Early on I learned that if I could wear the right clothes, look the right way, at least in part, I could pass as normal. When my best friend Emily was pregnant with her first child, she was very sick, most notably during a Globe Theater performance, which she valiantly sat through in order to […]
Over the almost 40 years that I’ve been on this planet, I’ve absorbed the message — whether it’s about my hair, pale skin, or the size of particular body parts — that I’m too much. I was an unusually hairy kid. For me, it was the thick, black hair that blanketed my milky white legs […]
The Eye was so much more than a passive watcher. It was a pervasive social force with a destructive aim. But I wouldn’t fully understand this until, finally, I experienced life without it. The Eye started following me at puberty. It watched me from building sites and vehicles and outside pubs. Until seven months ago, its […]
I didn’t want to always have to pay attention to my body. I wanted to have a life. Women are not supposed to talk about their periods, we have to be discreet and hide the fact that we have them every month. Luckily, more women are publicly talking about periods these days. For example, photographer Rupi Kaur […]
Since Eve first realized she was naked and scrambled to cover her shame with fig leaves, feminists have been divided over the question of how to return dignity and humanity to the female body. It was apparently a fraught decision for the avid bell hooks reader, but after a bit of back and forth the […]
