Sublime

have chosen to no longer be apologetic for my femininity. And I want to be respected in all my femaleness. Because I deserve to be.

Even after working for so long, I am often made to feel I do not belong, that none of me is valued except what I cannot control—my youth, my race, my weight, my skin, my symmetry. I am a guest here, stopping by so long as age and trend allow.

New Museum—

I am not simply proposing that you make peace with your body because your body shame is making you miserable. I am proposing you do it because it’s making us miserable too.

“Giving into the fear of feeling and working to capacity is a luxury only the unintentional can afford. And the unintentional are those that do not wish to guide their own destinies.”

am holding the tension of centering my own white, wealthy body in this writing, while knowing my body should never be at the center of the collective liberation I put my reflection in service of. I am

Pressures for women to position themselves as “normal” and “nice” are almost always a constraint, no matter who’s listening. “None of us is ever free of the need to keep up some sort of front,” Coates says.

Emma Goldman.

Naomi Wolfe, journalist and author of The Beauty Myth, writes, “A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in history. A quietly mad population is a tractable one.”