Hope – by Anonymous

My education had mostly ended after eighth grade. So when I was sent off to college I was less than confident. I was informed not to worry about failing. I could go back home.This was no doubt said as a comfort, but to me it was a painful reminder of my inability. If I was to fail at college, I was to be sent to Alaska to find a husband. Not kidding.

This was repeatedly said to me. Followed by a laugh. Followed by a, “No really, I’m serious.” I would have to work as a hard as possible to maintain a C average. To my surprise, working as hard as possible produced A’s instead. Yet before I could receive my report card, I had been proposed to. I tentatively accepted on the advice of my Father.

I was hopeful to get out of it swiftly. Yet a series of sexual assaults made me, as Christian purity culture proclaims “A chewed piece of gum.” I was stuck to the teeth of my betrothed, or doomed to remain single. This thought was severely unpleasant for me on many different levels. In fact, it was levels I wasn’t allowed to even think.

I couldn’t question my Father’s choice in a spouse. He was the head of my household. I couldn’t question my betrothed actions, he was my future head of household. I tried to speak to authorities, but I was reminded of policies and losing my place at school. The one place I had ever succeeded at anything. There was no changing course.

My Father had it all planned out, because it was the best chance that “someone as neurotic” as me could have. I loved my Father so much. It had been easy for me to accept patriarchal doctrines. Yet when I overheard my Father defending the man who had repeatedly violated me, my heart broke.

I deserved him? Marriage as a teenager was all I was good for? The good grades I had earned for that past school year wasn’t good enough. I was still useless. A liability. No longer a cute little girl, but something far worse, a woman.

These ideas were only confirmed to me at school. I had a knack for biblical scholarship, but women aren’t suppose to teach. Those who dared defy the norm were often the source of ridicule. Something I couldn’t afford to bear. So when I was informed by my Father of my wedding date, I numbly made it happen. It was going to be okay. I might have to take a little time off of school, but I was going to get my bachelors and then my masters. I’d support my family myself, and show my Father how wrong he was for underestimating me. However, my new spouse had other plans.

Now I was aware of most forms of birth control, and how to use them. Yet the women in my family had bad reactions to the pill, and therefore I opted for barrier methods. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been surprised by the problems that arose. When had I ever been respected in a sexual setting? Yet I was consistently surprised.He’d say one thing and do another.

A little over a month after my wedding my period did not occur. I was very confused. It had seemed like we were very careful. After a positive pregnancy test, a confession was made. “I lied.” He said with a giggle.It wasn’t even a mistake,but straight out deliberate deception, for the sake of his desire.

Bubbling, boiling rage filled me. I’d never felt hate like this, but who was I to hate? My husband was my head, and provider. For all of his faults he believed in me,and was thoroughly looking forward to me becoming the primary provider in the future.

My mind raced. What could I do? Who could I blame? Men are notorious for not liking condoms. Obliviously it was my fault for not going on the pill. A pill? Could I kill this baby? I erupted in tears. What had I become?

I was low income, ignorant, pregnant, white trash. If only I had listened to my Daddy, right? My tears mixed momentarily with maniacal laughter. I sat on the floor and clutched my belly. As tears hit my navel, I whispered, “It is not your fault. I will find a way for both of us.”

I needed to find a way and fast. Before I could even confirm my pregnancy with a professional, my husband was unemployed and without insurance. Thus began my weeks of trying to get government aid. Never had I been treated so poorly by a stranger. This confirmed my reality. Trash. Trash who didn’t deserve to be treated with human dignity. After all I was mooching off of the government! I was adding to the surplus population. I had the audacity to be poor!

My husband regained his insurance before the government even gave me a drop of health care. Nothing gave me greater pleasure than to say “Thanks but no thanks” to her snotty voice. It was just in time too. Few give care to someone as far along as I ended up being. Of course, my midwives were happy I made the cut.

What a difference the private sector is! Not only was I received with open arms, but they wanted me to add government aid on top of my insurance. They felt not only did I need it but I deserved it! For the first time since I had entered my husband’s home I felt hope. Everything in the clinic was beautiful, but something better was coming.

“Can you hear that?” She asked softly. It was the sound of my child’s quick heart. Hope had uplifted me, but love was overwhelming. My child was alive and well, and I loved him. So too, I would live and be well and have love.

Freedom by Jamie Lee Finch

I suppose that among all of the other things to say and thoughts I could have, I mostly just have to wonder how we managed to get ourselves to 2015 and somehow my boss still thinks it’s acceptable to crack jokes about my ovaries being to blame for mistakes on the job. That, and the knowledge that if I were to make the same joke in reverse and blame his prostate- I would get fired.

And yet there I was, just hours before on the same day, driving into work, hit by this wave of, “it’s all really actually going to be okay”. This sudden realization that I am free. Because I came so far and into and out of and through so much that tried to convince me that I desire all of the things I don’t, and yet here I am with my course still set on the things I do.

I grew up in a tradition that didn’t know where to put me. That didn’t know how to speak to me, so they never did. That didn’t know how to live with me, so they tried not to. The majority of my religious experience was attempting to kick myself out because of all of the times I had been made to feel that there was no seat for me at the table. A tradition that had carefully crafted a system of oppression on the shoulders of about 70 words and never felt it necessary to answer for itself; and yet I felt like the only one who had even noticed. A tradition that taught me my body was a loaded gun and the only way to be a “lady” was to live with the safety on.

And it’s only just now- having distanced myself from the expectations and mourned the loss of that false image every pastor had always been so proud of that I feel like I am allowed to breathe and expand all the way out to my fullest capacity; claim all of my own territory. Because no, I haven’t shut down a desire for children out of a response to trauma. And yes, my dreams do happen to have more color in them than white. But your decided uncomfortability with that narrative doesn’t make it any less mine.

I’m not angry, I’m just frustrated by my own hindsight when I realize that this time last year, words were coming out of my mouth on a regular basis that have absolutely no foundation in what I actually believe to be true about myself. I’m frightened at how easy it was for me to let them teach me those things and I’m frightened by the fact that their lessons were never, at any moment, ill-intentioned… just ill-informed.

They weren’t trying to kill me. They were just trying to make me fit because they really, really believed I was supposed to and couldn’t imagine a world where I didn’t. And their honest belief that their manipulation is kindness is exactly what almost smothered me in the first place.

Because it isn’t exactly that the feminine voice has been absent; it’s more so that any female voice that doesn’t sound exactly like what the culture it’s speaking to expects for it to sound like isn’t heard. If she doesn’t say the things expected of her- if she begins to speak and an unfamiliar sound begins to rise- she is either actively silenced through intimidation or coercion, or passively silenced through fear and uncertainty.

So even that feeling of freedom I found- it’s like a secret I’m required to keep with myself. And maybe my brother- with a soon-to-be daughter of his own on the way- who is incised on my behalf when I tell him the story about my boss. And maybe the carefully chosen male friend at the party last weekend who genuinely wants an answer from me to the question of what he can do with his time on earth to be a part of making sure statements like those stop happening.

And I say “I wish I knew, Phillip.” Because I really wish I did, but right now I can be thankful for the little-by-little and the Widening Circle I continue to find myself becoming. I am a composite of each and every one of those expectations and questions and freedoms and apologies and entirely unused, but fully functioning reproductive organs. And for as long as this planet is successfully capable of hosting Beyoncé on it, I suppose I can be willing to stick around and happen to it, too.

The First Day of A New Cheer Uniform: A Lesson On Propriety – by Anonymous

I was told it wasn’t appropriate

for me to wear my team skirt

to school. After all, I was sixteen,

tall and sleek, with a perky ponytail, 

well-glossed lips, and big

pom-poms. 

A sour-faced woman in a grey sweater 

set, her lips bared into a smile, whisked 

away one shiny cheerful girl at a time, away

from the gawky boys in Wrangler jeans,

who paced the dirty, steel lockered hall.

“We wouldn’t want to give someone

the wrong idea, would we?”

With no mention of my straight A’s 

or the book I clutched. She handed me 

old men’s track pants, since their swish 

swish as I walked would be less distracting 

than my body. 

Later, after the halls were empty and

bulletin covered doors shut, I learned

something about propriety.

The swish of my track pants, walking 

out of the teacher’s room, the married one 

who taught Government, after he pressed me 

too tight against his chest and asked

if I had gotten any

of his messages, his hands too soft

for the leer in his eyes, like a cat

about to devour me, my hummingbird 

heart and all.

The problem with the skirt, you see —

it wasn’t its wiry gold threads 

that left red welts against my thighs 

or the squeezing grip of its narrow 

waistband (purchased a size too small,

a coach’s reminder to watch my girlish figure),

or even the problem of too much tan leg.

No, it was my skirt, not covering enough

of my body to indicate it was not

up for grabs. It might invite

some man to have his way. 

Thighs – by Jill

Let’s play a word association game.

Thighs- ugly- fat – flaw – me.

For as long as I can recall, those words have been synonymous.

My mother used to tell me I was “cursed” with her thighs. Her mother told her she was fat. I remember hearing the phrase “thunder thighs” in high school. Fashion has never been created for my thighs. My jeans were always tight in the thighs yet loose at the waist. As a teenager, I refused to wear short shorts or a bathing suit because my thighs were too big.

Even today in the age of the Kardashians, models and actresses don’t have thighs like mine- not even Helen Mirren. Remember the hoopla over her in a bathing suit? I do! And I don’t look like that in a bathing suit trust me. I have never worn size 0 nor had a “thigh gap.”

As I grew older and embraced feminism, I became more comfortable with my body. However, I work out mainly in an effort to decrease the size of my thighs (health is a secondary reason). The fight continues against my perception of my thighs as a flaw

Breasts – by Anonymous

Boobs mean something to me because its part of what makes me a female, biologically, but for the most part they don’t mean much to me in the sense that they are meaningful to me. Does that make sense? They are there. Sometimes they get in the way, sometimes they don’t. They’ve caused me much grief in the past and have been taxing to my physical and mental health. They are life givers because they bring forth milk, but are oversexualized and shamed for their biological purpose.

I see boobs everyday because I have a pair and I work with lactating mothers. I love boobs and I want women to feel empowered by their breasts. It bothers me when I hear, see, sense, feel, etc another person shaming a mother for breast feeding her child in public, but no one is talking about how oversexualizing breasts is the only acceptable way for breasts to be seen (ie- Victoria Secret Fashion Show, etc). Also, attending a Women’s College I didn’t feel shamed for not wearing a bra because no one cared. We were there to learn and be heard. At a mostly male college that I had previously attended, I had a male approach me to ask if I was wearing a bra and proceeded to shame me for not wearing one.

I didn’t hit puberty/start my period until I was 17, so for the majority of high school I was made fun of by other girls, because of my lack of boob size. Being a AA, size 4, and 5’8″ at the start of my freshman year was pretty terrible. Everyone else had developed/was developing and the girls had these beautiful boobs. I was so enthralled by them; not sexually attracted, but in awe of the space they took up and how ethereal they made these women look. I remember going up to have my yearbook photo taken and the photographer asked me to sit up, with my shoulders back, etc and hearing  group of girls giggle and shout out, “Look at those tiny skittles!” They were referencing my boobs and of course EVERYONE cracked up laughing. I was so mortified and ashamed of my body. My nickname at High School was  “Skittles” until I got my period during the middle of my junior year. My boobs grew to a solid B and my jeans grew to a size 10. 
 
The majority of the time men use the word BOOBS its in a way that it demeaning and just WAY TOO FUCKING SEXUAL LIKE COOL IT OK? But when I am in front of a room of breastfeeding mothers who are learning to nurse, are in pain because they are nursing, are tired, etc, it’s like my boobs are what is making me compassionate towards these women.

When I go on a run downtown, I dress in a way that will not attract the male gaze. We have come to understand the world as a “Man’s space” and that we women are merely traveling through that space. My boobs and how men react to them as it is evidenced in catcalls, street harassment and the constant pursuit of women by strange men are ways which shape my experience of them. I try to make myself as small as possible when I am walking in public and feel unsafe. 

Because of the way society and the media treat female breasts, young women spend their whole lives believing that theirs are abnormal. Obviously this is bad because it promotes body hate, rape culture, over sexualization of young girls and women, and girl-on-girl crime, etc.

Expectations- by Anonymous

I went to a private Christian school my entire life. When I was very young it seemed like it was aimed at good manners, but as I matured there were more bible classes that spoke on gender roles. My 8th grade class was girls only. What I got from those was that I was expected to marry young, have babies and be submissive. Those things were supposed to bring me happiness and fulfilment. Those things did not.

I dated in high school boys who were raised the same way. I was friend zoned every time. One of those boys introduced me to to a boy who went to public school. I was intrested. Probably more desperate.  Right away I knew he was different from all the other boys i knew. He had the sexy bad boy appeal.  Things went quickly. I even distinctly remember hearing a voice in my head who had to have been GOD saying ” run away”. But a typical teen I did not.  I married him instead.

Even though friends and family had advised against it. I thought  I was supposed to get married. If I had babies and was a good submissive wife then I thought my husband would love me and we would be happy. That’s not what happened.

We moved out of state. He barely kept a job. I constantly had to call my father for money. He once went out drinking all night and didn’t come home. When I walked to his father’s house and told him what happened and asked where he was I was the one who got yelled at by my husband when he did come home because I had told on him. That was the beginning of the abuse.

Any time he did something questionable I wasn’t allowed to tell for fear of worse repercussions. His family members always said to tell them if anything happened, but every time I did the repercussions were worse than the help.

Think of the worst verbal abuse you’ve ever endured. He was also often driving while he screamed at me and driving badly which made it all the more scary. He never once got pulled over while doing this and I will never understand how.

When he wasn’t yelling at me he was expecting me to get pregnant.  I thought it was my duty. I thought I wanted that too.  It never happened. I was devastated for a long time . I felt useless and broken.

The abuse went on. It eventually became physical.  I think that was easier to deal with than the mental. Bruises heal quicker than the mind.
When it got that bad I was so tired and stressed feeling this nightmare wouldn’t end. I thought I had failed somehow as a wife. I couldn’t make him love me enough to treat me like a human.

I met a man at work around this time. I was naturally drawn to him. Felt safer than I ever had around him. He met my husband and it didn’t take long for him to figure out what was wrong.  It took a few months but he helped me get strong enough to make the stand for myself to end the marriage.  It was a messy and mentally taxing part of my life, but for once I started feeling free.

I dealt with a lot of issues for many years after. For months after he moved out he would text me at work that he had canceled my car insurance and turned off my phone. He would tell me he was having sex with his new girlfriend and he could call so I could hear them.  The worst instance was when he told me his girlfriend was pregnant and how it happend right away and I couldn’t even do that right. I can’t lie that hurt badly.

I changed my phone number, blocked my Facebook and things got easier. The man from work who helped me leave ended up being someone I love and who loves me back. He has helped me all these years work through the issues and baggage I came into his life with. We are moving in together later this year.

Eight years later I feel like I’m a different,  better person. Part of me still feels like I’m supposed to be Susie Homemaker and part of me wants to be. Either way I know I’m free to be who I am.

Pussy – by Anonymous

Prior to knowing what sexual intercourse was, I knew I was considered weak. Sometimes it was what people said sometimes it was accepted customs, but I knew I should always receive strength from an external source. I knew part of what made me weak was my private parts, but I didn’t know how. I knew doing something “like a girl” was an insult, but I wasn’t sure how or why. 

Until I heard the word pussy. Then everything clicked. 
Penetration showed dominance. 

Later, this would be the beginning of the end of a deeply rooted sense of superiority and sinlessness regarding homosexuality.

The idea that a man would subject himself to a place of weakness and take the place of a woman – to be penetrated – opened my eyes to the insult of the word pussy. 

Pussy is always weak, never to be emulated. Pussy isn’t where life begins, it’s where degradation is born.

But there are different tiers to pussy. Not all pussy is created equally, at least, in the eyes of those commodifying them. 

And in a Midwest, American mindset, nobody quite knew what to do with me. 

See, Black pussy could be exotic, but they had to be stoic. Emotion, after all, is a sign of weakness; and black women aren’t afforded that privilege. White women, meanwhile, are expected to be weak. They’re expected to be emotional. They must be protected and saved and are in desperate need of Prince Charming. 

So. We can criticize a mother for showing emotion when her son lies dead in the streets for hours at a time in august heat…. but white women can discuss how the occasional emotional situation can affect them professionally. 

But I was never fully either of these (which makes sense since the dichotomy is oh so very false)

In comparison to my white sister (a Taylor Swift look alike) I felt I was inherently more sexualized while being worth less in terms of a commodity. In church language, this means I couldn’t be modest. I couldn’t wear the right clothes, I couldn’t hide the right parts, I couldn’t blend in enough to be modest. Melissa couldn’t not be modest.

But it’s because we were valued differently.

I’ve criticized mothers who wrote an open letter to Miley following Blurred Lines wondering where was their concern for Rhianna. In terms of downward spiral, it seemed that the latter was battling more and the latter simply had a good marketing team. 

But it’s because as a culture, not all pussy is created equally.

Sex – by Anonymous

When I was around 13 i had a guy ask me if I wanted to have sex. I really liked him so I said of course in hopes of having a relationship with him….I was wrong. It went on for 2 years of being used just for that by two different boys. I thought for the longest time sex meant love.

I felt that I meant something to these guys that I had sex with. I allowed it to consume my life for the entirety of my middle school years and freshman year of high school. That was until life caught up to me when I was 15 and I ended up pregnant. Then that word turned into a bad word. Something i knew I shouldn’t even talk about. Well three months into my pregnancy, I finally told my parents and I was forced to abort the baby due to my age and because the boy went to our church. My parents didn’t want to have to face his family. After that it was almost four years of deep depression. Feeling like I wasn’t good enough for someone to love me in that way, to have sex.

Through my earlier college days I bounced around in more relationships of just sex with random guys I shouldn’t be with just trying to feel loved and worth it. When I started college I found a different focus on life to a point. I stayed away from sex while there. In order to focus on my relationship with God. Within six months of graduating I yearned to feel loved or wanted by a guy again. I met a guy we dated and had sex a few times, but I knew he wasn’t the one for me. I realised I never found true love because I was looking the wrong way.

Sex took a new meaning when I met someone I wanted to do more than just time in bed with them.  That someone is now my wife. The connection I feel with her versus any guy I had sex with, is completely different. It is true love. There is a connection that is more of a deep down in the heart feeling not just in your parts feeling.

There are many moments I wish I would of waited in life. I think sex is something I personally struggle with wanting more than a lot of woman. I think it has to do with my past of just not feeling loved without the act.
But I wouldn’t trade a day with my wife for anything.

Cock Sucker – by Candice

In my life experience, the word “cock sucker” has almost always been used in an insulting, degrading context. I have heard men call other men that and it was almost always in reference to a man’s perceived weakness or softness. It was something said with the intention of attacking a man’s masculinity. Many times I have heard men say “suck my dick” as a way of establishing superiority or dominance over another or reducing another person to subordinate status – whether jokingly or otherwise. I have also heard this term used by men to describe women and it was never in a positive, favorable, respectful, kind or even a neutral or matter-of-fact context. When boasting of their sexual conquests to their male friends or gossiping about a woman’s sexual reputation with their friends, men would say “she sucks cock” to emphasize the woman’s alleged “looseness” or “easiness.” Because of this, I knew that I did not want to be known as a cock sucker. It may sound funny but I saw what having that label placed on them did to the other girls. I saw them be ostracized and whispered about by other women. I saw them be savagely pursued by the guys who heard of their willingness to perform fellatio (and called them dirty whores upon learning that information) but did so under the guise of genuine romantic interest only to disappear after getting the coveted blowjob. It seemed that performing oral sex on a guy was just not something that a girl could do and still be respected. It was implied to me that it was something that a man would solicit a woman for when he didn’t love her, like her, respect her, want her, care about her or even know her but just wanted a sexual experience and/or something to brag about. It was something a man who was already in a committed or marital relationship would solicit from a woman to get his rocks off and it was not considered cheating because it was considered steps down from “real” sex – just a one-way sexual service that a man can get away with because he’s just getting, not giving, pleasure. The upper echelon girls were made love to, the lower girls were just manipulated into giving or freely gave fellatio eyes wide open.

The first time I can remember hearing that term was when I was a freshman in high school – a year that would become one of the worst of my life. I heard it in two different sets of circumstances. In one context, it was just two senior guys playing a game of cards and in an admittedly entertaining superfluous display of testosterone, they were taking shots at one another. They would call each other “dick sucker” and many other explicit names and it was all in harmless competitive fun to them. Then in another context, it was used as a weapon against me. I was sexually assaulted by a senior when I was freshman on a band trip. He did everything he could to degrade me and humiliate me. I started school early so I was 13 at the time and he was 18. What he did was, in the eyes of the law, considered child molestation but he went around the school afterward, telling people it was consensual. He forced himself on me in the most demeaning and abusive way. The rumors spread like wildfire and I quickly got a reputation for being easy, stupid, and nasty. I was, from then on, a “ho” and a “cock sucker.” When I walked the halls, guys would make crude gestures at me. Girls would point and whisper to each other as I went by. A couple of guys approached me and tried to duplicate what the first guy did. One of them followed me as I was walking home and tried to drag me to his house to have his way with me. I became one of the girls that I heard rumors about. Having that label on me made life incredibly difficult at school. It meant that I was not respectable. It meant that I was stupid. It meant that I was not worthy of actual dating, a real relationship, intimacy, mutual affection or tender kisses, I was only good for a blowjob. It meant that I was no longer pure, clean, or innocent. There was no turning back, I was tainted for life. My upbringing in a strict Pentecostal home probably contributed to how that event altered my view of myself.

When I hear this word, it still causes a quiet “ouch” in my soul. Even though that traumatic event was about 18 years ago, it radically altered my view of myself, men, women, and sex. For many years, I associated fellatio with subordination, female submission, male dominance, degradation, and selfish lust. It is complicated because men seemed to shun women who were not willing to perform oral sex but use the word cock sucker as an insult and negative judgment on a woman’s sexuality. It seemed to be a desired action but an action that nonetheless came with undesirable consequences for the woman – in the form of damaged reputation, dismissal, sexual hit & runs, and public ridicule. As I get older, I think about the unfairness that the connotation of this word bears. What is to be said about the women who actually enjoy performing fellatio and get pleasure out of pleasing their partners? What do we say about the women who are sexually explorative and confident and do not carry the same binding social beliefs about fellatio that others do? Although I, as well as many other people, think fellatio puts women in a place of yielding. It is viewed as obedience, compliance, subjection, partially because in the actual act, the woman is physically in a lower position before the man i.e. on her knees. It’s like dick worship. The woman is in passive role and the man is in dominant role. However, every woman does not view it that way. Some women think fellatio puts women in the place of power. I mean she has the most sensitive, most vulnerable part of a man’s anatomy right in between her teeth. In that moment, she has the power to either bring much pleasure or much pain. She could send him to heights of ecstasy unknown or cause him intense agony to the point of immobilization. He should pray she chooses the former. It’s all in her hands….so to speak. It actually requires much trust (or much recklessness) on the part of the man. In that moment, his body is actually under her control. I suppose it depends on perspective. However, in my personal, individual life experience, being a cock sucker was never a good thing but could it have been a lie as the women who were stigmatizing it were probably doing it themselves and the men stigmatizing it were at the same time expecting it? Not only were the men expecting it but they were demanding it and not only were they demanding it but they would, in turn, come up with every reason in the world not to reciprocate. The woman’s body was somehow “gross” and reciprocating pleasure was too much to ask from a man. If that is not one of the most brutal expressions of phallocentric dominance and misogyny.

I do not like the word because of the connotation, history, social implications and emotional baggage it carries. I do not like it because of the vulgarity of it and the way it reduces a woman to a sexual object by defining her by what she does in the bedroom. I do not like the word because it used as a weapon against women (and men) to make them feel bad about their sexual choices (and the times when they didn’t have a choice). However, having reached the understanding that I have today, I would not judge a woman for her sexual choices. I would never participate with other women to ostracize, attack or ridicule women for their sexual choices. Words like slut, whore, and cock sucker are often thrown out as blanket labels to describe any and every woman who willingly participated in oral sex or was forced or manipulated into doing so. Basically, I’m saying that I do not like the fact that “cock sucker” is used as an insult but I do not think it is a bad thing because there is nothing wrong with fellatio as long as it is consensual, between adults, and not attained through deception….if that makes sense.

I have seen porn advertisements on the internet and many times the women were advertised as cock suckers and sluts. I suppose it’s good for the consumers who enjoy fellatio. Typically, pornography is centered on the man, his genitals and his satisfaction. And men who regularly consume pornography have a phallocentric view of sex. So women who are not only willing but are enthusiastic about fellatio and do not ask to be satisfied themselves are common in pornography. Although the men are there with the women participating in the sex act just like the women, it is only the women who are the sluts, whores and cock suckers. It is the women who are immoral and unclean for their sexual choices hence the nature of the names they are called. It is the women who are defined by their sexual choices and stigmatized/condemned for being sexually aggressive and sexually ravenous…..basically for behaving like men. They don’t call men who perform cunnilingus “pussy lickers.” At least I haven’t heard that. And I am not sure that a man who is willing to perform oral sex on a woman would have to endure social disgrace. He would probably be considered a good lover or a gentleman if he’s even “considered” anything at all. Almost as if putting your mouth on a woman is a greater sacrifice or a noble thing because women’s reproductive bodies are so “gross.” I could be wrong about this but the consequences for sexual choices don’t seem to be the same for men and women. I have also seen mainstream films, in which a woman was referred to as a cock sucker. I saw a prison film in which the male guards in the women’s prison were sexually abusing the inmates by forcing them to perform oral sex on them. Apparently they were not worthy of vaginal rape because they might get pleasure out of that and it would require work on the part of the man. And most of the other times I have seen women called cock suckers or actually sucking cock in films, it was either to humiliate them (meaning the female characters in the film, not necessarily women in general) or to express a “king and his harem” or a concubine kind of relationship – once again implying the yin-yang symbolism of dominance and submission exhibited in the act of fellatio.

If I performed oral sex on a man that I am in relationship with and then, later on, I heard that man call someone a cock sucker to insult them, I could not help but have some kind of negative reaction to that – even if it’s just a silent tisk. It would make me wonder how he really interprets my willingness to do that and what kind of internal judgment he is making about me. I would not call someone a “pussy licker” to insult them because I see nothing wrong with cunnilingus. There is nothing degrading about bringing a woman pleasure. I would not make a condemning judgment against someone for having an alleged willingness for performing oral sex on women and not just because I am a woman but because I find no fault in men and women pleasing their partners in whatever way they desire. It is normal adult behavior. I just daydream about the day when women not only stop joining in with women to attack other women but when men stop using their penises as weapons to subjugate women.

Anger by Lindsay Saylor

What I learned about anger growing up is that I should not be angry. Maybe I would get angry, but I should not be. I should stuff it down- silence it. I should replace it immediately with forgiveness, meekness, and a sunny disposition regardless of what the cause of the anger was. I should just ignore it, let it go, and above all don’t act angry. Anger is bad. However, I have come to believe that anger is not bad, at least for the most part. Sure we all get selfish and consequently angry over petty things, and those are probably best gotten over, but there are things that can make us legitimately angry. Anger is a great motivator and a vital warning that something bad or unjust is happening. Anger can bring about amazing and wonderful change. Anger is necessary for grieving and, I think, for healing. However to be this it must have a voice and a possibility for change. When it’s voice is silenced it does become something bad and turns into bitterness. I think bitterness is a label more often applied to women and I wonder if the outlet for their anger and their voice has been shoved down and silenced for far too long. Anger is not a good place to stay in for a long time, but it is a powerful emotion that can bring about powerful change.

I used to think anger was a negative word, but now I know it is a powerful word. Yes, it can be dangerous and cause hate, but with the right tools and the right outlet it can be a sign that something is drastically wrong and can be the voice that drives change.

I dislike how this women is applied to women and a whole, as if a women who is angry, even righteously angry, is over-emotional or how they express their anger is somehow ridiculous. Honestly, maybe it does seem ridiculous to someone on the outside of their experience, but that does not invalidate their anger. Society as a whole though seems to write off anger that way, so that women wanting to be taken seriously must be forever happy and put together, or at the very least stoic. I think this is blatantly obvious in the news medias portrayal of “angry women”. This is especially so in political news. In most media anger in women is rarely validated or positive.

I do think that I experience and respond to anger differently as a woman. Both men and women, traditionally, are taught to silence or suppress different emotions. I think men to an extent are given a pass on feeling anger. They can express it, where women are supposed to be passively cheerful.

Anger is not bad. It is simply an emotion. It is part of what makes us human, so listen to your anger and use it well.