Girlhood

“My desire was a galloping thing, and her touch, unlike that of boys, didn't snuff it out. If my body had been a passive machine from which men made withdrawals, like an ATM whose code they were handed on the day of their first erection, then with her it was a winning slot machine, screaming jangly music and spewing coins.”

DesireSexualityLgbtOrgasmSapphic

Book:Girlhood

Source: Girlhood

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“My wonder was bottomless for the world empty of stories, mine alone to name.”

StoriesImaginationWonderChildhoodDiscoveryExploration

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“Now those moments seem proof that self-love is an instinct, as animal as any other function of the self. The ferocity of my affection could not be erased, only suppressed under total vigilance. My self-hatred was not self-generated. It was an expression of the environment outside of my body, which, it eventually turned out, I could change.”

FeminismSelf LoveEmpowermentSelf DiscoveryBody ImageSelf Image

Book:Girlhood

Source: Girlhood

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“It is through the collaboration of all these factors, of course, that patriarchy is enforced: an elegant machinery whose pistons fire silently inside their own minds, and whose gleaming gears we mistake for our own jewelry.”

FeminismMale Gaze

Book:Girlhood

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“This is a love story, though. The kind where the lover laments all the years she lost at the altar of some false god. When regret seeps in, I try to remember the Hecatoncheires. They did not defeat the Titans as children. They lived under their power. They were of the Titans. It took years for their strength to surpass that of the old gods. But when they did? They threw mountains, a hundred at a time, one for each great hand. And what if they had been taught to hate their own strength? Maybe it would have taken a hundred years for them to grasp a mountain in hand, to understand what they could do, that they could make their own Olympus.”

FeminismBody ImageEssayBody PositivityPatriarchal Culture

Book:Girlhood

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“Instead of criminal, women's bodies are inherently defective, aesthetically defective. To the body whose value is judged almost solely on aesthetics, it is a devastating sentence. We are too short, too tall, too fat, too thin, too dark, too stiff, too loose, too solicitous, too yielding, too assertive, too weak, or too strong.”

WomenFeminismGirl PowerSelf ImageBeauty StandardsEmpowerment Of WomenMale Gaze

Book:Girlhood

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“I am that careless girl, hands sunk haphazardly into the dough, bedroom a sty, pen stilled against her hand, eyes cast out the window, humming a song, thinking of something else. I am that outspoken witch; I will disagree with any man. I am a firework gone off in the dark, a spectacle of disobedience, a grand finale of orgasms anytime I want.”

FeminismSexualityGirl PowerSlut Shaming

Book:Girlhood

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“I should have known that the cruelty of girls is intensified here, living together 24/7, hundreds of miles away from home.”

Boarding School

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“Our midnight feasts aren't so much 'lashings of ginger beer' as 'whatever booze we can smuggle in'.”

Boarding SchoolMidnight Feast

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“I have never been a victim of home intrusion. I have never been raped. It is not a reenactment of such a trauma but a preoccupation with the threat of it, with the problem and necessity of refusing without ever saying no.”

ConsentRefusing

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“I was not a little mother or a hot mama. I was an eleven-year-old girl. Now, it seems to me a startlingly efficient way to age a child in a single word. Sometimes the word itself matters less than the authority with which it is spoken. It is the act of naming that claims you.”

PubertyGirlhoodSexualization

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“Later, this understanding evolved into a fear of my own susceptibility to madness, but as a child I simply understood that a person could not live with an open channel to the sublime inside them; it was impossible to hold on to the collective story of human life with that live cord writhing through you, showering sparks like a downed wire in a hurricane. Human life was defined by composure and linearity, school bus routes and homework and gender and bedtimes and taxes. Though I could meet its requirements most of the time, I knew my adherence to the logic of reality was tenuous, that a more feral sensibility reigned beneath it.”

RealityHumanitySocietyMadnessSensibilityRules

Book:Girlhood

Source: Girlhood

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