also i will never get tired of remarking this: being in public alone as a woman has constantly exposed me to sexual harassment but it is honestly horrifying how SHARPLY the number of these instances has dropped since i stopped looking like an adolescent. again, holding true for almost every woman in know well enough to disclose details. i was harassed/molested/groped/followed/propositioned/catfished by people very obviously vying for sex encounters etc enormously more from the time i was 10-18 compared to later. it is true that these people having contested access to me helped avoiding worse escalations in my case but the risk and the harm were definitely there and felt and not at all hypothetical.

like i don't believe in a magic sorority of women as a monolithic category that isn't itself divided by a million other social forces and can automatically coalesce into mutual solidarity nor do i believe into making the experiencing of sexual offenses an intrinsic unifying point that marks belonging into it. i just think if we want to pose grand questions about why romantic storylines that include some element of sexual violation are so wildly popular among women, we might want to start by trying to confront how actually common these violations are within this social group

when i was 12 all the boys in my class decided to start a game where essentially the asses of all the girls would become free groping material and they would challenge each other to slap and grope them as a sort of group building ritual. refusing this molestation was immediate and direct reason for ostracisation and receiving it was framed as a sign of interest in your attractiveness. this went on for months. they fell off it on their own for their own reasons, i guess they got bored. i would argue all the girls in that class experienced a real violation of their bodily autonomy as a specifically gendered offense shrouded in romantic ideology. but hey what do i know. we can also keep telling them they are just internalising a probabilistic risk

i think abt this a lot also re: fear of navigating public spaces. all women i have ever known have been at least harassed in public spaces, no exception. something has actually happened to them. if it wasn't true and that fear was "only" a probabilistic one it would be justified nonetheless. but the choice to frame it in this manner, even in feminist spaces, feels suspicious to me when reality doesn't match this description. again this is not how i live

not at all interested in entering the debate over who can write what rn, not the point of this post. but it has been a source of alienation to me for a while that a lot of discussions re: how women relate to sexual offences in fiction assume a default position for the group as one of stastically potential victims that however have, in the majority, probably not experienced sexual offenses firsthand. i have met many women that haven't been raped, true, but i have never met a single one (i am not exaggerating, though i can grant my experience is not universal. this is why i am saying this is alienating to me, in my social context) that, when the topic was raised, couldn't dig up not one but multiple stories of sexual harassment of some kind: groping, threats of rape, being followed home with that intent, people masturbating on them in public, people exposing themselves to them, unsolicited requests to remove clothes, send naked pictures, exchange sexual services for professional favours etc etc etc. having one experience doesn't mean you can "claim ownership" over adjacent ones: if you haven't been raped you haven't been raped and if you have been raped any other rape will in any case be different from yours. it's important to track this, especially as, unless you are writing an autobiography, you are always in some way contending with a subjective experience that doesn't precisely trace yours. but unless you think the problems of so called "rape culture" as a gendered issue - their source, the identification of harm, their consequences - begin and end with rape considered as an isolated act i don't know how to justify framing these women as not actual victims of that culture, as people who have exclusively experienced its probabilistic risk. this is not how i live

the milan bar association has an online job board were law firms can advertise open positions and you can always tell when a firm is a truly shit working environment by searching back and seeing how many ads they've posted before the one you are seeing. if they have been advertising for months with multiple ads something stinks: in this economy a half good position with half decent pay gets locked down FAST. i don't think they realise everyone performs this check and they should, strategically, erase old announcements

a bird of some kind must have made a nest in the empty space between my roof and ceiling and now i hear a sort of purring like there are 10 cats up there. it's really loud, like a car engine. at least it's not a night bird...

i love everyone here for giving me windows into the world when i feel stuck in many windowless rooms❤️

in the interest of aiding my lacking inspiration for a possible url change, i am going to start one of those games where i ask followers to send me 1 word/small phrase that makes them think of me 💞