My inbox has been full of words. Words, silence, emoticons and the helplessness akin to having to endure a roller coaster ride you grossly overestimated your endurance for. You’re queasy and dizzy and your people are watching from the ground hoping you don’t throw up — hoping they don’t have to live through the mess. I expected and understood it but it still annoyed me. Again, I … Continue reading This song, my God, I have wept!
Survival. I love the word survival, it always sounds to me like a promise. -Audre Lorde. A few weeks ago, I cried. Like, really cried. It is a Saturday evening and I’m scrolling down my Twitter feed, distracting myself, trying not to cry. I have been dangling tears since I left my surgeon’s office. The doorbell rings, and I hear my aunt’s voice asking … Continue reading Survival.
You have friends that will stay on the phone with you for eight hours. No V, our relationship isn’t telepathic, but thank you for calling when you did. You have friends that will offer to pay and accompany you to a therapy session. You have friends that won’t let you forget you matter even when you’re being an incredibly pessimistic piece of shit. You … Continue reading 22 things to remember when you’re incredibly annoyed by your continued state of aliveness.
There is a tiny little matter called bodily autonomy: the idea that your body belongs to you and you can do with it whatever you want. It also means that you get to decide what is done and isn’t done to your body. It’s why you can’t be forced to donate blood or an organ; it’s why dead people are buried with organs that could be useful to people languishing in hospitals; they did not consent to have their organs donated. We get that, right? So how come we don’t get that the choice to abort, or not, should entirely be a woman’s; that the only way the government and other people should be involved in this, is if they are providing legislation that makes safe abortions every woman’s right and minding their business respectively. Continue reading Yellow.
My second memory, is me throwing up in the toilet after a whole day of running around, moving into this house. My college was in a very hot and dusty town. This town along with school, killed my already elusive joie de vivre. Even now, fifteen months after I officially left school, there are parts of me that are yet to be reawakened; anxieties to be rationalized. By the time we got our house in livable condition, I was so exhausted and dizzy, throwing up was more logical a reaction than any. Continue reading The way music stays with you.
And then Drake’s Hotline Bling happened and I was done. That song destroyed the goodwill I still had left for hip-hop in me. Because on the surface it’s a sad, albeit catchy, song about heartbreak, but then you think about it and it’s the kind of subtle misogyny that makes you want to crawl up in a fetal position and weep for days. Continue reading Drake honey, your misogyny is showing.
This book excites me. One of the tenets of my feminism is women unlearning the shame associated with our sexuality: women enthusiastically initiating sex; women exploring their bodies, finding their erogenous zones; women openly talking about sex; women explicitly stating how they want to be pleasured. This is important if we’re to end rape culture. Because when sex is constantly framed as something that is done to women, rape is inevitably viewed as some version of sex. When women can unashamedly say yes to sex, then maybe society will understand that no doesn’t mean “convince me.” Continue reading Season of Crimson Blossoms: A commentary.
You grow and change but some things stay constant. My writing still is for people who’ve felt invisible at some point but more than anything I want it to be obvious that for me, that demographic is black women. Man, it’s mad how aware my nineteen year old self was. This excerpt is a smack in the face, proof of how powerful my subconscious is. I may have figured out which group of people I want represented in my writing, but my sexuality has freshly become a riddle I’m extremely hesitant to solve. Because when I said queer, I thought I meant weird. But now, I am not so sure.
I knew I was going to write about Brooklyn 99 the first time Jake Peralta made the title of your sex tape joke. If you know me, you know that is my kind of humour. For context, the premise of this recurring joke is double entendres: Jake takes something the characters say and turns it into the title of their sex-tape. It is almost exclusively used on Amy Santiago to poke fun at her love life. Continue reading The men of Brooklyn nine-nine.
So if a man decides to unlearn his sexism, the first item on that agenda should be the idea that being pro-women is an act of benevolence on his part. Men don’t deserve rewards for believing in female equality. This is the bare minimum and we’re not in the business of rewarding fish for swimming. Because really, what is the alternative? Believing women are inferior things that deserve rape and mass murder? Continue reading I don’t trust male feminists.
