On m'a demandé comment j'avais réalisé que j'aimais comme une lesbienne. Alors j'ai essayé de répondre.

Je sais faire la différence entre l'amour lesbien et l'amour hétéro. À mes yeux, ils n'ont tellement rien à voir que ça tombe sous le sens sans avoir besoin de l'expliquer. Le désir d'une lesbienne pour une autre femme n'a rien de commun avec le désir d'un homme pour une femme. Ni même avec celui d'une femme pour un homme.

Once an inmate is eligible for parole (meaning they get released into the community to finish their sentence), they have to abide by a strict set of conditions. For me, one of those conditions is that I have to report every detail of my sexual relationship to my parole officer. Because I was with my boyfriend at the time of my offense, sex has everything to do with my bringing drugs over the border in the eyes of the law. My sex life is now under their jurisidition.

Everytime I meet with my parole officer I feel uncomfortable. She always asks if I’m sleeping with anyone, and if so, needs their names and numbers. She calls my friends to ask them if we are sleeping together, trying to catch me in a lie.

Heteropessimism consists of performative disaffiliations with heterosexuality, usually expressed in the form of regret, embarrassment, or hopelessness about straight experience. Heteropessimism generally has a heavy focus on men as the root of the problem. That these disaffiliations are “performative” does not mean that they are insincere but rather that they are rarely accompanied by the actual abandonment of heterosexuality.

[…]

A certain strain of heteropessimism assigns 100 percent of the blame for heterosexuality’s malfunction to men, and has thus become one of the myriad ways in which young women—especially white women—have learned to disclaim our own cruelty and power. Like most lesbians, I have found myself on the receiving end of approximately 100,000 drunk straight women bemoaning their orientation and insisting that it would be “so much easier” to be gay. Sure, it probably would be! That “men are trash” is not something I am personally invested in disputing. Yet in announcing her wish to be gay, the speaker carelessly glosses over the fact that she has chosen to stay attached to heterosexuality.

Bradley was one of her friends. He belonged to a group of boys who I only ever saw together. One of them had a credit card. At some point after we met, they used it to pay to see me naked on the internet. On that day or soon after, Bradley told his friends that he was going to have sex with me. “He wants to fuck you,” one of them said. This was the way things were. If a boy said he wanted to fuck you, you were supposed to feel flattered.

We live in a society where female ways of being are still commonly viewed as second-best, where too much feminine energy can be an obstacle to being taken seriously, where women are expected to conform to stereotypically male communication patterns and expectations in order to have a career and real power. Too often it’s a choice between embracing who you really are and getting what you want in life.

The key to understanding why a self-proclaimed radical feminist group would side with conservatives arguing for the right to force cisgender women into skirts at work is to understand who TERFs are and what they’ve been up to for the past 50 years.

21 ans que je vois des sales merdeux instrumentaliser le suicide de gars comme mon père pour éviter de parler des violences faites aux femmes par les hommes. Je dis de gars comme mon père parce qu’il cochait comme la majorité des hommes qui se suicident toutes les cases ; moyen utilisé, raisons, incapacité de parler etc. Ces gens s’en contrefoutent en général puisque le moindre mec qui oserait exprimer son mal être sur les réseaux sociaux est moqué, vilipendé, voire poussé au suicide. Qu’on ne vienne donc pas me prétendre que le suicide des mecs les intéressent c’est un mensonge, une sale petite instrumentalisation. Les mecs sont tellement mal à l'aise avec la fragilité masculine que c'est le seul argument qu'ils sont en bouche d'ailleurs lorsqu'il s'agit de contrer la propagande masculiniste et fasciste de certains. "Halala qu'est ce qu'il est fragile" braillent-ils face à un masculiniste comme si le problème était là.

les interdictions de la GPA n’arrêtent pas le commerce des bébés mais l’alimentent en réalité de manière à rendre les travailleuses gestationnelles beaucoup plus vulnérables qu’auparavant. Comme pour le travail du sexe, la question d’être pour ou contre la GPA n’est donc pas pertinente. Il s’agit plutôt de savoir pourquoi il est considéré comme normal d’être davantage opposé à la GPA qu’à d’autres formes de travails risqués et quels sont les effets de cette posture de charité sur les personnes qui exercent actuellement ce travail ?

Though well aware that this male-conceived genre served as a vehicle to tell horror stories of female independence, I was nonetheless entranced by these women who seemed so unburdened by emotion; it was the sort of disposition to which I could never relate, and never will.

“Stop the rhetoric that a woman is crazy or difficult,” Portman advised, […] “If a man says a woman is crazy or difficult, ask him, ‘What bad thing did you do to her?’ That’s a code word. He is trying to discredit her reputation.”

J'aime Natalie Portman d'amour.

The most normative gender transitioning story goes something like this: Trans woman realizes she was born in the wrong body from a young age, proves her womanhood to a doctor, starts hormone replacement therapy, gets surgery because of her intense discomfort with her genitalia, and comes out from the operating table as a perfectly cis-passing woman. It’s a cute fantasy, but it’s not entirely true.

Increasingly, we’re seeing more women onscreen dealing with mental illness, often in ways that treat their disorder as just one element in a fully human, complex character. But all of these women are white. Women of color—specifically African American women—are not afforded the same type of humanity onscreen, if they’re even represented at all.

While the studies presumably apply to both men and women, Dolan said the negative effects of marriage are compounded for women. For men, marriage often leads to taking fewer risks, making more money at work, and living longer. But women, especially middle-aged married women, are at a higher risk of developing physical conditions and mental illnesses than their single counterparts. They also tend to die sooner.

Masturbation allows me to completely empty my mind. I focus purely on the pleasure and sensation of what I’m doing. For a few minutes, there’s nothing else that requires my attention: no bills to pay, no deadlines to meet, no worries about the future.

And though the new breed of nannies is in some ways more varied than its predecessors (we now have male nannies, non-nannies who are more buddy than boss, and power nannies who take their cues from management consultants), these characters bear little resemblance to real-life nannies, who are most likely to be women of color and/or immigrants, whose work is often underpaid and/or undocumented.

[CW mention of abuse and rape]

“Why are you depressed?” my mother asked me when I responded truthfully instead of lying with a simple, “I’m doing fine.” […] And then more men used my body like a glove and they used my kindness as a balm for their own wounds, and they used the home I made for myself to shelter their needs, and then I kept trying and it got harder.

Kylie-Anne Kelly can’t remember the exact moment she became her boyfriend’s one and only, his what would I do without you, but she does remember neglecting her own needs to the point of hospitalization.

[…]

After three years together, when exhaustion and anxiety landed her in the hospital and her boyfriend claimed he was “too busy” to visit, they broke up.

In the 2006 documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated, director Kimberly Peirce notes that her 1999 film Boys Don’t Cry was originally rated NC-17—which is considered the kiss of death for movies seeking a broad audience—in part because a main character, Lana (Chloë Sevigny), had an orgasm that was “too long.” Peirce speculates that the problem lay in Lana’s undeniable pleasure—“There’s something about that that’s scaring them, that’s unnerving them.”

The dictionary defines femme as “a lesbian whose appearance and behavior are seen as traditionally feminine.” However, that’s what makes it subversive. To be “femme” is to capture femininity on your own terms, reclaiming it from the heterosexual gaze and performing it instead for a queer community.

This Sunday, there’s a tall woman a few tables over with this hot outfit (almost entirely denim) and her hair gracefully swept up and back. She’s here with her parents. Do they even know she’s gay? I’m pretty confident that she is, she gave me the nod on the way in. I’m here with a sweetheart, teaching them how to control the object ball with little adjustments. I pocket a shot and catch the woman’s eye, she gives me a look: mutual recognition but definitely flirtation too. I think maybe she would come home with us. She certainly seems to be signaling, the way her eyes ask me to play just before she looks away. A fantasy starts to grow in my mind; I want to take her home with us. What does she enjoy? Would she let me lead the way I like? Am I allowed to be fantasizing about a stranger like this?

She’s not allowed to quit or even change her style because Dad’s in charge and Britney’s not legally allowed to make those decisions on her own anymore.