If you are a white woman and you want to call yourself a feminist, you must acknowledge that your whiteness affords you a privilege that shields you from a lot. You must also acknowledge that you are afforded privileges that some men in this country do not have. Racism and sexism are tightly intertwined. You cannot fight one while ignoring the other.

You wonder why I don’t
answer your 3 a.m. phone calls.

When you say “I miss you”,
I begin to undress myself out of habit.

Men and women are misogynistic for different reasons: men to marginalize women, and women to ingratiate themselves with the men trying to marginalize them. Neither one is justifiable, but one is oppressive and the other is a (bad) strategy to deal with that oppression. One thus sees that if the men who are misogynists weren’t, the women who are misogynists wouldn’t have any reason to be. Ergo, exhorting women to stop being misogynists so that men will stop gets it precisely backwards.

Fashion is one of the very few forms of expression in which women have more freedom than men. And I don’t think it’s an accident that it’s typically seen as shallow, trivial, and vain. It is the height of irony that women are valued for our looks, encouraged to make ourselves beautiful and ornamental… and are then derided as shallow and vain for doing so. And it’s a subtle but definite form of sexism to take one of the few forms of expression where women have more freedom, and treat it as a form of expression that’s inherently superficial and trivial. Like it or not, fashion and style are primarily a women’s art form. And I think it gets treated as trivial because women get treated as trivial.

Seriously, if we believe a 14 year old is too immature to know how to take a pill, do we really think she’s adult enough to handle an unwanted pregnancy?

The truth is that the age restriction is completely arbitrary, tied only to our puritanical comfort levels. And listen, I get it; I think it’s fair to say that most people are uncomfortable with the idea of a 14 year old having sex. But here’s the thing - access to Plan B isn’t about keeping a 14 year old from having sex - by the time she gets to the pharmacy, that ship has sailed - it’s about keeping a 14 year old who has already had sex from getting pregnant. And despite what urban legend (or past embarrassing FDA memos) may tell you, making emergency contraception more available is not more likely to make young teens have sex - it will just make them less likely to end up pregnant.

We can’t let our discomfort with teen sex trump young people’s right to sexual and reproductive health and we can’t continue to let politics trump science. If we care about young women’s health and bodily autonomy and integrity, we’ll drop all age restrictions from emergency contraception. Anything less isn’t just illogical - it’s immoral.

The way we try to recruit girls into STEM fields is all wrong. We typically compare them to some great woman or someone that has gone before them. We are saying, “Hey, you can be like Madam Curie or Sally Ride.” It is recruiting by intimidation. We need to change that message. We need to recruit by appealing to WHY we need them in STEM. We NEED you to help make the world a better place We NEED you to help discover the cure for cancer. We NEED you because you have the ability to change the course of humanity for the better.

It’s funny that the people who accuse me of looking for things to get mad about seem only to find hatred and anger in a space so filled with love.

And then there’s this: People do social justice work for a whole lot of reasons, but, generally speaking, it isn’t because they hate the world or the people in it.

When I write a post about, say, the rape culture, cloaked in vibrating anger, it isn’t because I hate the rape culture (although I certainly do); it’s because I really love people, for the most part, and I don’t want anyone, anyone, to be victimized by sexual violence, ever.

Yes, I want to dismantle the rape culture, and if it were a little box placed into my hands, I would throw it to the ground and smash it into a million bits and keep grinding those bits into dust with my fists until I was dragged away. But that is not the thing that motivates me to write about the rape culture, or any other intersecting system of oppression, every day, at no small cost to myself, until I feel sometimes like I’m swimming in a sea of shit that has no shore. What motivates me is love. Love of safety. Love of agency. Love of justice. Love of people.

“Isn’t there anything this woman likes?” ask my incredulous critics.

Yes. More than I can say. It’s there to find, if you’re really looking.