Roxane Gay Quotes

When he finished talking, I said, “Your mother did not deserve the unwanted attentions of a man like my father.” I said, “I did not deserve the unwanted attentions of a man like you. It is often women who pay the price for what men want.

We were young once and then we weren’t.

I openly embrace the label of bad feminist. I do so because I am flawed and human. I am not terribly well versed in feminist history. I am not as well read in key feminist texts as I would like to be. I have certain . . . interests and personality traits and opinions that may not fall in line with mainstream feminism, but I am still a feminist. I cannot tell you how freeing it has been to accept this about myself.

Change requires intent and effort. It really is that simple.

So you decide, for the first time in your life, that you aren’t going to be one of the good girls anymore. You decide that “good” is not an adjective that ought to be applied to a person, as it only rendered you inanimate and inhuman, like a piece of cheese or a watercolor painting. The good girl is nothing more than a myth. We long for her for the same reason we long for utopia: Neither exists.

I am not good at romantic interactions that aren’t furtive and kind of sleazy. I don’t know how to ask someone on a date. I don’t know how to gauge the potential interest of other human beings. I don’t know how to trust people who do express interest in me. I am not the girl who “gets the date” in these circumstances, or that’s what I cannot help but tell myself. I am always paralyzed by self-doubt and mistrust.

If you are reading this essay, you have some kind of privilege. It may be hard to hear that, I know, but if you cannot recognize your privilege, you have a lot of work to do; get started.

More troubling than this oddly timed debate about birth control is the vehemence with which women need to justify or explain why they take birth control — health reasons, to regulate periods, you know, as if there's anything wrong with taking birth control simply because you want to have sex without that sex resulting in pregnancy.

One of my favorite moments is when a guy, at that certain point in a relationship, says something desperately hopeful like, 'Are you on the pill?' I simply say, 'No, are you?

My unarticulated logic went like this: if I give my body away, over and over, I can prove to myself that sex is my choice — even though, and this seems significant now, I always let the men choose me. Until I was nineteen years old, it never occurred to me that I could do the choosing. Not you, not you, not you. Yes, okay. You.

Why do we view the boundaries people create for themselves as challenges? Why do we see someone setting a limit and then try to push?

Fat daughters and their thin mothers have especially complicated relationships.

My husband's family is religious. His relatives believe in God. Their God is angry and unkind because they made him in their image.

The constant drumbeat of stories of sexual assault — from R. Kelly to our own goddamn president — keep me in a constant state of postrape PTSD. Some days, I feel like I have to hold my breath just to read the news so I can get through it and on with my workday.

"We are now dealing with a bizarre new morality where a woman cannot simply say, in one way or another, "I'm on the pill because I like dick.