.
How wrong I had been about freedom. I had mistakenly thought that beauty was the price of it, that I must succeed at erasing myself in order to be myself. In fact, it was the opposite. Only when I divested from the systems that benefited from my self-hatred could I relinquish it and glimpse freedom.
Intimacy, I’ve found, has little to do with romance. Maybe it is the opposite of romance, which is based on a story written by someone else. It is a closeness to another person that requires closeness with oneself. It is not watching lightning strike from the window but being struck by it.
Intrusions
The pathology of victimhood would also claim that self-blaming and shame were my very ordinary attempt to explain what had happened to me, to assert control over it by assuming responsibility.
“Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at … Thus she turns herself into an object—and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”
Thank You for Taking Care of Yourself
Secrets, if initially a source of power to their keepers, often transmute into a source of shame over time.
One of the dictionary definitions of the word unspeakable is “too bad or horrific to express in words.”
see two powerful imperatives that collaborate to encourage empty consent: the need to protect our bodies from the violent retaliation of men and the need to protect the same men from the consequences of their own behavior, usually by assuming personal responsibility. It is our shame, our embarrassment, our duty alone to bear it.
That is, it was preferable to tolerate sex she didn’t want than to tolerate the displeasure of men.
Sex and “love” were dues we owed to society for much, much longer than they have been voluntary routes to our own fulfillment.
If neurologists and psychologists conducted a study of women who had given empty consent, how many symptoms would they identify that we commonly associate with trauma?
It is not a coincidence that the apex of feminine beauty is nearly identical to that of physical powerlessness.
The only thing that renders the awkwardness of affirmative consent greater any of these awkwardnesses is that the onus of it does not rest entirely on the shoulders of the most vulnerable.
A body isn’t very well loved by the person who abandons it when its needs conflict with the desires of strangers.
If I have learned anything by writing this, it is that consent is a form of communication that happens first within the self.
Sometimes what I mean by healing is changing.
We must choose it over and over.
Les Calanques
Once in a while, I’ll give a few dollars to a panhandler who I know is going to spend it on dope. There are days when the next high is the only mercy available to us. Sometimes our best efforts at self-preservation look like a kind of violence.
A thing of unknown value has no value, and I treated myself as such.
The more I know my own worth, the less I have to fling myself against anything.
Anything Is Possible by Elizabeth Strout
