“My whole life, I’d just wanted to be pretty,” my mother said, eyes looking far away. “I never got any attention for most of high school.”

“Because you had no hips,” I said jokingly, referring to what I had come to understand as my mother’s core childhood trauma: The color guard girls saying she couldn’t make the team, twirling various batons and flags because she didn’t have hips.

“Correct. But when I was seventeen, a man fell hard for me. It’s the first time I remember thinking, finally, I’ve become pretty.”

The first fact omitted from this initial telling of the story was that my mother’s father had a shotgun stashed in the entryway closet in their house, and the whole neighborhood knew it, as would any boy at my mother’s high school since she lived only a handful of blocks away. The second fact was that the man who fell hard for my seventeen-year-old mother was thirty. I was first told this story when I was sixteen. It came up again when I was thirty-one. My eyebrows raised as high as they could go.

“He wasn’t with you because you were pretty,” I told her then. She sighed, that skeptical look on her face. “He pursued you because he thought you were an easy target. But unlike all the boys at your school, he didn’t know your father had a shotgun waiting behind the door. Until, of course, he did.” She laughs.

“I was distraught for weeks, wondering why he cut contact like that. But yes, turns out my father took things into his own hands.”

“You look disappointed about it.”

“He didn’t have to chase him off like that. And he was a nice man. Handsome too.”

“If I had come back here on a random day of my junior year of high school, introducing a thirty-year-old man to you as my boyfriend, you would’ve called the cops.” She waves me off.

“Things were different back then. And you’re my daughter. I never imagined I’d have a daughter who was so against being pretty despite being beautiful naturally.”

I’ve begun to lose my appetite, my own father serving as an unwilling witness to this conversation as he clears his plate and starts flipping through YouTube videos on the TV hanging above the kitchen table.

“I’m your daughter. You’re supposed to think I’m beautiful and want me to marry the best man on the planet, which you do.” I point to my father, “and he is supposed to chase off any man that comes near me because all men know how all men are, as he does. But it is really just a song and dance to delay what he sees as inevitable and natural. Because under male rule, women are not people; they are resources. And they are all raised from birth to go on this wild goose chase, trying to attain beauty when, at the end of the day, it really doesn’t matter at all. It’s a distraction. It’s like… some massive cultural MacGuffin. Something important to you, so important it’s the North Star of your entire life, but meaningless to the audience. It’s not what this story is about.

“Our fathers - our most direct overseers within the system of male rule - know that beauty doesn’t matter. Because men will put their dicks in anything, so having one want to put their dick in you in particular is hardly a compliment. It just means the appropriate measure of opportunity presented itself. You chase beauty your whole life, thinking it will give you value when in reality this story is about your god given destiny to be consumed by men at school, at work, at home, on the street, and even in death. You could replace beauty with anything, and it would have zero impact on the overall story. Women could get up any time they wanted, break the fourth wall, and change this. But over and over again, we do not from mother to daughter over and over forever,” I say, bringing my impromptu metaphor to a close. “So this is me breaking that fourth wall by myself.”

My father turns up the volume on the TV to disrupt the conversation.

“And now we’re back to talking about feminism,” he grumbles.

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When is the last time you lost control?

If you asked me, I’d likely point to that particular day as a five year old. Not being in control is a very unpleasant feeling. I should clarify that it is unique from making a bad choice or working with limited options that likewise back you into a corner. In those scenarios, some of which can be genuinely terrifying in their own right, your hands are still at least on the wheel of your own life even if the road beneath you is falling apart. I associate lack of control, generally, with childhood when you still don’t quite know how things work. In adulthood, I’d probably associate lack of control with madness if not physical illness. With that in mind, it’s curious that lack of control consistently comes up when I am interfacing with adult males.

When was the last time you lost control? I quickly came to suspect, if not explicitly told that in adulthood, men in particular find themselves losing control quite a bit. Not in the sense of wetting themselves, no. The men around me seemed perfectly content pissing wherever they pleased. Men losing control seems to always come up in two primary contexts: violence and sex (which I consider to be a prominent subcategory of violence within the male mind). It is this understanding that seems to play a big part in how human civilization functions. Ask me, though. Ask me what I think about that.

I think it’s bullshit.

Maybe, I thought distantly, maybe he has a problem. Maybe he needs help. What an odd thing to think of a man stalking toward you with a folding chair gripped in his hand before he hurls it at you, continuing to scream about how stupid and useless you are. I am relieved to say this was not a domestic incident. No, it was just me at my internship with my boss, whose ire was frequently directed at any number of his underlings. In his own words, he would “snap,” supposedly, but he meant no offense. Most said he had an anger management problem, but was still a good guy. I just thought about how he seemingly had no problem managing his anger around his boss or his friends or the high-profile teams of artists we’d work with each day at this particular music festival. No, it was just me and the other interns and the production assistant who he’d treat this way.

Having a female body seems to go hand in hand with temptation. What is a man to do if he simply cannot control himself? Maybe, I thought distantly, maybe he doesn’t know what he’s doing. What an odd thing to think of a man with his hands on you, your tears having as much of an effect on him as it would a pair of heavy glass doors that won’t budge. I deploy language indicating lack of consent. But this was not new information. We’d spoken about similar experiences playing soccer in high school for a few minutes, at which point he asked for my number and I refused. Such an affront, apparently, put him firmly in the realm of no longer being in control. He said as much. But he was in control. He did know what he was doing. He just didn’t care. And he did stop when witnesses intervened.

I can recall a few times where I was gripped with the most blood-boiling anger. But even at those times, I still felt like myself. How could I not when the cause of such anger was my character questioned, my morals trampled, my loved ones demeaned, my capabilities dismissed? And I would bite back with exactly what was true in my heart. I was every bit in control of my words even if sometimes - embarrassingly - I was not in control of my tears. But even that could be trained out of me. Perhaps what was trained out of me instead was an inclination to scream and throw things and destroy. For a child, that is a tantrum. For an adult, at worst, it is an act of war.

“I suppose we can chalk this up to him having a bad day,” my current boss in his forties says of my coworker who is in his fifties creating a spectacle at six in the morning publicly berating at the top of his lungs another crew member in front of a crowd for something extraordinarily trivial. “Even I snap sometimes.”

“I can’t control it,” another fellow roadie says to me after similarly screaming in someone’s face not for the first time, face red and veins popping. He’s currently in tears about it saying something about how he’s working on himself.

“If you were being held at gunpoint, could you control it?” I asked, finding myself in a unique position to be readily able to question a man about this. He frowns but, to my surprise, he thinks.

“Yes,” he admits.

“So you are in control,” I say, “you’re just choosing, on some level, for this to all bubble over. Frequently. Creating a spectacle of yourself and enemies of everyone else on this crew. If I came into this conversation screaming in your face, what would you think of me? Not anything positive, I’d imagine.” He frowns but nods in agreement, tears beginning to fall in earnest. I get annoyed by the shred of sympathy I feel for him. With what he’s been dishing out, he should be able to take something as light as this.

Am I airing out my theory on the wrong man?

Do I care?

Evidently.

I dismiss him from my office.

As of this moment a few weeks later, what used to be a daily problem seems to have suddenly cleared itself up. Maybe my time and attention was worth it after all.

I have been told about this thing called testosterone, how it can do a number on you. How women who inject themselves with it can be more prone to various violent tendencies. But my thought is that if these men who have served as obstacles in my path had been afraid of me, it wouldn’t have happened. If they knew I could hurt them, it wouldn’t have happened. Imagine going your entire life knowing that if you throw a tantrum or lash out or rape or maim or kill, nothing will happen to you. You might be convinced, then, that you lack control. That someone not bending to your will inspires uncontrollable violence. That these things just happen when you “snap.” When what you really lack is not control at all. It’s a sense of consequence. The same one I learned when I was five and decided, just a few more minutes on the swingset, then I’ll go.

Then I look at myself and what people say about me. How I’m so calm in the chaos, how I never raise my voice, how I stop and think and consider before I speak, and how I talk down violent men with grace, diffusing countless situations. These are good traits to have, I am told. But when surrounded by men who snap like clockwork, conveniently only in situations when they wield the power, I am wondering how much of that madness was trained out of me on purpose because I was born female. I think, far from the first time, about violence. How it’s not the answer, men say. But also how much I wish I even had the ability to hurt them like they hurt me. I’d say I dare you to open your mouth. I dare you to lay a finger on me.

So that’s my pet peeve, I suppose.

Don’t tell me you lost control unless you really mean it. Odds are we’ll all be able to tell.

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In addition to piano lessons, I remember being in the church choir with all the other children, but I can’t remember how we actually learned the songs. Surely there was sheet music, right? How old was I when I first touched a hymnal? I must’ve been a baby tugging at those pages balanced on my grandmother’s lap in the pews. Was I following the black circles going up and down just like the pitch of the congregation’s voices? Did I pick up on that even way back then? Eh. Probably not.

There was certainly sheet music at school, however, where choir class was a constant up through the 8th grade. Music classes were mandatory at my school as well so by the age of twelve or thirteen, it was the case that everyone could read music even if they weren’t particularly skilled at any instrument. So music itself never felt like something separate or uncommon. I would later be shocked in college that most people I encountered outside of my music program had no clue how to read it.

As a child, likely as a result of the church choir, I wanted to sing often despite not being a particularly gifted singer. I wanted to sing and dance so often that I got in trouble for singing and dancing as much as I did around the house which is a bit odd considering the criticisms I got from teachers for being so closed off at school. But I was a child with very busy parents and an older sister who never wanted to play with me, so in my mind at home, I had the company of tunes that would come from church, the radio, or even the cosmos. That’s what it felt like coming up with songs, at least. It felt like lifting my hands into the night sky and catching stardust on my fingertips, even if it was just a short burst - a short piece of something that might become more later. A little tune that would nonetheless live and die with me.

“Evening Song”

And music eventually did come to me often, always unannounced. That’s not to say it was good music. It would tumble out of my fingers when I should’ve been practicing for my lessons. It really never occurred to me to do anything about it until Molly approached me at lunch period one day in the 6th grade.

“You play guitar,” she told me.

At this point in our lives, Molly and I weren’t exactly hanging out on a day to day basis. We had known each other our entire lives but in the 6th grade I was mainly spending time with two other girls who I’d grown close to since we’d all ended up in the honors level class sections.

“I got a guitar two weeks ago,” I said, “and had my first lesson last weekend.”

“And you write music,” she said.

“Kind of.”

Molly grinned.

“I play bass. Do you want to make a band?”

A few days and three friends later, we’d formed a band. We then proceeded to spend the majority of the following year trying to come up with a band name while individually learning to play our respective instruments. Unable to come up with a band name, we joked about names like “Josie and the Pussycats,” which somehow snowballed into making a song called “Allie and the Rippers.” So it’s not a surprise that this is what everyone thought our band name was (it wasn’t though).

“Allie and the Rippers”

My bad habit of never practicing for my piano lessons eventually resulted in the end of me taking them. It’s no surprise that guitar lessons similarly went down the drain. I was too busy plucking my way to find the tune I heard in my head, too occupied to spend much time thinking about actual theory or technique. School was a good place to nurture this inclination, though. Dr. Johnson didn’t laugh when I told her I fancied becoming someone like John Williams - composing music for major motion pictures - at a time when I wouldn’t dare mention such a thing at home given how on track I was to landing myself in any number of prestigious engineering programs. So I used the tools now at my disposal to cobble together the main theme of a story that, just like my music, only really existed in my head. She said it was a good start, if a bit clumsy and unfinished. Not as polished as my newfound rival Laurenson over at the boys’ school who had already written something for the school orchestra.

“Birth on Antares”

But it is because of Dr. Johnson that my parents didn’t see the harm in sending me to a summer music composition camp. After all, it was still important that I be well-rounded. And for the first time, I had real musicians playing something I wrote, something born in a tiny practice room late at night during the two-week-long intensive. It was the finale of the summer program’s concert and the standing ovation and subsequent congratulations from observing college professors were a burst of validation I didn’t know I had been seeking in my solitary musical endeavors.

“Death on Antares”

Simultaneously, I had noticed that I felt a deep connection to others through the creation of music. It can be embarrassing to show poetry to someone, especially a friend who you never want to think poorly of you. But I often did just that, sitting across from Molly in her basement, bass guitar resting on her lap as she matched a rhythm to my half-baked words and melodies. What was once mine then became ours. That kind of warmth was addicting as a teenager, a far more realized version of what I had secretly enjoyed during choral classes, and is probably the core reason why I did eventually confess to my parents years later that I simply must live a life with music at the center. I must at least try.

“The Golden Land”

So I spent my remaining high school days creating as much music as possible. Again, nothing that would land me a Grammy, but things that would come as easily to me as waking up from a dream. Some things were just for me, other things I’d give to the band who eventually commented on how maybe I should try for something less cryptic and more typical like a love song. I scrunched up my nose at the challenge but wrote one as a joke anyway, backing vocals and all. And just like the joke that all but started the band, we decided to run with it. I guess it was cute for a bunch of fifteen-year-olds anyway.

“Wayward”

Dr. Johnson also played a hand in prying me away from traditional orchestral instruments. She asked me if I could have pieces I’d written for piano find new life in other arrangements. So I did. The piano piece I’d written in order to be accepted to that summer conservatory program in the first place, I brought to Molly and the one other band member who we hadn’t lost to boyfriends by the time we were sixteen, our five member girl band now operating more often than not as a trio.

“When the Worst is Over”

I also spent time giving more life to the fictional world I’d been building since I was little, trying to cobble together themes for different characters, Dr. Johnson steadily trying to get me to add bits of percussion or different instrumentation, even entirely choral pieces even though I had no choir, all while balancing advanced classes for physics, calculus, and statistics heading into my junior year because no - I still hadn’t proposed my grand life plan to my parents.

“Zile”

It seemed like the closer I got to sending out those college applications, the more tunes would come to me. Before I knew it, I’d been handed a diploma and was off to New York City to find my place in the music industry despite the displeasure of my father who insisted that hobbies should stay hobbies and music could be nothing other than a hobby. My adventure started with a music theory placement test that took up the entire first morning of college orientation.

“You may think that just because you made it here, you know something about music,” the professor said to the lot of us in the large, windowless room. “But you don’t. This test is designed for you to fail, but the extent to which you fail will determine your music theory level placement.”

As would be expected of someone who always fumbled through warm-up scales and routinely made Chopin roll in his grave, I bombed the test. But when my school-assinged private teacher asked who my favored composer was, I went with Chopin anyway and so began full days of hardly anything but music: Music lessons, music theory, aural comprehension, and music history that always included what they called “needle drop” sections on tests where a record player would be rolled out, a vinyl of some symphony would start playing randomly, and we’d have maybe fifteen seconds to name the piece, the composer, and the year it was made.

Outside the classroom, I was working concerts: Selling merch, scanning tickets, managing coat check lines, and networking in the bold manner that only places like New York City could bring out of someone who used to be so closed off like me. Because what was once a dream was quickly revealing itself to be an achievable reality.

“Lonely Winter”

I’m not sure when I stopped hearing music in my head. But I do know that I never notated anything after high school outside of the few classes I had where I had to squeeze an original composition of maybe sixteen measures out of myself to demonstrate a music theory principle, none of which were anything to write home about, none of which ever grew into anything complete. It felt funny once I realized it. Felt like waking up after losing a tooth. I would bring up recordings of old songs, wondering how the hell I came up with that, even though the arrangements were amateur, showcasing a novice albeit natural understanding of concepts like counterpoint which I now knew very well thanks to my round-the-clock conservatory environment.

On school breaks, I’d often spend time with Molly who used to inspire music within me just by sitting together over a cup of tea, but we never gathered in the basement of her childhood home to practice anything. Even if we had, I’m not sure it would’ve done any good. Something I’d had my whole life was now gone, but it wasn’t as disturbing as it could’ve been, given all the other things I was doing keeping me occupied.

I was still writing on my own time - fictional stories. I was still surrounded by, if not drowning in, live performance constantly. When I had that lightbulb moment as a teenager, determining that the only thing I could imagine happily doing for a minimum of forty hours a week for the rest of my life was music, I wasn’t wrong. I loved it. But when people asked me if I was an artist, I’d say no and leave it at that. I was in logistics now. In planning and organization. Loading concert gear in and out of venues early in the morning and late into the night. There was nothing else to say, after all. Even in my deepest and most articulate dreams, there was no soundtrack anymore. No stardust on my fingertips. Even if I sat down at a piano all day. Nothing.

Just a few weeks ago, sitting in a production office adjacent to the rehearsal room of my current job on a touring musical, I suddenly had the idea to go looking for old recordings of what used to be. In doing so, I stumbled upon what must’ve been one of the last times the band had ever gathered in Molly’s basement sometime in the fall of senior year. A simple recording of an old song followed by the seed of a new one that never had the chance to grow. I sent it to Molly, asking if she remembered it.

“It’s a shame we got so busy,” she said. “Maybe we’ll finish it someday.”

“When we’re old and roommates in a nursing home, maybe,” I said. She laughed.

“Ya know… I could look forward to that.”

“When the Worst is Over” + “Flood”

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The fact that we spoke about sex at all was considered significant in its “sex positivity” (as it would later be called). We learned about condoms, about the pill, about all the stuff men might try to do to make either of these things fail, and the consequences that could result if they were successful. This was in opposition to the “abstinence only” method, which is exactly what it sounds like: Don’t have sex until you’re married, and you’ll have absolutely nothing to worry about.

The former was feminist and progressive. The latter was overtly religious and conservative. But both were certain of one thing: It will rain. But as someone who viewed sex as quite possibly the worst thing that could realistically happen to me someday, I had no issue parroting the conservative-tinged viewpoint: If you don’t want any of the terrible things to happen to you that they talked to us about in school, just don’t have sex.

By the time I got to college four years later in the early 2010s, applying this view even if only to myself was wildly unpopular. Stating that it will never rain, understandably, sounds preposterous. Because while no one liked to say it out loud, everyone seemed to take this default view that sex - and about violence at large - is this thing that is done to women, perpetrated by men, whether they stepped outside willingly (with or without rain gear) or were ceremoniously pushed overboard into a hurricane. To state that I would simply avoid this fate was, in a sense, to claim that I could stop men from inflicting such acts upon me. It was to claim that I could stop the rain like I had some kind of divine power that other women did not. It was a claim that insulted people who perhaps didn’t even know why they felt insulted, because remember, no one was admitting that we were all operating from this same default viewpoint to begin with - a baseline acknowledgement of the seeming inevitability of male violence.

“What happens if you get raped?” a classmate asked me as a group of us sat in the dining hall, everyone’s eyebrows furrowed over the fact that I wasn’t on any form of birth control and hadn’t gotten the sequence of still somewhat controversial (largely just to the heavily Christian contingent) HPV shots… not that I had anything against these things, I simply did not want to become reliant on daily pills that can come with a laundry list of side effects and I was terrified of needles. The doctor telling me I just needed to get these shots either before I turned twenty-six or before I had sex immediately had me saying, “See you when I’m twenty-six, doc!”

“That would be terrible,” I say to my classmates. “But I’ve made my choices, so just like anyone, I’ll have to deal with the consequences.”

This would not be the first time someone would bring up the likelihood of men raping me. In fact, it would come up almost any time I gave any hint of my intention not to engage in sexual activities or my resulting lack of preparation for sex to happen to me unannounced. Don’t get me wrong, I know the statistics, I understand and am deeply concerned about the likelihood of ill-fated rainfall, but these sentiments felt very telling amidst the symphony of hookup culture and sex positive idealism that had overtaken my New York City progressive college environment.

Suddenly, we should not talk about sex like rainfall, this thing that men do to us. That is anti-feminist and sex negative. We should talk about it like this thing we take willingly for ourselves as often as possible with as many people as possible, because that’s what men do, and the more we mirror the sexual patterns of men who are not repressed, the more sexually liberated we will be amidst this landscape of puritanical, abstinence-only, anti-knowledge propaganda. We have our genitalia diagrams (highlight the clitoris!), we have our pills, we have our condoms, and now we will have our way. YOLO (“you only live once” for you younger folk).

All ran out into the open fields, spoke enthusiastically about their time jumping in puddles with their rain coats always at the ready. The dark clubs, the loud music, the narrow beds, the shower walls, the kitchen countertops, the sofas. All bodies are beautiful and will be consumed; all of us will dance gleefully in the rain, rolling in puddles. Because, yes, did you forget? It will rain. May as well just get it over with. Get ahead of it. Be in control. Unlike those other women with their Bibles, their promise rings, their inexperienced naivete. It’ll rain in their neighborhood, too. And they’ll wish they were us.

Me too.

I was surprised when someone finally said it. It felt as if we had all resolved to simply never talk about it, this elephant in the room that would glow bright red like Rudolph on Christmas Eve each time a concerned woman spoke to me about my future rape. I was surprised when women started pointing out not these hypothetical masked men in dark alleyways, but their friends, their bosses, their spiritual leaders, their family members, their partners. I was surprised when, all at once, women weren’t just idly scrolling through the weather forecast but instead started getting angry about it. Furious about it. Emboldened and taking to the streets.

But at that time, I was out of college, trying to scrape together a young career in the same industry that was commonly being called out for its perhaps higher-than-average rate of inclement conditions. I’d very nearly been caught in the rain a few times at that point, each instance the drops gaining on my heels. This most recent time, my canvas shoes got drenched in a puddle, and I was caving in on myself. Uncharacteristically, I was now afraid of the outside, hated the thought of looking at myself, hated that I didn’t see it coming.

Was it the clothes? Was it my voice? Was it my pretty (a compliment that always made me uncomfortable now made a habit of haunting me) face? What do I do? It has been days. Weeks. My shoes aren’t drying out, no matter how long I hide in here.

Pull yourself together.

I left the city. Got new shoes. Still canvas. Watched the conversation brew until it inevitably, predictably, disintegrated. Before I even really got a chance to appreciate that it existed in the first place, it got flipped on its head. And somehow it felt even worse than before. The plague hit. The women I knew, economically backed into corners, said yes to the rings offered, smiling(?) behind a mask arm in arm with their forever weathermen. By 2024, the forecast was sunny skies, but outside it was pouring and state governments were soon given the power to take umbrellas away.

The script has been flipped in other ways, too. Many young women are pointing out the pitfalls of the extent to which ideas of sex positivity steered feminism into a ditch. Perhaps those Evangelicals had a point? Even as a critic of aspects of that progressive attitude, I attempt not to sway where I’ve dug my feet into the sand trying to bring attention to the thing that we have all seemingly chosen to forget in favor of more aesthetic (tradwife utopia, top surgery escapism, brat summers, woman on a leash in a satirical sense, a manosphere renaissance) distractions.

It will rain. It’s raining somewhere right now. And I need us to get so collectively irate that we break through the clouds by any means necessary. That sounds far more liberating than willingly rolling in puddles or saving ourselves for the hurricane ever was. In some arenas, I do see it happening. Rumbles deep enough in the foundation of our world that have been creeping up under the radar of all these cultural shifts.

To many, our current predicament may seem bleak. But as I have ended so many writings before, I do feel we are at an important precipice. A razor’s (however dull) edge. And that’s why I started writing here in the open in the first place. I want to play even a minuscule part in tipping it, maybe reaching someone out there who would benefit from such perspectives and musings. Anything but being caught hiding inside again with my head in my hands.

Perhaps above the clouds, to finally end this long analogy, we can more widely understand what intimacy actually means.

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Fuck me.

Mindset.

Get fucked.

It’s about…

… mindset.

This is…

…I’m the most confident when I’m getting…

… fucked.

Dicked down.

Suck a dick.

Choke on my-

He’s not like his…

Friends.

Father.

Brother.

It’s about-

Patriarchy…

… hurts him too.

This nigger bitch better be thankful I…

… you’re just a-

Hole.

Whore.

She wants it.

… mindset.

Females.

If you meant that you would’ve-

Sweetheart.

Ran through.

Slut…

… prude.

He treats me well.

Girls all wanna be a little bit…

…abused.

It’s about mindset.

Nice guy…

Teach your sons!

I taught him better.

My boyfriend is a…

… feminist.

You can’t just-

… never sucked his dick?!

He takes out the-

Men are trash.

I keep him around to carry…

Heavy Things.

I don’t wanna…

Consent.

… die alone.

Sexy.

Consent!

I like it when he calls me…

Pretty.

Cumdumpster.

Cockslave.

It’s about mindset!

You trust him to…

… I feel safe if it’s-

-him choking me.

Daddy.

You know when you’ve got-

Semen in your eyes?

That’s powerful.

Queen shit.

MINDSET.

I prefer the term…

… love.

Making love.

Love?

That’s what This Is.

… to me.

It’s about-

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When you’re in a new town every day, dealing with all kinds of tedious live show things and live show people, Christmas has a habit of sneaking up on you. One day, at some venue in some town, you shuffle your way onto the loading dock at six in the morning to be met with the sudden sight of tinsel and colorful lights attempting to spruce up otherwise cloudy grays and dusty blacks of the interior. Then, when you make it out to the venue lobby, you’re hit in the face with twenty-foot-tall Christmas trees covered in colorful orbs, and every flat surface is layered with fake snow and reindeer.

There are two non-negotiables I have for any touring contract I sign. The first is that the tour can’t go to places where being an American in the wrong place at the wrong time could result in my detainment. So no Russia, no China, no Middle East. The second is that the contract must allow for me to be home over Christmas. I miss every single other holiday most of the time, but I must be home for Christmas. So when I’m on the road and these decorations start popping up around me, I can’t help but think that it’s only a matter of time before I get some rest, and it fills me with relief and generalized excitement.

I love Christmas.

In the world of music, there’s a lot of talk about mental health. But in the touring world specifically, it has become a hot topic in recent years, I guess because COVID did completely derail the lives of everyone involved, and I suppose as a society we’re starting to acknowledge casual alcoholism as a bad thing. I hear it repeatedly, how being on the road means the highs are really high and the lows are really low. You often have little to no personal space or time to yourself. The rush of getting from place to place and those first opening notes of each show can get your adrenaline pumping like crazy. But for everyone from headline artists to production assistants, there seems to be the shared experience of going through all that then one flight later you’re home and it’s… quiet. Dead quiet. Or otherwise, you’re like a pebble falling from the sky and splashing into the steady stream of everyone else’s daily life back home: You can’t flow with them, and as a result, the water slides over you like you’re not even there because it has no time to stop. It’s not personal, it’s just how it is. One could say that a lot of touring people don’t handle that well. And the quietest, slowest, stuck-in-the-mud part of any roadie’s year is the winter.

It’s always a similar scene for me every December, thrilled and relieved getting back to my hometown with a backpack and the suitcase I’ve been living out of for the past several months, stuffed with the bare minimum. These days, I’m in this WhatsApp group with thousands of roadies who this year have decided to flood the chat with photos of them arriving home and sending general well wishes for everyone through the holiday. A virtual support group that typically happens every other week is said to be happening weekly from now through the end of February to combat the off-season blues.

After a quick meal with my parents, who graciously make sure my car battery doesn’t die in my months of absence, the first thing I always look for after driving my car back to my apartment is bugs that have crawled in over the past months and died unceremoniously out in the open. This time, there is a dead cricket in my sink, a couple of tiny unknown bugs on the floor, and cobwebs brushing the tips of my fingers as I raise my hands and spin in every corner of my two-bedroom oasis. Worryingly, my back door is unlocked; a new set of keys for it was left in the kitchen with a note saying the locks got changed by management. They presumably left it there so I wouldn’t get back home from work on whatever day that was, shocked that I couldn’t get in. I shiver thinking about how long it must’ve been sitting there and take an extra survey of the apartment to make sure I haven’t been robbed and there’s no one secretly in there with me. After securing the perimeter, I go to the bathroom and realize my water has been turned off at some point. Luckily, I have a stash of plastic water bottles that can get me through the night just fine.

And it’s so quiet. Always so quiet. But once the heater kicks in enough to thaw out my dwelling, I pass out and am dead to the world for three days.

During my short stint in grad school, my roommate who shared my enthusiasm for K-pop music often asked me what touring was like. One of our teachers gave her a book to read about it, a very blunt recounting of touring experiences by a woman that - based on a couple of pages I took a peek at - had a great voice for chronicling her adventures. But a week later, my roommate shared with me that she had finished the book, exclaiming that she’d rather die than ever go on tour. (this was Tour Book by Rachel Hales)

“Everyone is here because they know how to put on a show,” I find myself saying to artists and crew alike at the start of most runs, “it’s all the stuff that happens between shows that’s the hard part. But you are not the first to do this and you will not be the last. My door is always open. Except, of course, when it isn’t.”

Most first-time touring people I work with don’t take to it very easily. They’ll finish out the contract most of the time but it’s hardly something they want to make a life out of. Touring for most people is a brief season in their life, not unlike something such as college - a few years of adventure at most. That is a sensible response. But there’s usually one or two who always get back home to that quiet they’ve been craving, only to realize after a few days or a few weeks that they want nothing more than to get back out there. In other words, they’re crazy. Those are the ones who make a career out of it. People like me who’ve been in it for ten years and counting.

I recognized the importance of structure during these times without much fanfare in my early twenties. And so now, after my three days of being dead to the world, I set my alarm for 10 AM to do some semblance of exercise, eat a real breakfast, watch my favorite TV westerns at their normally scheduled times, practice piano, sit down to really lock in on my writing, and start cleaning up my space (goodbye, dead cricket). Then I will eventually be brought back into the outside world to pick up shifts with my various local employers who are happy to hear I’m back in town for a little while.

Most people peg me for an introvert, but it would be a lie to say I don’t enjoy being around people (if anything as a chronic people-watcher), catching up with their lives, or hearing about the otherwise mundane. Suddenly I am not confined to the same six black shirts and three pairs of black pants of my touring suitcase, but after dusting off my forgotten wardrobe I’m cruising through town in my colors of choice and blasting my favorite music, preening at the normalcy of scanning tickets at the movie theater, buzzing people into the front door of an event center, or waving cars through in a stadium parking lot. Conversation with coworkers in these environments is easy, even if I mostly take the role of the listener. After sometimes meandering to the closest corner store at the end of a shift, we go our separate ways until the schedule puts us together again.

There’s other work during this time too, stuff closer to my actual normal. I find myself in a familiar loading dock, back in my show blacks, unloading gear off a truck for some kind of conference. Or I’m setting up the backstage green room at a nearby venue in anticipation of the entertainment for New Year's Eve. But it’s easy to drift in the background in these cases, joking around with other local hands seemingly natural. Because, unlike on the road, I’m not everyone’s boss this time. I’m not running the whole damn show. I’m just here to help out. You say jump, I’ll ask how high. Then, sometimes after all the heavy lifting is done, we’ll all be in the back alley opening up a pack of beer and passing around a blunt, both of which I will politely refuse, but stay for a bit anyway because sure it’s cold but it could be colder and the company of people who are more in line with my world is oddly comforting.

Meeting up with my actual friends can take some time - if it happens at all. Like I hinted at before, falling from the sky into the stream of someone else’s life can be disruptive if you insist too much. But if the logistics work out, I’m once again eager to hear about the finer and (in their view) mundane details of their lives. After a decade of only physically being within their orbit for 10% of any given calendar year, I try not to come off as desperate for connection and in doing so have my questions brushed aside with “oh, nothing interesting,” before everyone just wants to hear about my latest batch of crazy tour stories always responded to with comments about how exciting it all sounds but how they’d never want to live the way I do. I’ve refueled enough by this point, somewhere between my three days of being dead to the world and two weeks of casual local work, Christmas and New Year's now behind me.

“I live by myself in the middle of nowhere,” writes the tour manager of a well-known rock band in the WhatsApp group, “and I would’ve spent Christmas alone drowning myself in alcohol if not for someone in this group inviting me out to Los Angeles to hang out. Thanks, roadie fam.”

Several other people respond saying they also live quite isolated from the industry. Just as many others chime in from hubs like New York, Los Angeles, or Nashville, talking about how great having groups of roadies to talk to in the off-season has saved them from falling too deep into bad habits. “It’s nice to be around other people who get it.”

“Sending love to you road dogs,” someone says, “this is why I had to quit.”

Inevitably, as Christmas decorations give way to far more sparse forecasting of Valentine’s Day date nights, I begin to get antsy. I wake up at 10 AM, do some light exercise, fix my breakfast, practice the piano, work on my writing, and watch my TV westerns. All of my friends have been seen, all of my stories have been told, I helped fix whatever was broken at my grandmother’s house, I took my aunt to her doctor’s appointment, I walked the streets of my childhood and found them barren of the comfort provided by the people who once resided there. I get bored. It’s usually at that point when the work emails start coming in that I realize two things:

1. I don’t belong here. Not really.

2. I’ve got at least one more of these adventures left in me.

I know this lifestyle of mine is not forever. Everyone gets off the road eventually and there’s a lot of discussion amongst career roadies about when or how that should happen. How do you know? I’m aware of how close in age me and the divorced alcoholic tour manager with chronic anxiety living in the middle of nowhere with no nearby family left to speak of are. I know I’m lucky still finding such convenient peace and comfort in the off-season as I do. I know I’m addicted to the high of the next gig, even though it’s just a job. I know all of that. But none of that knowledge keeps me here in one place. Hindsight will always be 20/20, but for now, I choose to be the pebble because… it just feels right. Or rather, it only feels right when I know that the next thing is on the way.

It’s in the last gasp of February that I pack up my bags, that “back to school” feeling simmering in my veins. Sure, I’ll complain about it: The waking up early, having to deal with all the people, all the problems, all the usual things people complain about when it comes to work. But lacing up my boots and pinning my new all-access credential on is a soothingly familiar armor as I brace for the impact of whatever this next journey will consist of. I may be leaving home, but in a strange and perhaps misguided way, I am also coming home to myself, and the thrill of it brings the barest hint of a smile to my face.

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I’ve often said that I can run tours across the United States with my eyes closed. I’ve been everywhere except Alaska multiple times with all types of shows: hip-hop artists, pop groups, jazz bands, musical theater companies. I’ve loaded in shows to clubs, theaters, arenas and massive festivals like Coachella and Lollapalooza. I’ve rolled off my tour bus and worked with probably every flavor of American there is. I’ve longed for more international adventures and I’ve gotten a few. In total, I’ve managed road shows through six different countries. The most common other country I go to, understandably, is Canada. And just like most US roadies, I hate going to Canada.

First off, tour bus wi-fi never works in Canada. The change in currency can be a pain for several aspects of tour operations. There’s always that one guy whose phone plan doesn’t extend that far so he’s thrown back into the dark ages. The layout is different - hotels aren’t built where you’d think they’d be and the chains can be different and the front desk can be weird about credit card authorizations and every business card I’ve ever had has been American Express, which many Canadian businesses understandably do not accept. There’s only one major highway and if anything happens to it on a tight show schedule, you’re kind of screwed. All the tour bus companies are based in the US so if something significant happens to your bus, getting it fixed in a timely manner is unlikely and sending a new bus across country lines is equally an ordeal. Now you’re booking emergency flights from point A to point B and good luck dealing with Air Canada and their different weight and luggage size policy compared to airlines based out of the US. Good luck checking your two dozen pelican cases worth of production gear without significant delay. And despite warning the tour party several times along the way, there will always be that one person with a DUI from a decade ago that they didn’t think would be an issue when - uh oh - the Canadians really don’t fuck with DUI’s. Have fun walking back across the bridge to America!

And the drugs (usually - but not always - just weed). Don’t even get me started. I’ve been detained by Canadian border agents more times than I’d like to admit because an idiot on my bus didn’t get rid of their bullshit despite having plenty of opportunities to and inevitably when they ask “who is the person in charge?” I’ve gotta raise my hand. Interrogation time! I tell them that they’re going to bring out the dogs! You can’t hide anything from the dogs! But here we are, two hours in, our tour bus outside getting torn apart, guitars in the street, mattresses sliding down the steps. Though given the number of times I’ve toured with artists who are not American, I spend just as much time saying that, no matter how much of a pain Canada is, they should be twice as wary of the United States. Because if the Canadians don’t fuck around, the Americans will destroy your entire life. And good luck using your phone. You’ll notice that cell phone signals seem to lose some or all of their strength at any border crossing point on the road. You can’t convince me that this is not by design.

So for this and many other reasons, border crossing days are always my most stressful days on tour. When I was younger, I figured I’d get the hang of it. Going to and from Canada isn’t a big deal for most people, but you must understand that it’s different when you’re crossing with a show. The scrutiny is on a whole other level. And what makes me the most genuinely fearful of border crossing days is the fact that I’ve crossed enough times in enough places with enough shows to know that the only rule is that there are no rules. Your show getting the green light to continue on their way is contingent on which agent you get and how they’re feeling that day and which hour of their shift they’re on and how smooth of a talker you are. The only other defense is having paperwork up the wazoo and hope no one brings up another form of paperwork that up until that point you’d never heard of. I prepare for border crossings weeks in advance for a fleet usually consisting of semi trucks filled with production gear, the whole other beast that is merchandise logistics, and - of course - the artist and crew themselves. If any one of those things falls through, there will be no show. And everyone can tell that on border crossing days, I don’t fuck around either. So you can understand the panic that would be triggered within me on a routine bus ride deep in the night from US Town A to US Town B with the whole tour peacefully cocooned in their bunks, I am woken up with a hand shoving my shoulder, a flashlight shining in my face, and a male voice asking me if I am a US citizen.

The day before, we’d had a show in Texas that was right on the border, so my first thought is that our bus drivers had taken a wrong turn and accidentally brought us to Mexico. Cue more panic. I didn’t have any paperwork available and given that I would later see that it was two in the morning, my response to stating how many people were on the bus was definitely a second more delayed than I knew was desired in a border crossing setting. By luck when the man asked to see my passport, I had it in my bunk next to me in the bag I’d carry everyday since later in the tour we were actually going to Canada. I realize other members of the tour are up because my bunk was not the first one he went to. I tell one of them to start getting everyone up, assuming that we’d all need to exit the bus as one would do at a border crossing. I’m asked where we were coming from, where we are going, which venue we performed at. The man is young, white, and as the petite and bubbly female performers start emerging from their bunks he looks increasingly bemused and convinced of the story I’m telling.

“I thought this was a bus,” he said.

“It is a bus,” I say.

“Yeah, a real fancy one.” And it’s true. Most people have never seen a tour bus. If he was expecting a normal 52 seat coach bus he surely would’ve been surprised to see the front lounge complete with a bathroom, kitchenette, two couches, and two TVs. Even more surprised to barge his way into bunk alley where we slept. He laughs and before everyone is out of their bunks or even awake he’s turning around and leaving. I’d been awake at that point for maybe all of 90 seconds.

I rush to the front where our bus driver is standing there, confused why my face has transformed from panicked to furious as I realize that we are, in fact, on the side of the highway. I pull out my phone to see we’re a good two hours away from any border to speak of.

“We got pulled over,” he said. “It’s not like I can tell them not to come on the bus.”

“Did you say what show we were?” I ask because the border agent had asked me just that.

“Yes,” the bus driver insisted. “But he came on anyway.”

I exit the bus onto the side of the road where the security vehicles are already gone, my passport still in hand on very much American soil.

“What the actual fuck?” I say to no one, heart still pounding.

Back on the bus, I start getting thrown question after question. One artist is shouting about ICE agents, another is explaining that no one should be mad because there are bad people out there that these cops need to hunt down every night.

“And what would’ve happened if we didn’t have our passports? What if we weren’t American?” One of them asked.

“It would’ve been fine,” the supporter says.

“Has that ever happened to you before?” I am asked.

No. It hasn’t. In my ten years on the road, I’ve probably been to every town in Texas worth mentioning and even some that weren’t, and not once did I ever think what just happened was remotely within the realm of possibility. I say just as much.

“It’s Texas though,” I add. “And it’s 2025.”

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I was put into a group of four with one woman and two men. The woman and I met up in our designated group work room in the library. Thirty minutes after our agreed-upon start time, the men still hadn’t shown up and weren’t responding to text messages. So the two of us put the entire thing together and assigned the others the slides they would discuss. The day of the presentation came, and as expected of myself at age eighteen, I got up there and bombed. Hard. I’m fairly sure no one past the center front two rows could hear me. The notes I’d written on the index card in my hands all blurred together.

“That can’t happen again,” the professor told me. “This is college. No one is going to come and save you.” Point taken.

It wasn’t long into putting on shows professionally that it really hit home that being in the working world was a group project in and of itself. One where picking up the slack of others isn’t as simple as putting together a slide or two in a presentation, and where the consequences for failure within the group can be far more severe than a less-than-favorable grade.

“Is that even your job?” Jenny asked me late one night on our first tour together.

“Half the stuff you see me do isn’t my job,” I say.

“Then why are you doing it?”

“Because if I don’t do it then no one will do it and everything will go to shit.” She shrugs.

“Why not just let it go to shit?”

“Because if it all goes to shit, it’ll be my fault, I’ll get fired, and then my entire life will be over!”

Turns out you can only put up with so many sleepless nights before a little dehydration and your period has you fainting on a sidewalk in Texas. But Jenny had a point, and I was catastrophizing.

By the time I got to grad school, I’d been working for a good few years with a healthy list of crazy stories to choose from. I’d more or less gotten over my need to prove myself to other people and was focusing on personal development. That’s how I ended up at a conference room table with six men, which consisted of the five other students and the teacher. Had they been all women, it would’ve felt a lot like high school. Alas, it was far from it.

I liked to call the class my “management therapy class,” because most of the time we’d just get asked questions about situations we’d been in in the past, what we learned from them, and what we’d do differently if facing the same situation in the future. Everyone else in the class either came from a purely theatrical background or was there because they were purely interested in theater. So in the rare times I’d chime in with a story about hip-hop artist X or popstar Y, not even the professor knew what to say. But then one day, a question was posed to the class: What do you struggle with the most as a manager?

The kid fresh out of undergrad volunteered first. He was obviously smart or, at the very least, was so convinced he was smart that everyone took it at face value. But he didn’t have any professional experience, so being in this program would likely put him in the tricky spot of being overeducated and underqualified.

“I find I struggle the most with overconfidence,” he says, and I need to try very hard to stop myself from laughing. I’d never heard such a claim in my life, though - to his credit - at least he’s a little bit self-aware. But unlike me, everyone else nodded vigorously in agreement. What followed was an hour of storytelling from each of the men around the table, talking about how they got put in positions they were very much underqualified for, but went at it like they knew everything. They each failed miserably, some of them making mistakes that had price tags on them of tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. However, with each mistake, the man who hired them would just act like it was a matter of bad luck and they’d be given another chance. So up the ranks they went, feeling like imposters because they still had no idea what they were doing.

My brain was exploding. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Women talk about “imposter syndrome” all the time. Still, it’s usually in the context of them being qualified, if not overqualified for the task at hand, but because of social conditioning, they feel like they don’t deserve the position or that someone else available could do the job better than they could. Here we were talking about men who legitimately weren’t qualified, got the job anyway, messed up spectacularly, but got a pass because “shit happens.”

The male bonding that was happening at that conference table in front of me in real time hit me like a ton of bricks. The realization was clear as day: These men live in a completely different version of reality than I do. And considering I was in my late twenties at the time, given all the absurd adventures I had been on up until that point, I felt foolish only realizing the wider extent of the situation so seemingly late in the game, as someone who often feels like clarity in that sense is rarely an issue.

I momentarily thought about those two guys in my marketing class. And that’s when I started to notice, once the COVID shutdowns eased up and I got back to work: The multiverse of the group project.

Always at the top of the organization was a man. An eccentric man. The type that would be good at schmoozing, which is valuable if your main job is bringing in more business, but nonetheless would be derided in a woman. Partnered with him would be a woman typically in charge of coming up with and executing the plan within the parameters of the nonsensical ramblings of the guy in charge. She is always miserable and she contemplates going to work somewhere else, but at the end of the day, she stays where she is because it could be worse. Taking the leap is too risky in a world unforgiving of female failure.

“You WHAT?” Jenny screamed at me over the phone as I sat at the kitchen table at my brand new apartment, lease freshly signed only two weeks prior. Gone were the days of living with my parents or with the nuns. I’d be turning thirty at the end of the year. It was time for a change - a change I felt confident making given the stability of my main gig.

“I quit,” I said. “Or I was fired. I don’t really know. But I’m not working with Blake anymore.”

Jenny’s phone was on speaker and her boyfriend was in the background, cackling. The three of us had started working together under Blake years ago and had become a well-oiled machine. And over the years, Jenny had told me the insane things Blake would say to her behind closed doors, accusing her of poor work ethic or outright stupidity or even that perhaps her period was clouding her judgment when he’d be asking for an array of things that simply didn’t line up.

“Why do you let him talk to you like that?” I’d always ask. And it was because she didn’t want to rock the boat. It was because part of her thought he was right. “The second he talks to me that way, I’m out. But I don’t think he will because he knows better.”

How classic of me, right?

The music business is kind of like the wild west. Less so now than in the past. But as freelancers, there really aren’t any norms or standards outside of the ones you set for yourself. And Blake knew good talent when he saw it, which is why he kept Jenny and me around for so long, confidently making otherwise poor business decisions with the artists he’d sign on with and the productions he’d have us put together. And just like I’d been told since I was younger, I was good at making problems go away - even better at it, working together with Jenny.

He never wanted to explain where the money was coming from or where the money mysteriously went. Payments to artists were delayed. Lawsuits had been filed by talent management companies. Rumor upon rumor was circulating, but the rush of the projects at hand was always enough to push such issues aside for later. At that point, sitting at my kitchen table, Jenny and I were fresh off of big festivals like Coachella and Lollapalooza - career highs and major bucket list items for both of us. But to help cash flow, Blake wanted us both under contracts that I jokingly-but-not-really called “pimp contracts.”

“If you’re not touring with one of my shows, you can still find work elsewhere,” he’d explained a little over a year prior to this point. “But you’d work for those people under my company name. I’d negotiate your rate. Your pay would go to the company account, where I would take out 20%, and the rest would go to you.”

“You’re batshit insane if you think I’d ever agree to that,” I told him at the time only to learn that after his meeting with Jenny, she had agreed.

“He gave me an ultimatum,” I told Jenny now, “to sign the pimp contract for an honestly good annual salary or have my monthly retainer cut in half which wouldn’t even be enough to cover rent. I said no to both and offered to manage his tours purely as a freelancer, just reset everything altogether. He would no longer owe me a monthly retainer but could still hire me for my services on a project-by-project basis just like anyone else I work for so long as I am available for the required dates. But he said no. He said he’d rather hire someone with no experience to run any tour he pulls out of a hat last minute that he had full control over than to work with me in a capacity where I could move about without being tethered to his company, somehow, no matter where I went. So I terminated our working relationship.”

To my surprise, she began blaming me for not seeing the full picture, to not want to sacrifice for this startup that Blake was single-handedly running into the ground. But I suppose I deserved that for all the times I blamed her for how Blake was treating her. Eventually, she saw my point of view, even if she did not agree. Now I had no main gig and a brand new apartment. But I didn’t want to continue the cycle I had been in - tirelessly solving the problems of one confidently incompetent man. Jenny and I had gotten far too comfortable with Blake, and the consequences of that were becoming readily apparent.

Two years later, two years of me hustling like I hadn’t had to do since I was nineteen, two years of watching me make it work without Blake’s schmoozing and sketchy money practices, Jenny came to the same conclusion.

“I ended it,” she told me via text, sitting on a bench somewhere in Paris. “I’ve got other tour offers to get me through the end of the year.”

“Haven’t I told you that you’re great at what you do? Anyone would want to hire you,” I reassured her once she revealed that her boyfriend wasn’t for her decision and had chosen to continue working with Blake instead of leaving with her.

“I still want to tour with you again, though. More than anything. We had a really good thing going, the two of us,” she said. And this wouldn’t be the first time she’d bring up possibly going into business together. But for now, our solo journeys would take priority. We were on opposite sides of the world, working on completely different shows, learning new things every day, and sharing those lessons with each other while our individual reputations grew. As a group project, I referred to it as library curation. We were each adding to the shelves of our collective knowledge to borrow at our convenience.

As things inevitably are, there have been plenty of confidently incompetent men we have encountered along the way since. But at the very least, we knew what to do when the stench of the bullshit got too powerful to tolerate - a lesson learned in our twenties that was now integral to the compass being used to navigate our thirties.

If grad school taught me anything, though, it’s that the learning will never stop.

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- to give official authority or legal power to

- to promote the self-actualization or influence of

Synonyms: Enable, authorize, allow.

Antonyms: Prevent, disqualify, hinder.

Power. | Noun.

- possession of control, authority, or influence over others

- a physical might, mental or moral efficacy, political control or influence

Synonyms: Control, dominion, sway.

Antonyms: Powerlessness, impotence, weakness.

Source: Merriam-Webster

Have you ever wanted to kick some serious ass?

I have.

Running around the street in front of my house as a kid, swinging around a plastic lightsaber like I could defeat the whole empire myself felt very good. But there was always a small twinge of disappointment when I’d end by reaching my hand out at… anything. A door. A lamp post. A fire hydrant. Focusing with all my might. But I could not get any of those objects to move using my nonexistent Force powers. I was not a Jedi Knight. I was not a fearsome warrior. I was what is often seen as the exact opposite: a young girl.

Where I lacked in my ability to kick ass, I made up for in other areas of life. One of my earliest memories is the pure delight I felt coming home to showcase how I had learned how to spell my first five letter word to my grandfather: W-A-T-E-R. Like many young people, I delighted in my expansion of knowledge because with knowledge came more control over my own life. The ability to read, write, problem solve, and figure out the world around me with greater independence year by year.

“Knowledge is power,” I said often, motivating myself in front of heavy textbooks I didn’t feel that inclined to shove my nose into. Honing my focus would open all the doors there were to open in life, allowing me to live up to whatever my full potential turned out to be. I may not be a Jedi Knight, but I didn’t have to be. And while I did get into a scrape or two with others in my childhood, the parting words of my parents to me when going off to college was that I really can’t threaten to kill anyone anymore (even boys who were pestering me) because I’m eighteen now and could get arrested for it.

To covet power is a moral failing. A moral failing makes you a villain. Simplified, that’s what all the grand tales of destiny and adventure say, the flipside being that obtaining power is bad unless some divine ruling chooses you to bring peace to the realm, balance to the Force, or life back to where there was once only desolation. Those chosen are always portrayed as morally superior and thus unlikely to abuse that power, which makes it okay. In real life, however, this moral superiority does not exist.

My uncle chooses to take the time after Christmas dinner to show off his new pistol in the living room. I can hear the commotion from the kitchen where I’m still clearing dishes and putting leftovers away with my sister. Curious, I go over to look at it. His eyes go wide and he makes a small show out of keeping the weapon away from me because he says to the whole room that I am quite evidently crazy. Everyone laughs.

“I would’ve learned how to shoot a long time ago if some people had let me,” I say, looking over at my father referring to our long summers spent out in bumblefuck where all the men and my currently incarcerated cousin would go out shooting while I was left, once again with my sister, helping our grandmother prepare any number of meals or making sure the laundry got done… by hand.

It often feels like the grand stories of men focus on the classic, biblical, good versus evil. In it, the hero must thwart the efforts of the villain to gain power, resulting in the formerly established or longed-for status quo reigning at the end of the day. The stories we’d read in school, however, were most often historical fiction about women and girls. They featured a desire to escape anything from marriage to inhumane factory conditions to their isolated village where their whole lives were seemingly predetermined by the nature of their birth.

These women weren’t out to save the world. At best, and far more realistically, they were out to save themselves. They wanted power over their own lives. At the end of their road was not a massive celebration in their honor. It was peaceful solitude. In a way, they were all anti-destiny. In wanting power over their own lives, they were causing a tremor in the foundation of their world, incinerating a thread in the tapestry of the overarching and beyond-the-focus-of-this-story status quo. And that’s all well and good but a small part of me would always seethe when we’d get to a part of the story where what the girl really needed was to spread a guy’s brains all over the floor and my blood would turn hot until she would instead use clever words or her agile nature to outsmart him instead.

“Violence is not the answer,” I would repeat to myself and say jokingly to my friends as English class would come to a close and again when the boys who would leer at us from across the street would catch my attention on the wrong day. “Violence is not the answer.”

Right…?

Every couple of years or so, I get into a conversation where my father chooses to remind me how easily he could kill me. He talks about how any man could easily kill me if the mood hit them so I should watch what I say about male violence and women’s liberation. You know, to not set any of them off which would inevitably happen if they felt disrespected in some way. He also points out how the good men in my life deserve accolades for not choosing to harm me. For casting their lightsabers aside and not giving in to the dark side. For having power, but choosing not to use it.

Just like that, they are heroes.

As a college freshman, I thought about the concept of liberation… never. I was there to get a degree and start my career.

My first discussions about liberation and empowerment nonetheless took place in college. Each and every one of those conversations framed liberation for women as something sexual. I must liberate myself by consuming or producing my own pornography. I must be empowered by sleeping with strangers or getting a “sugar daddy.” Still a teenager, I was coming into my own. Any perceived lack of confidence on my part was attributed somehow to a lack of sexual success. I should want to bring men to their knees with my sexiness. That would be my power.

“Leia’s slave bikini did not give her power,” I would explain to many women who would not understand the reference. “Having the strength to use her own chains to murder her captor did.”

“Sometimes I really think you do want to kill all the men,” my friend said to me one night.

“No,” I said, “I would just sleep better knowing I had the ability to if it came to that. If we had the power but simply chose not to use it, would the status quo not be entirely different?”

The only time my father ever put his hands on me was when he was annoyed by how long it was taking for one of my teeth to fall out, combined with the fact that I was too afraid of the pain I’d feel taking it out myself. So he picked me up from the kitchen table, threw me onto the couch, grabbed my jaw, and yanked it out. Perhaps the ends justified the means, as all at once, there was nothing left for me to fuss over. But that is the first time I was struck with the feeling of powerlessness, like every cell in my body was burning. Thankfully, I have only had to feel that way a handful of times since, even if each of those instances felt like something unpleasant injected into my bloodstream that had every intention to take root and stay. My flashpoints to anger, while rare, grew more intense as a result, and I would talk myself down, thinking that this is not a reasonable response. This is an immoral response. Violence is not the answer.

“You are smart, capable, and kind,” my grandmother said to me towards the end of her life. “But your soul is restless and wandering. Peace only comes by accepting Jesus.”

I smiled and said all the reassurances you’re supposed to give to your grandmother, a small part of me thinking how many family members would be happy if I spiritually lobotomized myself to realistically achieve such a state as a true believer. Nail myself to destiny and feel nothing but peace. But that was never going to happen. And sometimes, due to the nature of my upbringing, I occasionally have a crisis where I contemplate if I can truly be counted as a good person or not.

But in the end, if I look at things objectively, my feelings appear to be a logical response to my environment. I think it is okay and completely understandable for me to be angry. It is understandable not to want to be or feel powerless. And I appreciate all the work that was done long before I was born for me to have all that I do today. I’m far from a damsel. I just wish that sometimes, in those scary moments, I had the raw power over the people standing in my way. To make people do what I wanted them to do. Is this not a normal and entirely human response? If it weren’t, I doubt there would be so many stories about it.

I didn’t learn to drive until I was twenty-seven. Circumstances made it so I could survive just fine without a car. I’d probably spent whole days' worth of life waiting for buses, trains, or cabs. I was a city girl through and through. And even if I wasn’t in a city, I’d steel myself to walk forty minutes on the side of country roads to my destination rain or shine. But those country roads looked different behind the wheel as I drove myself down south for grad school, pulling over at any rest stop I felt like to stretch and get a snack.

Despite being a roadie already for so many years, despite sitting as a passenger all across the country and back again several times, there was a newfound appeal to the open road under my own hands. With my trusty Subaru, I could get in and go anywhere the right amount of gas could take me on no one’s schedule but my own. It wasn’t a type of freedom I was used to, deciding I was going to a place so unfamiliar to continue my studies and just… go. And ever since, the number of side gigs I could pick up that were just a few hours' drive away I could say yes to without hesitation, without sifting through Megabus or Greyhound schedules or even hotel room prices. I could simply grab my duffle bag and go.

Learning to drive and putting my name down for a vehicle transformed my life in a way I was not used to. It instantly and tangibly increased my control over my life. It made opportunities accessible to me that previously were not. It was empowering.

The realization made me laugh to myself as I had soured so much on the word during my college years that I mentally shut down at any mention of it ever since. Maybe out here riding solo on the interstate was symbolic of the solitude at the end of all those stories.

I still believe that in day to day life, violence is not the answer, and it is wrong to covet power over others. But I’m not ruling out the possibility that there may come a day when the only option is to blow up the Death Star. Because I do not want to live my life asleep. And I know deep down that all those women and girls who found their peaceful solitude on the last page of their novel would nonetheless go to sleep each night knowing that the fate they escaped could catch up to them at any turn.

Then what?

Well. I assume they’d have no choice but to kick some ass, whether they were chosen by god or not. But, realistically, how? And my inner frustration returns. I would want the enemy to regret coming after me every remaining day of their lives. I would want to put them down so thoroughly not just to win the battle at hand but to prevent all future battles from occurring.

They say that the axe forgets but the tree remembers. And I don’t feel guilty at all saying I’d rather be the axe.

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“Happy International Fake Oppression Day to everyone who wants complete strangers to know they don't fancy a shag.” - @jk_rowling

“Imagine being so lost and devoid of identity to the point where you have to create an imaginary enemy that would make you feel like a victim because victimhood is the integral part, if not your entire identity.” - @BrunoAlvessi

“Another proud moment for the Woke Olympics where being a functioning human with a mild personality trait gets you your own oppression badge. ‘Look at me, I’m not horny, validate my pain!’ These people act like they stormed Normandy because they don’t get turned on easily. It’s not a movement, it’s a mood. And not even an interesting one. The left’s endless quest to feel persecuted has officially run out of actual struggles, so now we’re digging deep into the ‘I don’t feel like banging’ archives and calling it bravery.” - @SchoenPhotog

“‘ASEXUALITY’ is just a fancy label for ‘I can’t get laid’. Stop inventing oppression and get a real problem.” - @MitchPls4Real

“This is fucking HILARIOUS. Asexuality isn't a sexual orientation. It's not even a ‘thing’ really, just a state of mind from fleeting to long lasting. NO ONE CARES IF YOU THINK ABOUT SEX OR NOT. Dear asexuals: you're not oppressed; you're self-obsessed.” - @MsKristinCasey

“Sounds like they’re just a bunch of sexually frustrated folks that don’t know how to communicate what they want effectively to their partner or just haven’t found the right partner that does it for them yet.” - @icebergz99

“Can’t wait to tell my wife she has her own day!” - @CrimsonPKing

“International 'not tonight I've got a headache' day.” - @Centrefuter

“I prefer the term menopausal instead of asexual.” - @clairedagain1

“That used to be a disorder known as sexual disfunction, isn't it?” - @TBerlaga

“The comments fail to understand the point: no one cares that you are asexual. If it is a problem for someone, there are therapists to talk to. It is absolutely not something that should be celebrated on an international stage.” - @Maryellen615

“It’s a new way of saying ‘I’m hideously ugly, and/or completely broken inside.’ Classic defense mechanism. ‘I don’t want to be with the group that has already rejected me.’” - @RestWillia6795

“International unhappy people with low testosterone day!” - @PiajSigler

“Stop catering to these delusions... there is a real mental illness crisis happening!” - @cneibert13

“Mental illness is so hot right now!” - @Cherub_Rock_23

“Happy It’s Just That SSRIs Destroyed Your Sex Drive Day to all who celebrate.” - @salltweets

“Can't we just rename it to dissociation day? Sexual attraction and sexual drive is innate to all mammalians, asexuality is just a fancy word to normalize what is essentially a dysfunction”. - @SL06162568

“I wonder whether they've ever considered this is just a metabolic issue messing with their hormones because they're eating so much seed oils and soy and no beef? Guessing not.” - @adyanalistens

“Basically people with low hormone levels that lack any form of sexual drive because of the imbalance.” - @Deverydoo2

“I wonder if this group is made up primarily of trans people who had the surgeries and, as a consequence, no longer are able to experience sexual sensations?” - @MichelleRae_8

“Asexuality?? are they serious. I see the argument for gay people having a day or month because at one point, most states banned same-sex marriage. But celebrating people who've never faced oppression or have nothing to celebrate, I don't see the point.” - @JabariTheMiller

“As a gay man can someone tell me why straight people not wanting to get laid has ANYTHING TO DO WITH ME?!” - @JohnJamesNI

“Yes, Happy Closet Homosexual Day!” - @EnochMetaScribe

“LOL Why do these folks, and others of abnormal persuasions think they need a special day??” - @MarieJSPhillips

“The left is deranged. Putting the + at the end is really just a placeholder for whatever other insane things they want to add.” - @Duke3God

“Theater kids. All these movements are so people who have never accomplished anything can feel like they did.” - @StupidSapient

“Imagine being asexual—living a life so dull even the furniture feels sorry for you.” - @tan_bruss

“Isn’t this just called friendship?” - @AlxDassylva

“a BIG who cares about this! Enjoy your elective celibacy but you don't have to announce it.” - @DrPamSpurr

“What’s next, a day for people who have no interest in learning to drive a car?” - @InigoeJ

“In honour of National Pet Day, the two best girls in the world.” - @jk_rowling

OMITTED: Many comments calling JK Rowling a cunt and a bitch.

This post was brought to you by: www.nationaldaycalendar.com

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I’ve said before that in all girls school, the stories available to us in the library and the ones assigned as reading for the vast majority of my upbringing depicted girls from every time period most often turning their entire village upside down trying to escape arranged marriages. While I certainly agree with the sentiment, you can see how such tales might’ve not been the most captivating to me at the end of the day.

My favorite pieces of media are most often action-packed and exciting. And I can’t help but notice that for a woman in her thirties, I vocalize my active imagination more than what might be considered typical.

I’m not catching an Uber to the airport. I’m diving into the getaway vehicle after a mostly successful heist but surely the feds will be scanning for my face in the security line because of a small but pivotal slipup so I’d best keep a low profile using my baseball cap as a disguise. I’m not writing an email. I’m out in the field using code to put together an encrypted message to send back to headquarters. I’m not grocery shopping. I’m tailing a key suspect in an assassination plot against the queen foiled by yours truly.

At home, my shelves are filled with countless character figurines, replica fantasy weapons, books, and comics. “I was hoping you’d be going for something a bit more mature,” my mother says, frowning at the many posters framed on my wall. I waltz over to one of my shelves and ignite my lightsaber as a response draped in my Jedi bathrobe. It’s moments like this, I realize, why so many of my peers compare me to things they’d seen on The Big Bang Theory, a show I admittedly never watched.

While perhaps not typical, I know I am not unique in this sense. After all, I follow plenty of podcasters and YouTubers who have their nerd collections displayed proudly behind them in every video. I’m vaguely aware of some arrested development narratives as it pertains to millennials and something about childhood now mentally extending through the entirety of one’s thirties, unlike all the previous generations who allegedly had all their shit together at sixteen.

There’s a certain degree of flashy ingenuity and resilience and general kickass-ness that I am drawn to in superheroes, secret agents, space wizards, and all manner of Chosen Ones. It’s why, in a very indirect sense, I view such forms of media as aspirational in nature. I wish I could be like that, but I’m not. There’s also the aspect of teamwork and camaraderie in such stories which will always get my heart to swell.

It is exceedingly rare that I will encounter media that I can relate to on a personal level whether that be songs or books or TV shows or movies. Granted, I have long since identified my genres of choice and don’t find myself straying outside of those boxes all that often which is where these relatable stories would be found. When I do stumble upon relatable media, I am often struck by a sense of hopelessness and inevitability that I’d much rather not dwell on so… back to the whacky adventures of Sherlock Holmes it is!

A friend of mine is all about coming of age tales and is being quite well fed in all these young adult novels getting movie and show adaptations in recent years. Her favorite by far is To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before. What can I say? She has always been an endearingly clumsy hopeless romantic and I, her faithful friend side character, a role I took seriously and with honor in the era before all of my protagonist friends settled down into their respective marriages just like the scripts tend to dictate. At best I’ll find these stories quaint and funny but they’re about as foreign to me as Battlestar Galactica without the bonus of cool space stuff and fictional political intrigue.

Once in a blue moon, I’ll stumble upon a delayed coming of age tale for which the main message often leaves me conflicted. What I can’t fault them for, however, is accuracy. Far removed from flashy space battles or colorful school romances, they’re so painfully accurate that I avoid most rewatches. This kind of media usually features a young woman who is likely to be seen as unusual (neutral connotation, not necessarily negative or positive) having to come to terms with the fact that a key feature of growing up is losing (to varying degrees) her strong relationships with women to men.

Even just typing that made my spine tingle with a sense of immaturity because let’s face it - relating with such stories (as perhaps also signified by my replica lightsabers) often implies on some level a reluctance to let go of childhood, the mature response being a quiet acceptance of your loved ones succumbing to deep-rooted conditioning that binds them to their oppressor.

Yes, yes I can hear you all laughing now. What an extremist I am implying getting married and having kids is not an original idea at all and completely enforced by the world around you that ultimately serves the purpose of maintaining the core structure of female isolation and subjugation under male rule. And while that might not be the tone of the entire plot resolution, it will definitely be a key feature of the earlier acts of the story.

What I find myself thinking most often at the end of these stories as well as in real life is… why? Because in coming of age stories about men, they are not expected to sacrifice anything. Their battle is all internal usually symbolized by something external like… I don’t know… excalibur (don’t quote me on that I’m really not well versed in Arthurian tales and outside of the BBC’s Merlin series am not sure if this counts as a coming of age story at all). Keep in mind, I’m really quite ignorant as it relates to the social lives or inner worlds of men so I take my cues from the stories they write and the breaking news headlines they generate.

Anyway, I also don’t think that it’s a coincidence that in all these admittedly male-centric stories I enjoy, the friendship between men is indicated to be a key strength rather than something holding them back from their destiny. It is a throughline for all the ups and downs of their lives rather than this starter relationship that they are meant to grow out of or else be framed as some kind of forever child who can’t let go.

Whether the men in question are on the same page fighting side by side or fighting each other to the death due to some grandiose misunderstanding in any given tale (note that there is always a fight involved because this has value within the culture of men), it is the most emotionally charged aspect of the story with any noted female love interests serving as background motivation or lazily slapped on right before the end credits because what’s the point of beating the bad guy if you don’t end up with the car and the girl at the end? Just ask Anakin Skywalker, it sucks.

Of all the discourse I see about women, in particular, being prone to “shipping” such characters together despite there being no canonical romance between the men present, I think this is the inevitable result of actually assigning value to friendships on screen as a form of love that matters and that is primary. For even in real life it is often argued in select feminist circles that men are only capable of loving each other even if they happen to enjoy having sex with women, thus this subtext that women and girls the world over are forming entire fandoms around. Romance as a genre primarily serves as cultural propaganda to keep women joyful in their cages vying for the attention of men who spend little to no time thinking about them at all outside of fucking and keeping up appearances with their male peers, not dissimilar to the men in the “great epochs.”

In my previous essay on this topic, I ended by contemplating what these “hero’s journey” tales would look like removed from male cultural values and beliefs. Now I ask the same about tales of women. Prioritizing bonds between women stereotypically only exists as having personal cheerleaders for gaining the courage to put yourself out there, grow up, and partner with men. Giving priority to such bonds past that most often signifies an aversion to change and being stuck in the past.

The resolution most often depicts stubborn girlhood eventually giving way to the mandated heterosexual romance. Rarely it depicts the unusual woman accepting a life of relative solitude and individual adventure knowing she has at least stayed true to herself. Almost never does it depict two women actively choosing each other in any sense and if I dwell on it too much it really does break my heart, how of all the absurd and fantastical things I see play out on the page or on screen, it is this most natural magnetism I feel in my life that is loathe to even come true in fairytales.

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It still stands that I have not actually seen Sadie since her wedding day fourteen months ago. Life updates from her, likewise, have been rare even in our group chat. What I saw at her wedding was that she had carved out quite a life for herself in New York City amongst fellow intellectuals and through no malice of her own likely finds it completely natural to let her hometown crowd more or less fade into the distance during this chapter of her life. Whatever it is she’s up to, she is no doubt excelling. I hope to see her again at some point in the next two years.

Today, the hometown crowd has dwindled down to three which is a stroke of luck considering how cramped the brunch spot of choice was. Squished into the corner beneath drafty windows are Molly and myself on the bench that runs along the entire wall. Opposite our table for two sits Rachel who I hadn’t seen since our ten year high school reunion back in 2022.

“SHOW ME THE PHOTOS, NOW!” Rachel demands loudly to the surprise of those surrounding us. She arrived a good twenty minutes late by which point Molly had already told me the big news, that she and Kevin had gone down to the courthouse and made things official despite not telling anyone until that precise moment. I did not skip a beat in congratulating her. She eagerly took off her ring to show it to me - a custom made ornate gold band capturing an oval of jade, an equal mix of fancy to showcase its importance and unobtrusive to the tasks of daily life. It was fitting and not gratuitous at all like I was used to with more common rocks used for this sort of thing. Molly seemingly would always be a sensible individual.

I have no more grief to spare, you see, and it is my hope that those of like mind would not blame me for that. I am not a tyrant. I control no one but myself. And I pride myself on that control quite a bit. While I normally would find Molly’s happiness and contentment infectious, I was just as fine now feeling nothing focused on cutting in half the selection of small pastries I had gotten for our table instead. These times together in the valley are rare, as you might know. And it felt very natural and familiar sitting next to Molly despite the circumstances.

“I can’t believe you kept this from me for a WHOLE MONTH,” Rachel continues on. “You don’t get it, Anna. I was texting Molly about hanging out and she said she did want to hangout but that you were getting home on the 18th so it absolutely couldn’t be before then. I even texted something completely unrelated and she still responded ‘Anna gets home on the 18th.’ Girl I was giving an update on my rewatch of Supernatural!”

That was news to me. I always felt like I was being a bit of a bother keeping Molly updated on my comings and goings. Perhaps that was just me being self-conscious. Maybe I didn’t have to worry about there being no room for me in this new chapter of her life which, let’s be honest, wasn’t not a concern.

“We were thinking December 2026 for the actual wedding,” she tells me. “And because you know a lot about parties and events, if you wanted any part in the planning - big or small - I’d welcome it.”

“Of course. Just let me know what you need,” I say, again not missing a beat.

It’s an easy afternoon together nonetheless even a couple hours later at a sports bar where most are watching the day’s football game. At some point in the conversation, Molly notices she has two missed calls and a text from her… husband.

“Call me as soon as you see this,” it says.

Even I grow concerned. But it is only a short conversation before she hangs up.

“I told him I was coming into town today but I guess it has been a while so he freaked out.” I look at the clock. It’s barely past two in the afternoon. On a Sunday. Molly then opens up about how this always happens. She tells a story about how she went out to dinner with some people from work saying she’d be home by 6 PM. At 6:05 PM he called wondering if she was dead. “It’s because one person showed up 45 minutes late and I was sitting there telling people I really needed to get moving but we ended up not ordering real food until the person got there anyway and… ugh.”

Rachel squeals, finding it cute. I don’t say anything.

“Are you changing your name?” I ask. Molly rolls her eyes.

“He wants me to change it. I don’t want to though. I really like my name! And it would just be so much work. So I don’t know. We have to talk about it more.”

“You just said you don’t want to change your name so what else is there to talk about?” I ask.

“I’m hoping to convince him is all,” she says.

A pack of rowdy men erupt in cheers behind us as another touchdown is scored. We all turn to look at the replay. Molly announces she has to leave not too long after making a comment about how she hates living “out in the corn.”

On the way home through urban streets, all I can seem to think about is jade. By the time I take off my coat, I immediately become incredibly tired. My deep sleep is interrupted by a sudden queasiness. I throw up in an orderly fashion. It’s a one and done and I do not cry or linger too long on the bathroom floor. I believe I have conquered grieving even if my subconscious perhaps has something to say about it. I go back to sleep for a couple of hours more.

Sometimes I wonder if anything I could have said or done at any point in my life would have changed the trajectory of any woman stubbornly on her path to destruction as seemingly ordained by god to the extent it is seen as the natural course of life. Because Molly, just like Sadie, is so intelligent, so true to herself, so everything I could admire most about a person. Yet she, like most, chose this. Would writing any of these essays change the minds of those reading? Or do they find my alleged extremism little more than an interesting thought exercise?

When is the moment, exactly, that a woman decides to act against her own interests in the manner of a tale as old as time?

It will be impossible to ever know the answer to that, I think.

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This is the place where the boys studied when they weren’t loitering by the front gates of their sister school down the hill from them. I sometimes wondered if they felt the weight of the tradition that quite literally encased them. I wondered if it emboldened them or gave them a sense of pride or purpose or belonging. My father seemed to think so. But when he attended that place, he had something to prove. In the early 1970s, he was among the school’s first black students.

“I looked at those pictures and I knew that’s who I wanted to become,” he told me once in many long speeches I’d hear about ambition. Then, after some contemplation, he amended that to say, “It’s who I needed to become to get to where I wanted to go.”

For a boy who spent his early childhood in a segregated society in rural Georgia and one noteworthy winter up north when the Black Panther Party threatened to shoot out the windows of any black family’s home that had a Christmas tree visible from the street, I can guess the strength of the singular sense of focus that seemed to overcome him stepping foot into a building that had hardly changed its appearance in over two hundred years. Of his peers, whether it be there or at the Ivy League college he eventually attended or the oil company he eventually worked for, he spoke primarily of a goal-oriented ecosystem that provided good company of consistent character along the journey.

For many, the term “brotherhood” evokes something positive or enticing. The bravery of soldiers, the camaraderie of a sports team, the power of a secret society, or the grit of those on the frontier. And while exactly none of those things are specific to men, the celebratory images that likely come to mind are male-centric. My casual TV watching habits always have me tuning into old westerns from the 60s and 70s, the ones my father watched as a boy. The upstanding cowboy or sheriff who speaks with purpose and is the measure of morality for a small town, gunning down bad men in the middle of the road because he simply had no other choice.

In one sense, he is a loner. In another sense, he is part of something larger than himself. A goal-oriented man who had the company of gunslingers, shopkeepers, and farmers of the town who were all of a consistent noble character. Most often, save for a barmaid or school teacher entering the frame with the soft glow reserved for women on film in that era, this circle of people around him are all men. Men with a code. It remains a fantasy as enticing as any tale of medieval knights, samurai, or all of Star Wars which is just a combination of these three things. I wanted to be like them. I wanted to be able to save the day and protect those I cared about.

Recently, I encountered a pair of feminist commentators who stated that they desired a brotherhood of women and ran in the opposite direction of anyone advertising sisterhood. They wanted to have a real impact on the world around them instead of sitting in a room pretending that they enjoyed the company of the women with them who had arbitrarily been assigned their sisters. While my life experience doesn’t exactly put me in a position to, I feel, adequately analyze male social dynamics, I did want to write a little bit about my musings on this. That is, my musings on brotherhood. I have already outlined the ways it is advertised as something meaningful and captivating from a distance even for women like myself. But just like most other things, it gained this status - or even mythos - because it was assigned such extreme value by the underlying male culture within which it exists.

While brotherhood might be considered the foundation of humanity’s great institutions, dominion over women is and always has been the foundation of brotherhood. It matters not their race, their class, or their origin, men will bond with, bow down to, and kill based on the resources they divide (willingly or unwillingly) between themselves. When my father was in school, the thin veneer of civility maintained between black students and white students couldn’t be disturbed more swiftly or severely than if any given boy approached the wrong type of girl at the school down the hill. The mere existence of a girl's school so nearby was like a resource management practice run as it remained by the time I attended, boys peering at us through the gates like zoo animals until they worked up the guts to approach one of us for real.

Put women by the sides of men as accessories and you see the creation of the most fantastical tales ever told. In reality, take the women away and due to this violation of nature you have headline after headline about males in crisis, spiraling until they meet their ultimate demise in a blaze of glory. You get the tortured and misunderstood soul who is nonetheless a genius, either scientifically, artistically, or spiritually. Women can neither be the greatest of the great nor the worst of the worst because those are male traits. To be able to reach the heights or depths of your potential is thought to be reserved only for those who are fully realized individuals under male rule. Male culture is unconcerned with female advancement or fulfillment, but they frame female domestication as the will and destiny of nature. In this way, women are the key to brotherhood but cannot be inducted into the brotherhood themselves.

So do I desire a brotherhood of women? I understand the sentiment but, after some thought, do not agree. I’ve come under the impression that my positive experiences in a community of girls could be considered rare. Sisterhood as a concept to many is nothing more than a joke, the bonds between women bred to be frail, unable to withstand the weight of male destiny. The catalyst for its flourishing is often in reaction to male dominion over them, either welcoming it or attempting to survive it. Because of the place of women within the male power structure, the warfront of sisterhood is to simply exist at all in the first place, like grass fighting its way through sidewalk cracks.

But in my experience as a child, sisterhood is built on cooperation, curiosity, and creativity. It is an acceptance of differences, a celebration of strengths, and a companion to aid weaknesses. It hinges not on dominion over others, but of a genuine desire to conquer yourself and come out on the other side confident and ready to face the world and to play a meaningful part in it. The propaganda of brotherhood has diminished the value of sisterhood down to ash. It is my desire to see it restored for a purpose other than being the foundation of an institution that despises it. And it is entirely within our power to do so.

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It feels even more like school when I’m on tour with a theater production in the fall because when October rolls around for a tour that ends in December, it is audition central out on the road. Everyone in the show is using every spare minute of their time locking themselves in a room to film tapes to send out to whoever. Everyone is exchanging information about who they know on each road show. One actor turns to me and asks if I’m going to take a shot at Moulin Rouge. I say probably. And she then spends the next five minutes painting the scene for how life would be if we both got on that tour together.

Others take a different route with theme parks or cruise ships. I’m asked if I’ve ever done a cruise ship contract and each time I say “Of course not. Have you seen the Titanic?” Again, a joke that isn’t a joke in the slightest. Put me on a bus with people for a season and I can at least get off the bus. Put me on a ship with no land in sight? That’s just asking for trouble. And have you seen the size of those ships these days? No way they have enough lifeboats. And those COVID ships stuck at sea because no country would take them? That’s even more nightmare material!

Inevitably across my job search screen rolls in the occasional gig for lengthy tours in China or ridiculously lucrative contracts out in Dubai or Riyadh. Sometimes others on crew will ask me about those. Many guys I know have taken those jobs and lined their pockets, coming back with a nice tan and not a care in the world.

“Not for me,” I always say to an audience of confused faces and I sigh as I’m forced to explain what I believe is obvious given the number of action-packed shows about CIA operatives I’ve seen. “There are few things worse than being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong passport. I like to avoid situations that could end up in me becoming a CNN headline. I said the same about Russia before the war started and everyone thought I was being ridiculous!”

Everyone brushes off my paranoia again anyway.

“It’s actually really nice out there,” one man says about Saudia Arabia. “First off it’s not just like you’re living anywhere. I lived in a compound-”

“Oh yeah, I’ve heard all about the compounds. And you’d best bet I’m not letting anyone shut me away in one of those. Then of course comes the question, what happens if I traverse my way outside the compound? Unaccompanied?”

I’m told about all the cool things to see, how it’s different from what I’m thinking. I ask if they knew any women who took contracts out there and I’m told, “Some.”

“Good for them. Still, not for me. Knowing how I am, there’s a half decent chance I’d get myself into trouble. Have I told you the time about when I went to international relations camp? The embassy trip. Not the simulation where we had to run our own country and I started my own dictatorship and enslaved half the refugees from neighboring civilizations.”

“No,” they say.

The year is something like… 2007. My parents observed my enthusiasm for anime and all things related to Japan and figured that a constructive use of that interest would be for me to grow up and become some kind of decorated ambassador. So that’s how I found myself arriving for my first of many extended stays in Washington DC in a college classroom, probably thirteen years old, extraordinarily uncomfortable in my newly purchased business attire that was a requirement for the summer program that would run for a couple weeks.

During this camp, a trip to the Saudi Arabian embassy was on the agenda. We gathered on campus early in the morning to eat breakfast and lay down the ground rules. Going to an embassy, we had learned, is technically like going to another country. The most extreme version of “their house, their rules” you could come by. This was an exciting prospect for me, going to a different country. But by this age, I had resolved to never smile or look excited about anything. There was nothing metal about enthusiasm. So I trailed in the back of the pack into the metro station, out the other side at our destination, down and around a few blocks, until we had arrived.

I wish I could recount to you more about the embassy building itself. It was probably nothing spectacular, just your normal modern government building. I say this because the small theater inside the building (which I do remember) was similarly unspectacular, much like the college classrooms I’d been confined to over the previous several days. Standing at the back of the pack as I am, by the time I make my way into the theater I hear the camp counselor's directions:

“Boys sit in the front rows, girls sit in the back rows.”

My eyebrows raise not because I don’t enjoy sitting in the back of the room. In fact, it’s my preference to sit in the back of the room. Nonetheless, I’d never been told to sit in the back of a room before.

“Why?” I ask, still standing in the aisle.

“It’s the rules,” the teacher says.

“That’s not fair though,” I retort.

I am given an explanation about local customs and cultural differences, one that sounds familiar to the speech we were given earlier in the morning that I was only half paying attention to. And the more words are said, the more I am determined to sit right in the middle of the front row or die trying. Besides, everyone in the room at that point was American.

Few others in the camp are paying attention to the small scene I am causing. Meanwhile, I’m just dumbfounded that I’m having my own minor Rosa Parks moment in the 21st century.

“I’m not sitting in the back,” I say again. At this point, people who work at the embassy have entered the room and have started up the screen for the upcoming presentation. They look my way, sensing there is a holdup of some kind. I then sidestep the teacher, walk up to the second row (the first row was filled), sit down next to all the boys I’d been ignoring ever since camp started, and cross my arms (much like I had done in France a summer or so prior in front of a police officer with a machine gun during an incident with a suspicious bag reported by my father. I had gained more of sense of mortality since then, however).

My heart was racing but no one said anything.

The presentation was a lengthy tourism ad emphasizing cities of the future simultaneous with wonders of the past. I don’t think we were in there for more than fifteen minutes before continuing our little tour.

“That was kind of crazy,” one of the girls said to me on our way out. “You’re crazy.”

“I think my reaction was perfectly reasonable,” I say, reluctant to add: I just wish any of you stood with me.

My coworker’s eyes are similarly wide at the end of the story and I shrug.

“I mean it might be different now I’m just saying it’s going to take a lot more than a fat check to get me to work anywhere over there,” I conclude.

One of the guys laughs.

“You are truly wild,” he says.

“Don’t be impressed with me. Be impressed with the women over there who have to live that reality every day and are still fighting the good fight anyway.”

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My bus isn’t the only bus parked in this hotel lot on election night and I look around sitting in the diner next door to see if other music nomads have also decided to take their last supper here. Up until 48 hours prior, I was confident that Trump would win. But that small part of me that likes to hope took over and I found myself unable to say who would win despite always being out in the country working alongside all kinds of people. Unlike my parents back home in the city, I often saw other versions of normal. I saw all the perfectly competent people for whom voting for Trump was the obvious answer.

Dragging my bags back onto the tour bus a little after midnight, I am met with the artists on my show barreling through different stages of grief, not being able to comprehend what has happened, zooming in on voting maps to see how people voted in the dozens of towns we’d been performing in over the past two months. The normalcy of the people there went against the red the artists were seeing on their screens. In real time, I saw them becoming fearful of shadows.

But not me.

“Of course,” I thought to myself hours ago, “there was no other way this was ever going to go.”

For most of my life, ever since Obama’s first inauguration was projected on a screen in the hallway right outside my school’s cafeteria, somewhere in the back of my mind I wondered what the retaliation would look like. Would it be swift at the inauguration itself? I refused to look at the screen for that reason passing by with my books and snacks. I thought the same with same-sex marriage. I thought the same with the glorification of hookup culture. With young women achieving more than many thought they should. With “Me Too.” With BLM. With all things trans. With DEI. With the Hollywood mockery of Christianity and academic thought pieces on the death of the nuclear family, falling birthrates, and neverending perplexion about male loneliness and the violence it apparently justifies. Poking and prodding at the hive could only ever end one way. And after sixteen years, it had by every statistical measure. A flimsy revamping of the status quo had thoroughly backfired.

What of the next sixteen years? Who’s to say?

Waking up the next morning in Alabama, I greet cheerful local stagehands who are all still high with delight coming from their respective late night election parties. There is work to be done though. Everyone no matter their mood must soon focus. Settling into my production office for the day, however, I open my social media to see “4B” in my top trends. And over the next few days, not just in my personal trends. National trends. And soon after, national headlines.

“4B” or “the four no’s” is a term coined by South Korean radical feminists. It refers to no dating men, no marrying men, no having sex with men, and no having kids. The disparity between the sexes in South Korea is more immediately pronounced in the usual traditional ways than in the United States from both a legal and social standpoint. Yet just like everywhere else, radical feminism is considered both fringe and extremist and is derided by most people you stop to ask about it on the street regardless of their political leanings. But because it unabashedly aims at the root of male rule, unlike other forms of feminist or otherwise progressive thought that simply dress it up to appear more friendly, the movement has garnered both national and global attention and on the ground has resulted in targeted violence against women who appear to go against any aspect of Korea’s very singular beauty standard. No makeup? Short hair? Must be one of those evil feminists trying to bring about the downfall of society.

The inaction of 4B is more popularly known as celibacy but given the way of the world, I tend to refer to it as common sense. The bare minimum of ground level self-respect a woman could have from the outset. But historically, any time simply choosing not to engage with men even if just limited to the arena of physical intimacy is proposed, it is immediately shot down as extremist and ineffective, snuffed out before talk of it can ever materialize into something concrete. So even though women the world over have privately been participating in this inaction over the span of human history, 4B is unique in its volume in the online sphere, loud enough to go viral all the way on the other side of the planet among women who not too long ago would equate a lack of sex life with a lack of empowerment, and label anyone encouraging women to not intimately involve themselves with men as anti-feminists plagued with internalized misogyny. I would know. Such accusations were made toward me quite a few times.

Similar to the overall political atmosphere of the United States, I sit back in wonder when I realize I’ve been alive long enough to see shifting tides in mainstream American feminism and related topics. I’d caught wind of the “childfree” contingent of women, some celebrities and other public personalities drawing absolute hysteria from men over short clips of them lounging in some scenic location using time and money they wouldn’t have had if they’d chosen to have children or (in a distinct minority of cases) marry.

Parallel to that, I have seen the backlash against the formerly embraced hookup culture by women that was pitched as this tool to level the playing field of sexual politics by emulating the sexual behaviors and attitudes of males and equating that with liberation. This has mostly taken the form of anti-feminism, course correction leading the way of the “trad wife” for some women, and the way of obsessive navel-gazing about one’s sexuality and gender identity for other women who - despite their long think pieces on the topic - typically have close to or no experience in any actual intimate relationships.

In this equation, the latter has made a habit of calling the former and many other women “TERFS” (trans exclusionary radical feminists) for years at this point, over the simple fact that they acknowledge that women are female and men are male. Just as “4B” dragged even the term “radical feminism” into the spotlight in South Korea, “TERF” dragged the term into the spotlight in the United States. This all added to my confusion that such a wide contingent of ultra-liberal genderists would even loosely associate with anything related to radical feminism. But it became quickly apparent that the pop feminists of my country had every intention to water down any and all things sensible about 4B just like they had at every other juncture at which they could have risen to the occasion but just allowed themselves to be fucked over in increasingly creative ways. The questions I have seen come from this common sense resolution include but are not limited to:

Is 4B anti-trans?

Is 4B anti-sex worker?

Should we distance ourselves from South Korean TERFs?

Does 4B unjustly punish the “good men”?

Should men be excluded from 4B?

Can I participate in 4B with my boyfriend/husband?

Will 4B actually do anything to change men?

I find it both painful and infuriating yet unsurprising how quickly and easily my fellow countrywomen completely lose the plot every single time. It is why I reacted to CNN headlines with deep skepticism and have been reluctant to engage online with anything carrying the 4B banner. But I don’t wish to throw the baby out with the bathwater either. Every woman must first have her own rebellion before even getting a toe out of the fog of her conditioning. So while I am tempted to mock the tone of 4B in the West, I must acknowledge that somewhere out there surely it is a first step in the right direction for women who yesterday were directionless. And it is to those women that my tiny Substack read by maybe ten people in a good month stumble upon or take the time to read. Or maybe this is just more for me, an automated message for all the instances I have neither the time nor the patience to even attempt to spell all of this out, particularly to women who are a breath away from calling me a Nazi for agreeing with Hitler that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west.

Just like for the female artists on my tour bus attempting to hold back tears as they struggle with understanding the difference between today and yesterday, there is no hope for them until they understand that the only difference between today and yesterday is that they - however temporarily - have gained some level of clarity about the longstanding reality of their own situation.

THE SITUATION: We are the product of thousands of generations of rape and subjugation under male rule. In the system of male rule - within which we all find ourselves - women are not people. They are resources just like children, animals, minerals, or plants. All part of nature yet nonetheless not man. Men are people, for whom rights default, brotherhood extends, and more complicated internal hierarchies develop, hierarchies that are chiefly concerned about the control of all resources. Above them are the gods or God, fictional characters that regurgitate and naturalize man’s own ideas generation after generation after generation.

Everything from their kindness, their sadness, their passion, their love, their anger, or their benevolence is underlined by this reality. And through that clarity, the swinging ship of politics makes much more sense and remains enduringly unsurprising. In times of peace and abundance, this reality can be more muted than it would otherwise, particularly when compared to harsher environments. But the danger for women is always present. This is not a scare tactic. This is simply reality. The entire world knows it. We were all taught it one way or another as children. It only becomes blasphemous to say when adult, legally fuckable women, regurgitate it or (god forbid) take it upon themselves to do something about it.

LIBERATION: In conjunction with the overarching situation, most women have no desire for liberation from men. Of those women, many are not even of the view that they have anything to be liberated from. They find comfort in their cages, have accepted this as the natural order, and are perfectly content on a personal level with their status as a secondary sex class even if it requires no small amount of mental gymnastics in which they frame themselves as unique either due to their own “greatness” or the “greatness” of the men they surround themselves with. They invest their lives into the system, feast on its questionable rewards, and pity those who just couldn’t manage it the way they could.

For most, the caged life is comfortable or even desirable. They will likely never turn away from it, performing all the usual steps to chase this feeling of safety from unspecified external threats and stability. For some, like me, this fate is a horror I dreaded with all my being from a young age. As a result, my cage was never comfortable at all. But I am happier seeing the bars for what they are resulting in a lifetime of singularly deepening my relationships with other women and girls. It has not been a life free from male violence, but it has been a life of stubborn dignity.

NEGOTIATION: Whether it be the simple proposition about basic human rights, legislation over legal matters of education, property ownership, financial independence, divorce, pregnancy, birth control, abortion, workplace harassment, street harassment, violence of all kinds, full constitutional equality with men (still not achieved in the United States), or the rollback of any of the aforementioned, at some point in some room somewhere, the concept of a “sex strike” was proposed. But while the inaction of a “sex strike” is one I support, the reasoning behind it is often flawed.

The popular rebuttal of a sex strike by feminists usually centers on them not wanting to so readily admit their baseline value as resources under male rule. To view yourself as men view you is anti-feminist. But it is only through acknowledging the existence of the male view that the inaction of non-participation becomes not about men at all, but your own self-respect as a human being, something inherently refuted under a male regime. The answer is not to dress up the overarching situation with cultural notions of romance, to reframe pornography as empowering, or any other number of “feel good” copes. None of that is possible while we are still in cages. None of this would exist in the first place if the cage itself did not exist either.

That aside, the stated goal of a “sex strike” if any does catch any ounce of consideration, is to change male behavior. But it must be understood that male behavior is not contingent upon lack of education or lack of preferred ejaculation. Male behavior simply is, and after thousands of generations of rape and exploitation of resources, I find it unproductive to have a nature vs. nurture debate around the issue. I simply determined that I will not be negotiating with terrorists and through that determination, I have arrived at the common sense conclusion that willingly going as far as dating terrorists, marrying terrorists, having sex with terrorists, or birthing their children would be the definition of insanity under the given, longstanding, and (in our lifetime) unchanging circumstances. I instead maintain the thin veneer of civility expected in everyday interactions between adults that keeps everything out of an active state of chaos.

RETALIATION: Whether it be plain old celibacy, a sex strike proposition, childfree, 4B, or any other term that takes men out of the equation in any form but particularly when it comes to intercourse that can result in pregnancy, the fear of male violence suddenly blossoms from women who just moments prior were talking about how most men are good, actually. But you must understand, male violence will happen either way. Even if you become the exception (for however long) to a man who will puff his chest out in pride knowing you trust him to protect you from that other extreme minority of men who are bad, actually, you might have moments of clarity - like a presidential election, however silly - that make you acknowledge our overarching situation. And you might feel, no matter how much your instincts have been dulled, that the man who poses the most threat is the one in your house. The one with the most unregulated access to you. Not the nameless, faceless bad man in an alleyway that your benevolent overseer is supposedly protecting you from.

CHOICE: All that being said, within the United States it still stands that you have a choice. No one is making you swear off men. In fact, everything running as it always has demands that an appropriate amount of us don’t swear off men. The conveyor belt must keep moving. And just like always, the vast majority of public and private programs that have resulted from feminist efforts will continue to focus on getting women away from their terrorists once negotiations inevitably fail. Meanwhile, just as many others will continue to fulfill their role in the resource pyramid, feeling secure behind silk-covered bars, dying of old age none the wiser.

I, a singular individual, simply ask that if you ever again have a moment of clarity, know that you have real power. Everyone knows it. And that is why it is instrumental that your head stays in the sand. That is why panic so quickly sets in the moment any woman anywhere in the world says “no.”

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Do I hate men? 

How might the sands feel about the tide coming in? 

“I HATE MEN!” my coworker Gabi fumes beside me in our aggressively air-conditioned production trailer. It is deep into the summer, humidity unrelenting and the sun has been cooking us in ninety-degree or higher heat for the better part of a month. As the keepers of festival staff necessities such as radios, golf cart keys, sunscreen, and a treasure trove of snacks, it is unusual for just the two of us to be in here. But I assume that her choice of timing for this outburst is because we are, in fact, alone. 

“Oh?” I say. 

Our very first week working together, Gabi pulled me aside with a grin on her face saying she had gotten the 411 on all the guys on the production crew, a panel of tall, white, bearded, hipster dudes. The kind who would enjoy spending their summer neck deep in operating a festival like this. 

“I know each one’s ideal type, the ones who are single, and the ones who want to be single,” she told me, “and based on that, I’ve decided which ones I’m gonna smash.” 

“Oh?” I said back then as well. Because how else is there to respond?

Despite our obvious personality differences, Gabi and I created a good vibe for the production trailer alongside Stephanie who was your quintessential cute, blonde, original brand Americana woman, her collection of straw hats impressive. The rules for our combined Spotify playlist were 1. Must have a female singer and 2. Must be, in their words, “cunty.” 

Beyonce, Dua Lipa, Charli XCX, Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan, and Taylor Swift dominated half of the playlist. The other half was a slow indoctrination into the world of K-pop, courtesy of me. Our first day blasting this playlist using Gabi’s portable speaker was the first iteration of what I would internally call the “girl talk huddle,” during which Stephanie told us about the plight of her roommate back home who was madly in love with her coworker who she was glued to the hip with every second of the work day. He showered her with attention, compliments, and lingering touches which only made her fall harder. The issue? He already had a girlfriend and when he brought said girlfriend to the previous weekend’s company party, he went the whole evening without acknowledging that Stephanie’s roommate was there. The next day in the office though? Back to normal. 

“I think your roommate should realize that the male attention she seeks has no value,” I say after the two of them had been going back and forth for a while about the absurdity of the situation. 

“Right!” Stephanie says, “Because he already has a girlfriend.”

“It would have no value even if he didn’t. Male attention has no value at best and is actively a danger at worst. As it is, he knows exactly what he’s doing so she should assert her boundaries. At minimum, there’s no reason for him to be touching her at all in the workplace. It’s highly inappropriate.”

I wonder if I went too hard when the two of them just kind of stare at me in shocked silence for a moment. But then Gabi perks up and snaps her fingers.

“Yes, Anna, talk yo shit!” But two months later, we end up where we end up. 

“He really thought he could talk shit about me to Stephanie and thought she wouldn’t come right to me and tell? I mean, I was offended when both Matt and James said she was their ideal type but… damn… I wasn’t even looking for anything serious obviously like I mean I’m pretty sure James is planning on breaking up with his girlfriend and Matt... I thought we were friends. You saw when he brought his ex here right? They didn’t look like exes. But I guess they’re the type of guys to be flirty with everyone.”

On one hand, I do feel sad that Gabi seems so genuinely shocked and out of sorts, her loud confidence replaced with an uncharacteristic self-doubt. On the other hand, I find it exhausting spelling this kind of thing out for women who can’t or refuse to see through the fog.

“He’s not though. Remember when Stephanie told us that story about her roommate with the work crush? That guy, Matt, and James all know what they’re doing. This is all by design. All summer those guys have walked into this trailer where I am sitting at the desk right next to you. They’ve had full on ten or twenty minute conversations with you and leave without acknowledging I’m here. It’s not that I want their attention, it’s just pretty odd… and rude.”

“Matt loves Star Wars though!” Gabi says, her anger giving way to confusion. 

“Yes. We talked about it once for two minutes my first day here and I haven’t had a conversation with him since.” 

“Not even out on site? At dinner? He doesn’t help you with anything? He’s always swinging by to see if there’s anything I need.” I laugh.

“Of course not. He doesn’t want to fuck me. Or more like… he’d rather fuck Stephanie, you, that one really pretty girl on the volunteer team, and probably no small number of interns… in that order.” 

“What about James? Does he talk to you at all?”

“He pointed me in the right direction of a drill bit I was looking for once. That’s really it. But it’s not like I’m looking to converse with them either. They’re on a different branch of the production team. Casually conversing with them would be a big detour on either of our parts.” I let her marinate on that for a while. 

“Bitch, you should’ve told me! Then I wouldn’t have made as much of a fool of myself.” This is a line and scenario I was used to, this conversation that tends to repeat when friends scorned by men come running to me to vent out their frustrations. 

“Women I’m friends with… don’t tend to take too kindly to that course of action.” She groans.

“Whatever. I’m so over this. I’m mostly a lesbian anyway.” 

At that, the way I kept my facial expression blank should get me an Oscar.

I’m waiting for my things in baggage claim after being away from home for seven months when I get an email from a theater festival I’d forgotten about looking for an assistant stage manager starting tomorrow. I check the current time—9:47 PM. Curiosity gets the best of me. I always like to get the inside scoop on a shitshow. 

That’s how I meet Emily, a stressed-out stage manager for whom the sky seems to be falling trying to pull together this very low-stakes black box theater production with, to her credit, a stupid amount of props and a batshit crazy director. But we get through rehearsals, then tech rehearsals, and by opening night we are on the same wavelength running the show. 

“So there’s this guy,” she begins to tell me after our second show run as we’re going through the handwash costume items together. “He is devastatingly hot. He’s also engaged. Which is what makes it super strange that he’s telling me that his fiancee is in Ireland all week and he’s sending me pictures like this!” 

She holds her phone up and shows me the photo of a standard issue white man making a heart sign with his fingers. “And he’s inviting me out for dinner when I swear we’ve barely spoken to each other since we did the Scottish Play together way at the beginning of this year.” 

“Oh?” I say. 

“If it were anyone else I’d say we were gonna fuck but I mean he’s super sweet, super hot, bisexual - I just trust queer guys way more, and autistic so he just communicates differently. But he’s so hot it’s distracting. How am I going to survive this dinner?” 

“You could turn him down,” I say. She gasps. 

A few days later, there are updates. 

“We spent the entire day together. I almost died,” she said. “And now he wants to swing by the theater after the show and go out for tequila shots. I’m really going to die this time.” 

“Be careful,” I say. 

The next day arrives. 

“We fucked. Anna. I fucked an engaged man.” 

“That you did,” I say. 

“Please tell me you’ve done something even half as wild.” I shrug.

“I don’t speak to men but… I did spend my college years working at a nightclub run by the mob.” She ignores that second part. 

“I swear I basically never speak to men either. I usually date women but… this guy, he’s just so sweet.” 

“He did just cheat on the woman he plans to marry.” I can tell that this conversation is not going how she expected. “Nothing can be done about it now. I just think his actions demonstrate that he doesn’t respect his fiancee and he doesn’t respect you and if you continue to go after him, you wouldn’t be respecting yourself.” 

She’s silent for a moment before groaning. 

“I hate men,” she says. 

Despite it being August, the women’s film festival I am somehow roped into has seen a string of cool nights where I lean against the podium in front of the venue while the show goes on inside. When scrolling through my phone, an Asian woman named Izzy who looks to be in her forties comes meandering outside. She takes one look at me and starts talking.

“I know the filmmaker. Even volunteered to help promote this screening for her. But she never responded. Never even reached out when she knew I was having all that trouble with my landlord. The subject matter was far from what I was expecting though. I should’ve stayed home.” 

“Oh?” I say. 

“Yeah. But… I mean… you know how white women are. I’m really tired of them. I need a break. I need to really be around people who showcase that they are invested in women’s empowerment.” At that, I perk up a bit. While the woman in front of me seems a bit crazy, I still have an hour to kill standing at this podium. Spending it with an artsy activist was as good of a time killer as anything.  

“It’s a pet peeve of mine that when it comes to women it’s all about this false sense of empowerment while for men it’s about power. They get something real while we are told to focus on what feels good. I swear half the time I hear about ‘women’s empowerment’ it has something to do with sex.”

“You’re honestly right,” she says. “But white women in particular seem completely unwilling to work with each other, much less with minority women.” 

I lay out my view that the majority of women are indoctrinated with the value system of their male overseers which is white men in the case of white women. Black men for black women. Asian men for Asian women. In the power struggle among men, women are a resource to flaunt and subdue as needed. Just ask Drake and Kendrick Lamar. 

“The fact of the matter is that men cannot see us as human. As it is, bonds between women are the biggest threat to male rule. Knowledge passed from generation to generation of women that does not center on serving men is blasphemous according to the tenets of male doctrine. I understand your frustrations, but I think it’s important to keep an eye on the bigger picture, even if you decide to not work with this particular filmmaker again.” 

For someone who seems so much older than me, I’m surprised that the concepts I’m laying out seem brand new to her. We chat for a bit about women’s liberation and I express my desire to emphasize that women have autonomy and that it is frustrating to me that so many conveniently forget that when it does not suit them. 

“I just worked with this woman who hooked up with an engaged man. She felt kind of bad about it afterward but then flipped the whole story around to be about… male manipulation and general shittiness. Which… okay. But she willingly participated in all of it. I don’t know. I guess I just wish that women would own up to their own mistakes. Not everything they do can be someone else’s fault. Male rule and male violence are two very real problems, I just… I don’t know how to phrase this. But I’ve been thinking about it all summer.” 

“Female autonomy is great,” she says, “but women can’t fare very well autonomously on their own.” I have to hold myself back from laughing in her face as she paints a picture of disenfranchised women forced into marriage and trafficked for sex. I ask her what any of that has to do with my coworker going out with the intention of fucking some guy she thought was hot. From there and for the next two days of the film festival, she comes early and stays late to pick my brain about feminism. She is highly resistant to the notion that women can truly make choices and that invisible chains require us to marry men. 

“Far too many have sacrificed too much for too long for me to behave as though I am enslaved,” I say. “We might not have control over everything, but you need to recognize your own power. And with power comes responsibility for your own actions whether they be brilliant or idiotic. I’m completely capable of needlessly derailing my own life if I choose to. And no, I’m not talking about getting thrown unexpected life curveballs where you just need to make the best of a bad situation.” 

She is very attached to creating a hierarchy of men, explaining in detail the men who have been cruel to her and celebrating the men who have not. The ones who, in her words, “tried to not be predatory.” 

“I’m not in the business of giving cookies to men based on whether or not they raped me,” I say with a shrug. 

On the fourth night of the festival, she arrives to the theater upset about a man who she thought was her friend but really had no respect for her at all as evidenced by some kind of argument they had at a cafe earlier that day. 

“I’m sorry that went down that way,” I say.

“I really thought he was one of the good ones. Be careful around men you think are your friend.”

“The whole concept of a male friend is an oxymoron to me,” I say. It’s not the first time I have to remind her that I have no casual association with men. But she’s very angry at the moment. I consider it possible she forgot. Again. 

“He was always so sweet and attentive, sticking up for me when other guys in public would make me uncomfortable.” 

“It’s dangerous business relying on men to protect you from other men. It is typically the men who have the most access to us who pose the greatest threat. The window of opportunity is wider, the incurred risk lower.”

She continues to air out her feelings a little more. The night’s film is starting soon. 

“I really hate men,” she says. I don’t respond. Eventually, she goes inside. 

How does one feel about the sun rising in the east and setting in the west? How does one feel about water being wet or fire being hot? How does one feel about a fork being found in a kitchen? 

On my drive home, I criticize my approach. Should I not expect more from this particular half of the population? Am I letting them off the hook by labeling them predators by their very nature? Am I complacent? Am I putting unjust blame on all the women who come to me professing hate for men they choose to be around and continue to associate with after their anger cools down? 

I think I am just irritated by the extent to which this sideshow of misadventures detracts from real obstacles. From the real fight. It was amusing enough in high school. Acceptable enough in college. But now? They do say the definition of insanity is trying the same thing and expecting a different result. And that is how I feel in these “girl talk huddles.” That is how I feel when I waste so much of my breath trying to illustrate a point only for it to all repeat again a day, a month, a year later and shunned for not understanding because I’m supposedly too different to understand. Repeated actions and associations that are entirely voluntary, seemingly serve no purpose, and seemingly have no value. It is exhausting. It is needless. It makes my heart numb and my empathy run dry. And yet throughout my entire summer, it seems to have been the cornerstone of female bonding.

Is that not royally fucked up?  

Gabi uploads a photo to Instagram of herself splayed in the lap of a man at some excessively neon party.

Once again, I feel the tide coming in.

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Honestly, I had handled that news a lot better than I thought I would. I impressed myself by feeling nothing when she announced her engagement. I’d been mentally preparing for several months, ever since Sadie’s wedding, because I knew that kind of grief wasn’t healthy or normal at all. I felt like I really needed to lock things down. Channel the Jedi way a little more. Try to see the partners of my closest friends as something other than primary suspects in future homicide cases. It was difficult and I would’ve been thinking about it as our night’s adventure began if he’d been there. But he wasn’t. Finally, after two years, we were unsupervised. 

The more I traveled on tour, the more I enjoyed being at home. And even being with Molly in a dirty subway car felt calm. A return to a sentimental normalcy. When she asked me what the hell I’d been doing all summer before dropping out of the sky to invite her to see Green Day with me, I decided to start with what I’d been talking about in our group chat with Sadie. 

“I was asked to come work the show, which would’ve been cool. But no one got back to me until a few days ago at which point I’d already agreed to help stage manage this other show for a local theater festival but I saw I only had a matinee today which meant I’d still technically be free in the evening and I’m trying this thing now in my thirties where I’m aiming to have fun and not just work all the time so…” She looked at me funny trying to decipher my word salad and ended up shrugging. 

“This makes up for me never having seen MCR,” she says. 

“And this makes up for me never having seen Linkin Park,” I say. 

She tells me of her recent time in Spain, courtesy of the armed forces, and what a miserable but brief deployment it had been complete with building walls out of cinderblock all day and being at the mercy of officers who seemingly had nothing better to do than order them to do stupid and tedious tasks. 

“I did invite Kevin to the show,” she explains, “but he doesn’t like crowds.” For a guy who did ten years full time in the military as the bomb guy, I figure it’s best not to ask about that particular tidbit. 

“And how has the engaged life been?” I ask.

“Haven’t really had any time to process it. I had to go to Spain two seconds after I told my parents. Then I came back and started that new job I told you about which has been great but busy.” 

I can hear the rock music blaring the moment we’re back above ground. The Smashing Pumpkins are still on as one of three openers but the two of us decided we only had enough energy to see the main act in their entirety. Elbowing our way through the crowded stadium concourse is equal parts amusing and miserable. Seeing a show as a spectator was pretty rare for me but eventually, we settled into our seats just as the stage crew began working to prepare for the night’s main event. 

“So new job… definitely better than your old one?” I ask. She brightens up.

“Leagues! The people, the work, the location, it’s everything I wanted. Still can’t believe it worked out so well too. A pet peeve of mine is people endlessly complaining about their jobs so I’m glad I’m finally where I want to be and can just… chill. COVID really delayed so much.” I nod along. “I’ll need to enjoy this while it lasts,” she continues, “because we’re moving to DC.” 

Mental record scratch.

Rewind. 

“Huh?” I say dumbly. 

“Yeah uh… Kevin left the military a few months ago. Hasn’t liked being a civilian at all. So he’s joining the Secret Service. To do that, we need to relocate to Washington DC. Which means I need to find a new job.” Unprepared for that bombshell, I feel the wind knocked out of my sails. 

“No you don’t. If he’s gotta do secret service school or whatever he can go to DC on his own and come back on the weekends. Plenty of people make that commute. It kind of sucks but it’s not fair for you, with clear goals, to have to drop everything for a guy who frankly seems to change his career aspirations every six months. You’ve almost moved so many times to so many places. He had his chance. He missed it. This is absurd.”

“This isn’t like the other times. He’s more than qualified for the work. He’ll get through the training. I figure if we live at the end of the train line it won’t feel like living in a city.”

“I just spent half my summer living at the end of a DC metro line. It’s very much like living in a city. You wouldn’t like it. It’s expensive too. He can’t join the police? Become a fireman? Plenty of ex-military guys do if civilian life isn’t cutting it for them.” 

She explains the prestige of the position he’s after and I ask her if he’d ever mentioned the Secret Service before Trump’s near miss. She dodges a direct response and we are both silent for a few moments before she holds out her hand. 

“Look at my ring,” she says. 

I knew what her engagement ring looked like. She’d sent the photos to the group chat the same day it happened with no kind of caption or explanation. The first photo had been of Molly standing precariously on a cliff edge with her boyfriend down on one knee in front of her blocking her way to to any semblance of safety, the angle of his leg obtuse, emphasizing the uneven nature of the terrain as he slides a ring onto her finger. The second was a closeup of the object. Silver with two rabbits on it because Molly had always liked rabbits. 

Now in the stadium, I was at a loss for words. The feeling of acid filling up my insides was certainly not the Jedi way. I quietly wonder if she’d be acting this way if he hadn’t proposed. If they were still just simply dating. You see, Molly never overtly acted like she was hopelessly head over heels for anyone. She talked about boyfriends like they were a complicated research paper she had to hand in before the end of the semester. And when the one before Kevin didn’t work out she lamented that after all that work she put in, she’d have to start all over again, like that open document on her computer had been lost to the abyss.

But here she was three years later with a ring. She’d finally gotten to turn that paper in. 

“You’re really fine leaving this job?” I ask, grateful that Kevin couldn’t listen in on this conversation. 

“No. But… it’s not the end of the world. He really wants this position.” 

The lights in the stadium dim and the opening vocal harmonies of “Bohemian Rhapsody” fill the venue, the standard “Okay everyone get the fuck back to your seats” house cue for the start of a Green Day show. Molly shoots to her feet and I follow a split second behind thinking that my hearing must be really jacked up by this point in my life for me to not find my surroundings loud at all. 

The ride back to my apartment after the show is mostly quiet because we’re both exhausted after singing along to two full Green Day albums with thousands of other people. The topic of earlier in the night doesn’t get re-opened. 

Eating pizza in my apartment together feels like home. Being with Molly always feels like home. But vaguely similar to Kevin, I’ve put ten years into doing what I’m doing. I never know where I’ll be the next year or even the next month. My life is exciting and ever-changing. I’ve considered getting out. Considered going for something more traditionally civilian but… like Kevin, I know I’d get antsy. I know I’d want to go back out there and do something as hectic as what I was doing before. I am drawn to chaos. And the last thing I’d do, knowing I am who I am, is drag someone into my bullshit with a marriage proposal and expect them to follow me into the fire. That’s not the Jedi way. Not at all. 

“When will you be back in town?” Molly asks me as she prepares to leave. 

“Christmas,” I say. 

“Let’s plan something for New Years then. Kevin was asking when you’d be able to come by the house. He’s finally going to watch some Star Wars.” 

At that, I soften just the tiniest bit. 

“New Years sounds good. Just… make good choices, alright?” 

She groans at me as her car door closes behind her.

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At Christmas time that same year, my mother recounted that moment saying, “I was watching the two of you strut through New York side by side and I thought… the two of you will be alright once we’re gone,” she said, referring to my father and herself. “And it made me so happy.” 

In 2017 only four days before I was meant to move to my sister’s city to live with her for a summer contract job, I found myself in an unusually hostile confrontation where she loudly exclaimed that I was always ruining her life and it was our parents who just assumed she’d be okay with me sleeping on her couch for a few months and forced this situation upon her without thinking of her comfort. With twice the amount of vitriol but half the volume, I said I didn’t need her and four days later rolled up to a motel outside the city with my backpack, a duffle bag, an intense feeling of loneliness, and a bone-deep acceptance that in this life my sister was not to be relied on for anything of significance.

Growing up, it did not take all that long to realize that Katherine being five years older than me put just enough distance between us that she would find me a pain to be around. Of course, after realizing this, I went from wanting to be like her to instead going out of my way to say the most outrageous things I could think of whenever I caught up to her and her friends like rambling about space invasions, torture techniques, or highly obscure Star Wars topics. But that was when we were young. We were also still young, relatively speaking, when our other notably heated argument got triggered by me saying her sorority sisters were fake sisters, and that she shouldn’t be going on and on about sisterhood when she’s got a real sister she doesn’t care about at all. In hindsight, that was an unnecessary instigation on my part but was indicative of how the nature of our relationship with each other made me feel by the time I was in high school and she was in college.

So in 2024 when word spread that I’d secured my third contract job in her city to date, I was bewildered when she texted me saying that one of her law school friends would be hosting her annual summer solstice backyard BBQ and that she wanted to bring me along because her friends had heard all about me and have been waiting for an opportunity to meet me. 

“You talk about me to your friends?” I asked. 

“Of course I do,” she said. 

Carrying the scar of an argument from seven years ago in the way my friend tells me only a Scorpio can, I agreed to the invitation with no small amount of suspicion. But as the date grew closer, I felt myself getting a little nervous. For the first time in my entire life, Katherine wanted me to spend time with her and her friends with no parents in sight to please at thirty and thirty-five years old respectively.

Meeting at her apartment to watch part of a soccer game before the party is my first time in her space since getting a quick glance at her freshman college dorm. Unsurprisingly, it’s very messy with clothes, cosmetic products, books, and craft supplies everywhere. It’s all very gray but smells of scented candles. I sit on the couch adjacent to her and begin contributing to the commentary about the match as she works on her latest crochet project. Internally, I puzzle more over how bizarre I am finding this moment.

Katherine hates anyone who isn’t her cat occupying her space. She won’t even have random Tinder dates come back to her dwelling, choosing instead to spend the night in the bed of an unknown man. But I also think about how her life has changed over the past few years. The passion that landed her in law school in the first place had faded, she’d been desperately trying to get a new job at a place that was more in line with her interests but has had no success, all of her friends had gotten married, she’d traveled to several countries around the world in organized travel group tours, and she’d watched one of her closest friends from her law school days die rather quickly after a cancer diagnosis that came too late. This wasn’t the same Katherine from 2017. Not really.

But in the end, I internally doubled down on what I felt deeply to be true: I simply cannot trust her when it really counts, even if I wanted to. And so this time we were spending together was little more than a well-rehearsed performance. I was very familiar with performance, after all. 

It turns out that the party was exceedingly normal. The natural flow of the group conversation inevitably ended up with me re-telling stories from my time on the road, even the most mundane of which seemed to captivate my newfound audience. Not a week later, the host of the party and her husband accompanied my sister to visit the event I’d been working on and we walked around the festival site for a good three hours before they went on their way. Until that day, my sister had never come out to see anything I’d ever worked on, not even the times I’d lived and done work in her city just a handful of blocks away from where she worked.

Now in my final days of the two of us being in the same metropolitan area, I have been invited to yet another party hosted by one of her friends and I’m honestly quite beside myself with shock. 

“The two of you have matured,” my mother says when I mention how unusual I find this situation. “You need to understand that Katherine is very proud of you,” she says not for the first time. I have nothing to offer in response except doubt. After all, this is the same person who said I ruined her life, who wasn’t worth nearly as much as random girls in her sorority, who never reached out to me about anything when I was in town whether I was living in a motel room or a dodgy efficiency room above a bar, who said she wouldn’t want me anywhere near her hypothetical wedding, who considers me to be a complete freak and never said anything remotely close to “sorry” about any of it. 

“She likes my resume,” I say, alluding to the big concert stories her friends had been so captivated by. 

“She loves you,” my mother insists before adding, “Holding a grudge is not the Jedi way.” 

It’s silly, I know. For someone who talks quite a bit about the importance of bonds between women, it’s laughable that my insides turn to wood around my own flesh and blood sister. 

It would be nice if this summer was the start of something new. I just can’t believe that it is. So in that sense, even if I can observe that in some ways she has changed, I haven’t. I suppose that means the ball is in my court and I have a little more growing up to do.

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“You look fine to me,” I say. 

“But my outfit isn’t projecting androgynous.” My brain begins to buffer. The thought of my roommate appearing to anyone as anything other than a human female seemed highly unlikely. However, she kept speaking. “It’s just so effortless for you,” she says. Cue a fresh wave of confusion. 

I wasn’t exactly a stranger to being mistaken for a male. It would happen from time to time typically in the winter when I’d be the most covered up. But I remember as a kid at summer camp the absolute horror on a cafeteria lady’s face when we’d gone through a whole (albeit brief) interaction with her thinking I was a boy but somehow at the end, she realized I was a girl then launched into a long string of apologies. I didn’t understand why she was so flustered. Me being a boy or girl wasn’t relevant to getting my lunch on a plate. But even with my clothing choices since my pre-teen years favoring the side of the store labeled “men’s,” I’d never been called something like androgynous. 

Through further reflection, this category of vocabulary was likely tucked away in favor of the more simple “proper” and “improper.” For church, I would need to wear proper clothes. Going to the department store with my mother and automatically finding myself in front of a rack of Star Wars t-shirts saw me getting tugged away for being improper because what would two ladies be doing on the men’s side of the store? What if someone saw us? When I got to make my own clothing decisions, I knew I technically wasn’t buying things made with my body type in mind, but it all still fit, and I’d had a few conversations with people who were surprised when I’d say everything I was wearing came from the men’s department. They couldn’t tell. As far as I was concerned, the moment those clothes came off the rack they weren’t men’s clothes or women’s clothes, they were my clothes and I happened to be a woman so… derive from that what you will. I wasn’t aiming for a masculine presentation or a feminine presentation or even an androgynous presentation, I was looking for a Star Wars t-shirt, a solid pair of cargo pants, and a denim jacket with (and this is important) inside pockets. 

“How much would it cost to get this tailored?” I ask a men’s formalwear store employee, holding up a vest. Formalwear, in my mind, came with hard and fast nonsensical rules that I’d long since felt didn’t apply to casualwear but I’d finally worked up the nerve to try to find something that was actually comfortable and stylistically appealing to wear to church or anywhere else that warranted dressing up. All the characters in my favorite old TV westerns had three-piece suits so I wanted a three-piece suit too. And now that I was fresh out of college with a paycheck in my pocket after coming home from my first tour, I was ready to dress to impress. The employee looked at me awkwardly.

“We can’t tailor for you here,” he said. But I gesture to the sign right next to him that says this is the corner of the shop where in-store tailoring was clearly being advertised. “We only tailor for men,” he clarifies. 

“It’s basically my size though,” I try to explain, saying it’s just the sides that need taking in. I’d heard my father say all my life that an untailored suit said a lot of things about you, none of them good. “Is it that hard to do?” 

“We can only tailor for men,” he repeats. 

I shuffle off to the side, confused by what had just happened and start to become self-conscious about being the only woman in the store. A different employee makes his way over to me and asks if I’m shopping for someone. 

“Nope. Just for me,” I say. 

“Oh,” he says. 

“I was hoping to get this tailored here?” I try, testing the waters. But I get the same response. I’d come too far though. I go to the register, buy the vest, and leave more determined than when I came in. I was an adult, after all. I had a college degree, a debit card, and a supercomputer in my pocket in the form of a smartphone that could direct me to every tailor shop on the planet.

A few months later, the living room erupts with hysterics. 

“Go change into something proper,” my father says over the tune of “oh no” from my grandmother. 

“This is proper. And quite expensive.” I’d matched the tweed vest with black wool pants and a white cotton shirt. I’d even put a necklace on! “Something feminine,” he clarifies. “This isn’t appropriate for your grandmother’s church.” 

“They’ll think you’re my grandson!” she says, already tugging at the threads. 

“Everyone in the congregation knows who I am and even if they didn’t, I am clearly female,” I push back. But I wasn’t too keen on giving my grandmother a heart attack and knew that is what I’d be blamed for if I carried this on much further so I went upstairs and changed. 

“Now you just look like a nun,” my sister says in response to me wearing my shin-length skirt, unchanged white shirt, and a sweater vest. The whole thing evoked the vibe of my schooldays more than anything. But for me, that was comfortable too. 

“See? That wasn’t so hard,” my mother says to me on our way out to the car. 

Nowadays, these words seem to be everywhere often shortened to the more en vogue masc or femme which half the time will involve some discussion about gender identity. But it will appear just as much in feminist circles that want nothing to do with, at the very least, anything on the trans side of gender. 

“I think you should instead use more specific words to clarify what you mean,” I say to a trans-critical feminist who has proclaimed that she simply likes feeling feminine. She doesn’t understand what I’m saying. “For example, I could point to a pink shirt and call it a feminine shirt. Or I could just say it’s a pink shirt.” She claims that this method of reframing wouldn’t work for what she’s talking about. “Terms like femininity are a product of male doctrine,” I say. “I think we can reach more clarity if we simply say what we mean rather than defaulting to it. You’ll see people all day on the internet enthusiastically talking about trendy terms like toxic masculinity or the patriarchy but many will be stopped in their tracks if you say male violence or the male subjugation of women. Because it’s too specific. It forces you to acknowledge what is actually being spoken about.” 

I recall a fateful shopping trip in high school, still wearing a knee brace as part of my ACL surgery recovery process and my mother and sister took me through DSW for my first pair of heels. Due to my reluctance, I am accused of never wanting to be proper which I can now interpret as being told that I never want to be feminine. 

“Is it improper to not want to voluntarily give myself a handicap?” I ask. Sure, the shoe before me could be described as a representation of femininity. But I had jumped to the more specific wording of restrictive and believe one can make of that what they will. My mother interpreted this as me hating myself as a woman. I assured her that wearing such footwear was a far more definitive sign of self-hatred or, at the very least, a sign of being confused, stupid, or nonsensical. I could probably make it to my bus stop hopping on one foot. I could get really good at it and say it’s easy or even comfortable. But the question will always remain why the hell am I choosing to hop to my bus stop on one foot?

Somewhere in the barrage of internet posts about this year’s Met Gala, I happened upon a short clip of Rihanna from the event some number of years ago, arriving on the red carpet in a gold dress that draped behind her all the way down the staircase like something straight out of a Disney fairytale. The music in the clip supported this with a man gushing about this moment being a representation of the American dream. In my view, I was witnessing what is often packaged as the dream a girl should have: Entering the room, all eyes on you, because you are stunning, graceful, gorgeous, and desirable in a notably carnal way… but also untouchable… for the moment. It reminded me of the rituals carried out at my friend’s wedding. When the groom walked down the aisle to take his position, it was nothing special. But when she walked in? The music changed. It swelled. Everyone rose to their feet. All eyes were on her in her dress that draped behind her. 

It disgusted me as much as it terrified me. And all these months later I’m still trying to articulate why I experienced such a visceral reaction. 

It’s not a hatred of myself specifically or women as a whole. I think it is a hatred of how we are framed by male scripture, by male language, and by male values. It was a set of values that I was aware existed but, for whatever reason, didn’t feel touched my world that much growing up. I had compartmentalized it away without knowing it. The absence of boys in my schooling brought other values to the forefront, values of academic or creative accomplishments, finding a common groove in teamwork, and being acknowledged for your unique strengths within that team or as an individual. I never thought of beauty or desire. There was little to no value there. I thought of creation and adventure. That’s why I assume even the concept of having a body image was foreign to me. It wasn’t something that would compute with my value structure and I figured all the girls around me were the same. Because this was our world, our society, our home in that place.

And it’s really these comparatively little things: The heels, the makeup, the grand fairytale entrance… that I presume set me off because they are accessories to the body of the beast that I am far more aware of now than I was as a child, a reminder of the cage that encases all women no matter how comfortable we make it for ourselves as individuals. I am presented with it and lash out in response because it feels as though there is nothing to be done about it. It makes me think of a time my mother finally did let me take that Star Wars t-shirt and cargo pants off the rack and smuggle it to the girl’s dressing room at Macy’s. 

“You can choose to hide yourself in these clothes but that will just fuel the imaginations of any boy that looks at you,” she said. I was taken aback. I hadn’t been thinking about boys at all. Boys weren’t part of my world. They were just signs in department stores and Jedi knights galaxies away.

I wasn’t hiding, not consciously. I wasn’t rebelling, not consciously. I just liked Star Wars and I liked collecting rocks and other things I’d find outside in my pockets. And if I think back over my whole life, such a monumental moment at Macy’s had been turned upside down to represent something else: My first acute sinking feeling that something beyond my control was horribly wrong.

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“No,” I can’t help but think in these moments. “You were probably born just like me, but your track of development happened to include a certain type of gravitation toward other people, a gravitation that would later be reflected on and understood to be the emerging of your sexual orientation as defined in the modern era.” 

That was my view from the outside, anyway. The view of the people around me gradually losing their minds to what I’m told is an intrinsic part of being human. Running off with the milkmaid and all that. Classic young love. Something celebrated these days when just a couple of centuries ago it was cautioned against because of the extent to which it could derail the stability of the larger clan. The path of Romeo and Juliet was not a recommendation, is all I’m saying. One wild weekend of hormonal absurdity and they both ended up dead (spoiler alert). But I digress. 

Sure, something happened to me. Something happened to all of us. Development is complex and beyond anyone’s control. How you feel about others is not a choice, but I also do not think who we grow up to fancy is pre-determined by our DNA and, to my knowledge, no one has been able to provide biological evidence that accurately predicts a newborn’s eventual sexuality or any number of feelings that would make up one’s emotional profile. Insisting otherwise for the sake of publicity and political causes is one thing. But it’s just us here right now. You and me. So I’m trying to be real. 

With that in mind, let’s continue.

I’ve been unsure whether or not I should write this piece mostly because I don’t wish to sound repetitive in what I put on this Substack. I’ve certainly written quite a few things that allude to or tie in sexuality in one way or another despite my professed lack of credentials for speaking on the topic at all. Another way of saying that would be that I’ve told stories for which these terms and feelings were relevant to the tale. But I don’t feel like I’ve ever pulled up a chair and talked about it outright. A big part of me did not want to. After all, one complaint I have is that people talk about this stuff far too much.

But I guess I’m setting out to be a hypocrite no matter which way you slice it. Because for all people talk about this stuff, I still feel like I perhaps have something of value to say for someone out there who might stumble upon this. Two works from others that have motivated me to do this are a RedFem podcast episode titled “Asexuality, the Logic of Pornography,” and the second part specifically of a four-part blog post from StoryEndingNever titled “Forced Sexuality.” I definitely recommend subscribing to both the RedFem podcast and the StoryEndingNever blog.

While I obviously might not always agree with everything the three women behind these works have to say, I find engaging with their work valuable because it is informative and enlightening and I’ll be referencing these two works at various points in this post. I’m a little concerned that compared to them I might come off as stupid or, at the very least, not academic. But this Substack was never meant to be “academic.” It’s mostly me telling stories and indulgently speaking of my own experiences, often leaving the ground more or less open for what any given reader derives from such stories. I imagine the result of this piece will ultimately be similar.

PART I: PURPOSE OF TERMINOLOGY

I’ve always thought that it’s a bit strange that there is a special word for someone who has never had sex. These days, I’m far from alone in that thought. The existence of the word “virgin” is not too much unlike the designation of “Mrs.” versus “Miss” in the English language, these markers put on women to denote their property status. Now of course we have “Ms.” Good for us, I guess, keeping it ambiguous. But with “virgin” you inevitably run into matters of wider purity culture which goes hand in hand with rape culture which all serves a male value system under which women, just like animals or a field of crops, are a resource to be relentlessly mined until we are destroyed. 

But even beyond that, what are other examples of words that specify someone who has never done something? I could list a few words for people who don’t take certain actions currently that hold an implication that they also plan to not take certain actions in the future. But they speak nothing of the past. They speak nothing of someone’s entire history up until that point. 

A celibate person is someone who doesn’t have sex. A sober person is someone who doesn’t drink alcohol. A vegetarian is someone who doesn’t eat meat. Is there a word for someone who never went to college? Is there a word for a person who never murdered anyone? Is there a word for someone who never learned how to ride a bike or how to swim? Someone who can’t cook? Can’t hunt? Can’t grow things? Can’t get a fire started? How about someone who hasn’t yet lost their baby teeth? There might be a medical term for that, but I’m unsure (I’m going to bring up those teeth again later because I’ve got a bone to pick about that - pun intended). 

I’m trying to think of things considered important by global society consistently throughout history and coming up with blanks. I guess if you can’t read you’re called illiterate. But that’s just a modification of “literate.” What’s the opposite of a virgin? Not a virgin. Not college educated. Not a murderer. See? I don’t think that counts as a word or phrase in and of itself. So “virgin” really is a standout, something that immediately highlights the level at which sexual intercourse is valued. One’s first time marks a turning point that changes one's entire designation. Somewhat similarly, I’ve found it strange that of all the things to have a special word for, we have an increasingly complex list of terms to describe who any given person would like to engage with sexually, virgin or not. But let’s rewind a bit.  

For a long time, even before the first Tribe Member of the Month was crowned after figuring out how to make fire happen, it is my assumption (given my distinct lack of anthropological knowledge) that the way of the world was that the strong would rape the weak and continue on with their day. Everyone else would have to just roll with it. As is observed in many other creatures, that essentially always means that males would rape females or weaker males. If females escaped this fate, they would simply live out the rest of their short lives and die off. They’d be removed from the gene pool through not reproducing. Lost to the stars. But for those who couldn’t get away, the cycle of violence would continue. 

Her daughter would be raped, as would her granddaughter, and so on and so forth for thousands of generations until over time, getting caught may even be seen as the more desirable outcome due to various social factors. Or it may even feel organic. Getting caught by one male over another male might be preferred even absent any intrinsic sexual desire. As StoryEndingNever pointed out quite bluntly, males will fuck anything. There are plenty of emergency room stories to support that claim. But for men to fuck a woman specifically comes with added benefits that can’t be provided by a warm piece of bread or an unsuspecting farm animal. 

That is likely why at some point over those thousands of generations, given the fact that males will fuck anything, some males in the group would no doubt find it beneficial to rein that behavior in a little. For among males, there is always a hierarchy and within that hierarchy, the quest for power and control is neverending. Thus, in my uneducated opinion, organized religion was born and all dominant religions of the modern era just so happened to have a lot to say about what males should be fucking and under which conditions the fucking should occur to maintain a properly functioning male society. 

Normal males became distinct from afflicted males. Normal males would fuck females, even ones they technically weren’t supposed to be fucking. Afflicted males would fuck other males, inanimate objects, or their own fists. Females are not real people within the context of male rule, so their desire is irrelevant at best and outright denied as a thing that exists in the first place at worst. They are objects from which to mine resources like offspring, male sexual satisfaction, and all labor related to those two things.

Male worship of their own penises evolved. Honorable males kept up appearances enough to satiate their social circle. Chivalry or other professed codes of honor became a thing in some places. The status quo grew to punish males who put their dicks in the wrong places (funny that sodomy is its own special word too). Females, widely considered crazy already if showing any resistance to any of this would be deemed particularly crazy for wanting to engage sexually with other females (though even today this is often not considered to be “real sex” because no dicks are involved). 

Nonetheless, progress was made after another hundred generations or so and within the past hundred years in particular. A decent amount of people began to admit that yes, they masturbate. Heterosexuality was coined to describe the default (though after thousands of generations of rape, male rule, and the ideologies that keep the machine going, I hesitate to agree with that for many of the reasons more articulately outlined by StoryEndingNever), homosexuality was coined to acknowledge the affliction later upgraded to be a simple difference in preference in some parts of the world. Then came bisexuality and the rest of the alphabet… including asexuality. 

So considering the ordeal of everything I just outlined, I am making it known that while I certainly understand why these terms exist, and while I certainly understand the communication benefits of using such terms, and while I don’t deny that consistent patterns of sexual interest exist in most people, I personally maintain that no matter how “progressive” we make sexuality terminology it remains a product of male culture. As such, I find it exhausting that this all remains so central to our conceptualization of humanity and our most valued relationships. I also wonder what language would look like in an alternate timeline where things did not play out as they did in our own reality. Star Wars, as a flimsy example that is far from a feminist utopia but claims that sexism is not a thing there despite clear examples pointing out otherwise, does not canonically have any in-universe sexuality terms. Though the people in the Star Wars galaxy have certainly noticed that they experience certain patterns of sexual interest and often say so quite plainly to the audience who then go wild assigning the corresponding terminology and flags of our own world to them. 

But it is what it is. Avoiding these words, as demonstrated in Star Wars, would do little but perhaps attempt to obscure a readily observable reality just like, in my opinion, coming up with the ownership-neutral alternative “Ms.” which also obscures a readily observable reality still reinforced by things like wedding rings and naming conventions. So no, I’m not coming for anyone’s words. But I do think that’s what makes it particularly interesting that when it comes to asexuality, the simple usage of that word can sometimes be seen as controversial. 

PART II: DEFINING SEXUALITY AND ITS ABSENCE

At first, I was surprised that out of all places to begin a larger discussion about asexuality, the hosts of the RedFem podcast, Jen and Hannah, decided to start with Stonewall’s definition of the word. Given how essentially every other organization in the Western world advocating for any and all things “queer” can’t even define what a lesbian or a woman is anymore for that matter, it’s funny that Stonewall, unpopularly known as a champion of transing children, would be seen as an authority on defining asexuality. 

Despite saying that, Stonewall’s definition is unfortunately consistent with the popular understanding of the word in its context as a sexual orientation. Compared to “homosexual” or even “lesbian,” “asexual” hasn’t been used to describe humans for nearly as long. Some feminists used the word fifty years ago here and there but they used it primarily as a secular alternative to the term “celibate” rather than to describe someone who seemingly lacked sexual inclinations outright which didn’t happen until the 2000’s and did not gain any traction until the 2010’s. Not because it’s a new thing, but because I figure most people (me included) never organically thought to give this lack of feeling a special name that described a wider phenomenon. That left more than enough room for the definition of asexuality to become effectively meaningless as inclusion warriors flooded in and decided that an asexual person is someone who either doesn’t experience sexual attraction or someone who only experiences sexual attraction… sometimes. This encompasses literally everyone. As such, an asexual person is anyone who identifies as asexual. 

Prior to that, ever so briefly, it was defined as someone who does not experience sexual attraction, full stop. And out of all the crazy terms being thrown around in modern circles concerned about such things, presuming that somewhere out there in a world where there are people who experience attraction to one sex or both sexes, the thought that there must exist some number of people who do not demonstrate attraction to either sex doesn’t seem like a big leap of logic. If I were a betting woman, I’d bet on it. It’s nowhere near as much of a leap of insanity as believing that some women actually have the internal gender spirit of a man. But the former contradicts the steadfastly held belief that we are all sexual beings as a prerequisite for being human and the latter coincidentally in a roundabout way helps set things straight for those who maintain that a man and woman being together sexually is the natural order of things if the alarming amount of lesbian women considered to be “masculine” (yet another term rooted in male doctrine) suddenly discovering that they’re really men are anything to go by… ignoring the fact that the whole idea of “masc-femme” or “top-bottom” homosexual pairings is not a rule of engagement.

Hannah reads through the Stonewall explanation that asexuals might also use terms like lesbian, straight, gay, or bi in conjunction with asexuality opening up the discussion on the concept of split attraction (that romantic attraction and sexual attraction are two distinctly separate things). Jen chimes in right away that it is impossible to be an asexual lesbian because if you are a woman who is not sexually attracted to other women, how are you a lesbian? But shortly thereafter, Jen brings up her own definition of sexuality that is not defined by who you want to have sex with but describes it rather as a larger both conscious and subconscious thing that touches many areas of life. She tends to agree with the theories laid out by Sigmund Freud who I believe was instrumental in her PhD work. 

One example she uses is a friend of hers who got very jealous when she got a girlfriend back in school. While Jen does not believe her friend had non-platonic feelings for her, she uses this as an example of the blurred reach of subconscious sexuality extending to other areas of life yet also likens it to the concept of sibling rivalry and does not expand further on that point. More concretely, she then points out that every asexual she has heard of still masturbates thus making them not asexual but rather autoerotic. The sexual feelings of that person fail to find an object (which is how many coincidentally define asexuality). I believe the point she’s making here is that in these examples, sexuality is muted, distorted, or otherwise repressed but still present. Should whatever limiting factors that exist go away or should the right conditions be met, these things would easily point to being heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual.

Jen also expresses the view that should a woman be so traumatized by relations with men that she becomes unable to feel sexual attraction toward them and as a result only feels sexual attraction toward women, she sympathizes with that and takes no issue with that woman calling herself a lesbian. And while Jen maintains that there is no such thing as asexuality, she similarly thinks that anyone who feels they genuinely experience no sexual attraction to anyone at all is that way due to similar past traumas, naturally low libido, libido-suppressing drugs, or something related to those things explaining that even though she is a lesbian, she hasn’t fancied anyone in years and that most married couples stop having sex after seven years but neither of those things makes someone a newly discovered asexual. 

From my perspective, I’m really open to any number of explanations. I’ve already outlined why I find all of this terminology a bit exhausting in the first place, though because I nonetheless find the topic interesting, when discussing it I’m more on a mission to figure out how the person I’m talking to is defining things then frame myself or others within those definitions to see where that discussion might go. For Jen, I imagine I would be the low-libido person who simply hasn’t got a clue what is going on. I’m not the woman who knew she liked other women when she was four or the woman who had her first crush on a boy in pre-school or the woman who had a bisexual awakening via Shego from Kim Possible. I just simply… don’t know. Have never happened upon the right person. I have an inconclusive set of data to be understood somewhere down the line or have concocted an internal block so powerful I have managed to fool myself into my thirties. So let’s go with that. 

As a small child, there were many things said to be part of my future that were unappealing to me. The first was the prospect of losing my baby teeth. It seemed bizarre, painful, and scary. I told myself that my teeth were perfectly fine as they were. I even mysteriously already had extra teeth in my mouth which pointed even more to the feeling that perhaps I was some kind of exception with my special shark teeth. They wouldn’t simply fall out like everyone else’s. But then they did (though quite a few more were forcibly extracted to make the inside of my mouth look like it was supposed to on the charts thus kickstarting my phobia of dentists). 

Next, I learned of menstruation, another bloody affair that sounded even more horrific than the gore of losing your teeth. But I told myself that this wouldn’t happen to me. These things I am told exist inside of me are not actually there or else surely I would know about it. I was different somehow. Perhaps I wasn’t even fully human. This thing would not happen to me. But then it did. 

I’ve written before about how at no point in my childhood did I equate love with marriage. Marriage was very procedural. An important strategic move to make in one’s life and a duty to fulfill. It’s why I figured the powers that be were so against same-sex marriage. It’s against the rules and I was certainly a rule follower. Not much better than Romeo and Juliet poisoning themselves, insisting on same-sex unions would have you booted from your home and left to waste away in the wilderness. It was better to follow the script until a time when the rule book might change. 

“After five years of dating I suppose it would be appropriate to hold hands,” I said to the amusement of my family as a pre-teen. “But we would need to do that for another five years before agreeing to marry. The wedding would take at least two years to plan but at the wedding would be our first kiss,” I said, figuring that by twelve years in surely it wouldn’t kill me to kiss this faceless, hypothetical man. “Hopefully if we had enough money we could live in separate houses most of the time,” I said imagining that once marriage occurred it was within the marriage contract to have sex once or twice for the sake of reproduction for which I could be heavily intoxicated as adults like to do or just unconscious entirely. “But of course, we’d come to dinner as a couple for the holidays. And I suppose… I’d be getting buried with his family instead of with you all once I die.” That idea at the end somehow saddened me the most. 

“Yeah, you’re gonna have to give that guy a lot of money to put up with her,” my older sister tells our parents. I didn’t see the problem. I was agreeing with the terms of polite society. I was also confident that with marriage being an adult matter,  it would be a long time before any of this would become a reality or even relevant. I was focused on friendship, something incredibly age-appropriate. And if the best-case scenario for marriage was marrying your best friend (something I took literally because I thought sexuality was something only experienced by men), perhaps before all these things came to pass the rules would change and my life teammate would be a girl for all of my friends were girls and boys were very much an unknown factor at my all girls school. Or perhaps I’d just be so vile to any future suitors that I could be a failure just in that aspect of life, leaving me free to spend time with whoever I wanted, perhaps traversing the world or even becoming an astronaut rather than staying trapped in a house being raped for the good of society. 

Years went by. The reality of my situation was far less archaic than I had initially anticipated. Those around me formed infatuations with others but I did not. In college, I learned through conversations with other women that there is such a thing as sexual pleasure for female humans just like for male humans. I learned that women have the ability to masturbate. I learned that sex toys are a thing. I learned that women genuinely wanted to have sex. But I didn’t. I still felt nothing. To this day I can only guess what sexual pleasure or arousal feels like through descriptions and context clues. I waited for the other shoe to drop just like I had various times before. But it didn’t. 

I never touched contraceptives, was never put on any medication aside from cold medicine or a temporary antibiotic. My skin was clear. My period came like clockwork every month. I always recieved a clean bill of health for college athletics. Life moved on. I forgot about all this stuff I was supposed to be doing. I was a roadie now, after all. Sleeping on a tour bus, traveling the country and eventually the world putting on shows of all genres and sizes. Normal people were back home doing what normal people do. But as years went by, my friends and colleagues on the road began to date. They’d tour less. They’d get married and stop touring altogether. I went from being the youngest person on a touring crew to the oldest. I began to worry what would happen to me if I ever got off the road, if I remained at home to see the reality of going off script set in. Would I be lonely? If I told a friend I wanted to be her teammate in life, or if I simply wanted to spend more time together generally, would she reject me? Would anyone even consider me a legitimate partner if sex was not in the cards? If they did, would that - funnily enough - be the key to a severely delayed sexual awakening? Am I some kind of frog prince? That’s an amusing theory. 

Without any history of sex, does a partnership have any legitimacy whatsoever? According to male doctrine, certainly not. Am I still in a limbo of not truly understanding myself? Was my willpower so strong that I managed to override these feelings that are thought to be a prerequisite for being human just like Harry Potter begging the sorting hat to not put him into Slytherin? 

Who’s to say? More than that, does this matter? Would I be having this conversation with you if we didn’t have all these special words to converse with? 

PART III: CONSIDERING OTHER NARRATIVES

There’s a book that came out recently called The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center by Rhaina Cohen. A self-described bisexual woman married to a man, I became aware of the book when she started making the rounds on various podcasts, eventually guesting on one that was reposted to a radfem-adjacent online space I was in. I’ve ordered the book out of curiosity for future reading, but as of yet have not read it myself. I have listened to probably five or six hours of her speaking about the book on different podcasts though so feel I get the jist of what’s going on there. 

Despite my somewhat unpopular approach to the topic of sexuality in large, an opinion I find not uncommonly held by others including by Rhaina Cohen, Jen and Hannah of the RedFem podcast, StoryEndingNever, numerous feminists I’ve encountered in online spaces, and from those I interact with face to face is that as a culture we really have put sex and romance on a pedestal which has resulted in things like friendship being relegated to something juvenile and, past a certain point, negligible or even tedious. 

What Jen and Hannah primarily describe about asexuality, is that this enduring non-definition of the word including the entire “asexual spectrum” like “demisexual” or “graysexual,” follows the logic of pornography in that no matter what the situation is, the woman in particular is always down to have sex. Porn logic dictates that everyone is wanting to have sex all the time and at any given appropriate (or even inappropriate) opportunity, sex should be occurring if you are normal. That is how for young girls in particular, anything less than hypersexuality puts you somewhere on the “asexual spectrum” which is complete rubbish and a very sad way to view life. Still, this is the result of a relentless wave of sex positivity and the neverending discourse and obsession with bestowing upon everyone some kind of sexuality label that is seen as key to understanding their true selves. 

StoryEndingNever describes how no matter if someone is homosexual, heterosexual, or bisexual, all generally agree that asexuality isn’t natural if not impossible. Further than that, she describes the obvious centrality of sexual intercourse when speaking about sexuality. Even I have written before about how on one hand, many are offended if you mention this centrality because to do so is some type of fetishization of the relationship, but the second you remove sexual intercourse from the equation it is seen as even more offensive by denying their intrinsic nature as human beings. To quote from StoryEndingNever directly:

“It is my contention that sexuality is completely contrived and agenda- and entitlement-driven. I think that all defined sexualities are choices and fuelled by pressure to be sexual beings and by falsely equating or linking love and sexual activity or sex drive. Even homosexuals are affected by heterosexual male thinking and believe that love is dependent upon fucking. If there is no sex or if the sex dissipates in a relationship, then the relationship is in trouble. No sex = no love = no relationship. Relationships only exist if there is a defined sexuality. And it is because of this that I believe that homosexuality is also enforced (i.e., if you are not straight then you MUST be gay). If you don’t choose a sexuality, then you will never find love or be loved. Queer nonsense doesn’t solve this problem, by the way.”

And she is right. In the ever-accepting online purgatory of asexual discourse, most people spend all their time hyping themselves up to have sex anyway to make a relationship happen, admit to liking sex just as much as porn might expect them to, or complain about every instance of being excluded from an acronym or flag display that, in their view, would lend legitimacy to whatever it is they’re trying to sell about themselves. It is a sea of absurdity laying there in plain sight on Stonewall’s definition page or otherwise to be ridiculed as much as it deserves. 

My main question is and has long been: What does a meaningful partnership with someone inherently have to do with sex? That is a question Rhaina no doubt encountered in the interviews for her book which included self-described asexuals and other assortments of dedicated platonic partnerships. It’s a question that maybe not a lot of other people consider because, reportedly, most people enjoy having sex at one point or another. They get something out of that kind of closeness that makes them feel valued so pursuing a partnership with that person is convenient for not feeling shitty. 

But I think the obvious answer here is that partnership really doesn’t inherently have anything to do with sex. Any two people can decide to be together for any reason. However, after a thousand generations of rape and another thousand generations of trying to assign meaning to it, and a hundred years or so of reciprocal sexual desire being acknowledged and acted upon for all types of people, we’ve ended up here where “reimagining life with friendship at the center” is framed as some kind of groundbreaking idea. Intellectually, I understand where others are coming from. But surely, I figure it can’t be that hard to intellectually understand where I’m coming from either. 

Jen and Hannah bring up the idea of sexual value and how this is something of high importance to women in particular in a male society where appealing sexually to others is the most important thing they have going for them. Jen even reflects on how not understanding this at first resulted in her giving her friends relationship advice that they were never going to follow, advice that centered on dumping the man and going off on their own to actually accomplish something which I found funny and incredibly relatable. 

Another idea that is recurring through many RedFem podcast episodes is how women place heightened importance on relationships in general, romantic or otherwise. A woman by herself is not a person, she is just a reflection of her relationships. If she has none, then she feels she has no value. They reference a thought put forward by Andrea Dworkin to counter this, one that links happiness to thinking of yourself and your life’s work in the context of lifetimes, the result of investing in something larger than yourself making your life meaningful. This is something I have espoused many times in past writings, an enduring drive and desire to be good at something, to contribute to something that I felt really mattered. Of course in the context of a male society, my younger self equated that with military service or something similar which Jen has pointed out seems to be a big draw for many a lesbian trying to fit somewhere in the world around them.   

I do however feel balance is important and care quite a bit about friendship, more than what tends to be socially expected. I’ve wrestled with the most appropriate way to go about it ever since I was a teenager and came to understand the reality of relationship hierarchies. My solution has simply been to move forward, go to work, keep in touch, and hope for the best. Do not feel dismayed playing a bigger part in some chapters of the lives of friends than others. If somewhere down the line someone I make a good team with wants to take a chance with me in a more formal sense… we’ll cross that bridge when we get there. But I’m really not counting on it anytime soon if ever.

StoryEndingNever speaks about her sexual pursuits as a young lesbian and how sex was the main thing on her mind, confused when an older lesbian she was with had different priorities. But as she has aged, things have inevitably cooled down and the type of partnership she would be the most open to is one that is distinctly asexual in nature, something I believe is fairly common across the board once you reach a certain age. Perhaps at that point in life I’ll be sitting with peers over tea or cold glasses of lemonade. They’ll entertainingly bond over their similar trajectories, appreciating the journey and valuing the role it played in their lives but celebrating their return to sanity whether they be partnered, divorced, dating, or single.

After all, they were born this way.  

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