It’s great to remember that reading is my first love. - Roxane Gay

I am a real survivor because I survived, even if some days it feels like I didn't survive at all.

My favorite definition of “feminist” is one offered by Su, an Australian woman who, when interviewed for Kathy Bail’s 1996 anthology DIY Feminism, said feminists are “just women who don’t want to be treated like shit.

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.