Kara > Books: 2016-read‎ (157)

“It literally never occurred to me that Princess Beige would ever be in a love triangle.”

“It’s really more like a love angle since Seth and I aren’t also dating. It’s just two lines pointing toward you.”

“That makes sense geometrically, I guess. Except Sofia’s 1st law is that no lines ever point toward me.”

“Sofia, you are so smart about everything besides judging people, and that includes yourself. You don’t have any idea how special you are.”

“It literally never occurred to me that Princess Beige would ever be in a love triangle.”

“It’s really more like a love angle since Seth and I aren’t also dating. It’s just two lines pointing toward you.”

“That makes sense geometrically, I guess. Except Sofia’s 1st law is that no lines ever point toward me.”

“Sofia, you are so smart about everything besides judging people, and that includes yourself. You don’t have any idea how special you are.”

If you are an adult foolish enough to tell another adult that you are (still!) a poet, they will often describe for you their falling away from poetry: I wrote it in high school; I dabbled in college. Almost never do they write it now…. There is embarrassment for the poet—couldn’t you get a real job and put your childish ways behind you?—but there is also embarrassment on the part of the non-poet, because having to acknowledge one’s total alienation from poetry chafes against the early association of poem and self.

…Rankine confronts—as an African-American woman—the impossibility (and impossible complexity) of attempting to reconcile herself with a racist society in which to be black is either to be invisible (excluded from the universal) or all too visible (as the victim of racist surveillance and aggression).

My privilege excludes me—that is, protects me—from the “you” in a way that focuses my attention on the much graver (and mundane) exclusion of a person of color from the “you” that the scene recounts (how could you have an appointment. Citizen’s concern with how race determines when and how we have access to pronouns is, among many other things, a direct response to the Whitmanic (and nostalgist) notion of a perfectly exchangeable “I” and “you” that can suspend all difference.

“… When we were only acquaintances, you let me be myself, but now you’re always protecting me.” Her voice swelled. “I won’t be protected. I will choose for myself what is ladylike and right. To shield me is an insult. Can’t I be trusted to face the truth but I must get it second-hand through you? A woman’s place! You despise my mother—I know you do—because she’s conventional and bothers over puddings; but, oh goodness!”—she rose to her feet—“conventional, Cecil, you’re that, for you may understand beautiful things, but you don’t know how to use them; and you wrap yourself up in art and books and music, and would try to wrap up me. I won’t be stifled, not by the most glorious music, for people are more glorious, and you hide them from me. That’s why I break off my engagement. You were all rigth as long as you kept to things, but when you came to people—” She stopped.

He would not bring down the government with the Nigerian Journal. Those days were gone, when newspapermen were feared and hounded and despised and worshipped for their recklessness.

As always, there was too much food. The table was heaped for guests that would never arrive: his dead sister, her imaginary husband and their six obese children.

Marcy enjoyed the pleasant soreness as she drove the five blocks home after each class. She liked how for an hour, there was a precise set of instructions she was meant to follow, a clear sense of direction.

A couple of months later, he comes over to my apartment in the middle of the night because we’ve long abandoned any pretense of a mutual interest in anything but dirty sex….

…he never knows how to make a move, still doesn’t understand he only needs to push me on my back and tell me to spread my legs.…

…I open my eyes and look up at him. A thin line of sweat beads along his hairline. I smile. I tell him to hate me more. He does, and a pleasant soreness begins spreading from between my thighs and my head is slamming against the headboard. Now I’m with him.

Later, I am still awake because I’m not very good at sleeping and I’m achy so I’m feeling tender toward him.

Bennett is not romantic and we don'>t delude ourselves about the state of our affair. He is, however, intense and always leaves me sore in uncomfortable places.

She gave in to the weight of him. He held her face between his hands like he might crush her skull. The pressure of his hands made her head throb, almost pleasantly. When Hiram kiss Mara that morning, her lips swelled and bruised, threatened to split open and spill. Her lips felt pulpy against his, beautifully misshapen. The whole of her body felt that way by the time he was done, as if every muscle, every part of her skin, had been worked through his hands and his mouth and his eyes until was broken all the way down.

When Mara climbed out of bed, sore, heavy, drained, Hiram said, “Don’t wash,” so she didn’t.

After her afternoons in the park, the stone thrower’s wife finds herself sweaty and pleasantly sore. She walks home slowly, breathing deeply. She revels. Then she takes a cold shower, emerges, wraps herself in a soft cotton robe.

I teach a section of Design of Concrete Structures and a section of Structural Dynamics. I have no female students in either class. The boys stare at me after class, they linger in the hallway just outside the classroom. They try to flirt. I remind them I will assess their final grades. They made inappropriate comments about extra credit.

Considering the efforts to reconstruct these scenes, readers may find that Marie Antoinette’s Darkest Days at times reads like a novel. However, with vigorous research and study of archived documents and secondary material from mostly eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sources, I have made every effort to retell this incredible story as accurately as possible.

Inside the magazine, you could find her posing in a cheerleader outfit, coyly pulling the skirt up toward her hips, or posing in that doll-stuffed bedroom in underwear and high heels, or shot from behind, walking a pink tricycle, wearing short-shorts with the word “BABY” emblazoned in rhinestones on one ass-check. Men were supposed to want to sleep with Britney, that was clear enough. But they were supposed to want it specifically because she was a child.

Sexism as it affects online life is the major focus of this work, with the key caveat that online harassment and abuse are rarely—if ever—linked to gender alone.

A modern cyberfeminism must be an intersectional cyberfeminism, with room to examine how technology and the Internet can be used to combat multiple oppressions, rather than creating easy metaphors that erase variety and disguise problems that have many roots.

For example, the design of technology to suit an ideal user (presumed to be male) or to make it more difficult for women to access and use is also cybersexism. Some examples include making smartphones too large for the average woman’s hand, health and fitness tracking apps that exclude menstruation (or regard the tracking of menstruation as only for cisgender women and aimed only at pregnancy) or designing a “revolutionar”y heart implant that works for 86 percent of men and only 20 percent of women.

In many ways that’s the true purpose of cybersexist abuse; to wear down individual women so that they give up and leave the space to the men.

She suggests that men need to stop asking women what to do, stop expecting women to educate them about the abuse they are suffering, stop trying to explain the harassment, and stop telling women how to respond to it.

If one puts aside for a second the question of strict political morality with the understanding that it is dangerous to do so for more than a second one soon realizes that the Time Bomb is as much a paradigm shift in human violence as the machine gun, the tank or the atom bomb. Few lives are lost in its detonation, except at the center of the blast zone; strictly speaking, no injuries are caused. It is a weapon at once entirely humane and utterly monstrous.

Until I realized: this long expanse of free time to rekindle friendships is not real. We will never come home to each other again and we will never again have each other’s undivided attention. That version of our friendship is over forever.

I laugh thinking about if they ever tried to do “Who Wore It Best?” for men’s magazines. They wouldn’t, because no one would care. Men don’t care which men looked better in the same clothes because it’s so obviously a huge waste of time. It’s also why they don’t have astrology sections in men’s magazines.