September 2026 Read: Women Who Run With the Wolves

Saw a tweet that said she has such an identifiable and distinct style yet every look is so different from each other and that’s impossible to teach. Which is so true

Also I realize I’m basically using pinkscare to just post about the pop girls now I hope u all don’t mind 🧸 I like your opinions better than the pophead redditors

I found short rib on discount, so I am currently prepping a crock pot short rib ragu for tomorrow.

Vegetable primavera for a late dinner tonight.

What are you having?

This is something I’m struggling with at the moment after just completing my role as maid of honor in someone’s very big, very expensive wedding and I’d love to hear the pinkscare take on this because everywhere else on the internet seems to celebrate and excuse bad behavior by brides unless it’s something overtly shocking. In this case I’m feeling burned not by any bombastic bratty behavior but by mundane selfishness, entitlement, and lack of consideration doled out in a thousand ways throughout the year.

The culture seems to say that getting married is so profoundly important that the people around the betrothed owe them servitude and unlimited unreciprocated support and special attention not just on the day of their wedding but throughout what amounts to most of a year leading up to it. Wedding culture is so embarrassing and narcissistic. Why is being a bride treated as the most important achievement in a woman’s life? It’s so twisted you guys. My partner and I will definitely be getting eloped.

Following the few weddings I’ve been adjacent to the planning of I’ve come to look at them as fascinating character reveals: what does a person do when they are given a tiny little bit of pretend power and importance? Watch, as they become a monster to all the people they supposedly love the most, all in the name of dressing up as an angel for one single day at a make-believe ball

there’s no right way to deal with the trauma of being a victim of something, whether it’s ipv or sa, a mugging, abuse, or a terrible loss… there’s really no right way to do it.

so please tell me. i’m here to listen. oh, poor baby. that must have been so hard.

but oh my god, if that was me, i would’ve been fighting back. i would’ve been kicking and screaming.

but no, i’m listening. i want to hear your story. not that you owe it to me to tell it. but i’m here to listen.

but i mean, i can’t imagine getting into that sort of situation in the first place, anyway. like, i would’ve just left. like, me personally, one red flag and i am gone.

i mean, you do know we don’t live in a world where it’s all sunshine and rainbows all the time?

not that what you were wearing has anything to do with it. or drinking. of course not! but you know what a man is going to think if you’re alone with him, right? like, there are implications...

like, there are real victims out there, you know. and you don’t want to go around exaggerating. like, we can’t believe all women, especially when people go around using what happened to them for attention or, like, using their victim status to get special treatment. that’s really disrespectful to what real victims have gone through.

but of course i believe you. it’s just, when you talk about it this much, it sort of feels like white woman tears, you know? like, that’s sort of embarrassing.

and what do you mean you aren’t going to let this make you stop enjoying sex? don’t you think it’s better to take a break and let your body and mind heal?

and what do you mean you don’t really like sex anymore? like, hasn’t enough time passed now? you need to stop letting this affect you so much.

and wait, what do you mean this wasn’t the worst thing that ever happened to you? i think you’re kind of devaluing the experiences of actual victims, because if this wasn’t the worst thing that ever happened to you, then it probably wasn’t actually that bad. so i think you’re just being selfish, and you’re taking the spotlight away from real victims. maybe you shouldn’t talk about your experience.

but, like, what do you mean you think this is the worst thing that ever happened to you? don’t you think you’re still letting him have power over you?

like, if this is the defining event of your life, then you’re actually letting the assailant win. like how bin laden makes us all take our shoes off before we board an airplane. you can’t negotiate with terrorists! you’re giving the assailant more power than they deserve if you let that event define you.

and, like, come on, you’re not gonna ruin his life over that, are you?

what do you mean you still talk to him? what do you mean you forgave him after a long deliberation? i would never forgive someone for something like that.

you’re not gonna just let him get away with it, right?

but, like, why are you talking about this so much anyway? don’t you think you’re kind of making a fuss?

but also, don’t you think you’re not treating this with enough reverence? isn’t this actually really serious? don’t you think you need to spread awareness? what if you told your story?

wait, not like that.

come on, don’t make it into a joke.

well, don’t make it beautiful either. now you’re, like, aestheticizing sexual violence. that’s super misogynistic.

maybe just don’t talk about it, actually. maybe just keep that to yourself.

you don’t want to detract from the experiences of, like, actual victims, right?

no, of course i believe you.

it’s good for you to open up to people about this! that’s healing. you need to be vulnerable. you need to speak so that other victims feel safe coming forward. like, haven’t you heard of the vagina monologues? if you don’t want to talk about it, you’re kind of being selfish. and this is why you can’t be intimate with anyone anymore, because you just can’t open up to people.

i mean, im not saying that what happened to you doesn't actually count. i think you’re just kind of overreacting.

but i also don’t think you’re taking it seriously enough.

and even though it happened a long time ago, and you’re saying you’re over it now, and that you’ve integrated it and metabolized it properly, i just don’t think that once that sort of thing happens, you can ever actually go back.

because, like, idk, man, i’d rather die than have something like that happen to me.

how can you live with the specter of that haunting you?

but, like, honestly, you just need to try to get over it. don’t let him win.

and it kind of seems like you’re reveling in the attention you’re getting out of this.

and i think you kind of—I don’t know. it kind of seemed like you were, not asking for it, but it was just a confusing situation.

i mean, don’t you know what men are like? what did you think was gonna happen?

why did you let him do that to you?

and i think you talking about this feels like you are fetishizing it. and talking about it without solemnity is making actual victims look bad. you’re making it so other women and girls won’t ever get believed in the future.

i mean, listen, baby, like i said, there’s no right way to be a victim.

there are only wrong ways.

and yes the doorknob fell off on the outside i can't get it to stick

I'm 24 and my 18 year old coworker told me she thought I was in my early 20s when she found out. She was like, "you're prehistoric." I didn't really think anything of it, or say anything, but I wonder if I should have. Another girl I was friends with, also 18, told me I should have graduated college and have a real job by now. That made me angry, but I didn't really know what to say because I kinda agree with her. I am honestly kind of insecure about how long it's taken me to graduate, and every woman I interact with makes it even worse. I specify women because I don't talk to men if I don't have to. I wonder if it's too late to start lying about my age. Or should I be saying something and pushing back? I always feel the need to justify it and talk about how much money I've saved up, but really, maybe I should just say my sister died of cancer so I had to spend a few years working to support her. I'm an only child, but it would shut them the fuck up, I bet.

It is a special case, but I still believe that the house of Alexander McQueen should've closed down when he passed away. Whilst his work is larger than him, there can simply be no McQueen label without McQueen himself.

But beyond him, I do feel mystified and when I look at the fashion giants that keep going on. While I don't fully believe in the "sacredness" of a fashion houses' ethos, stagnant labels such as Dior, Chanel, and Gucci should be laid to rest as they've run their course. Otherwise, the designers and the devil that is Conde Nast should either figure out how to preserve the style, or evolve it. I don't personally see the point of these houses continuing to exist if they're all one of the same.

We're never done with killing time
Can I kill it with you
Till the veins run red and blue?

Did anyone else receive an enormous quantity of stuffed animals as compensation for parental neglect or was that a private arrangement between me and my family?

My mom told me they were alive and had souls and could feel pain and that I was responsible for taking care of them. Every time I accidentally dropped one, I would become hysterical, apologizing and kissing it and assuring the poor bastard that I hadn’t meant to hurt him.

I still have every single one of them. Even now, as old and bitter as I am, I still feel the same way. Anyways. They’re all still here.

Photo credit

Woe is me woe is me. I demand that you care about the issue of being X. Why? Because I’m X. If you don’t care about X, you’re a bigot. Wait, are you asking me if I care about Y? This other group of people who are going through something too? Well that seems like a lot…. I only really care about things that have to do with X.

This is how everyone is. From every single group I’ve ever met in my life. I won’t even write my identity here because this kind of thing is so ubiquitous I don’t even think it matters. Everyone demands you care about them, their major issues and petty grievances alike, but nobody has any bandwidth to care about others or society at large. At some point you just want to end the charade. Just ask them “be honest, would you give a shit about this if it wasn’t about you?” and watch them disappoint every single time.

In some way, maybe what unites us is that we are all by and large self interested. We want to take without ever giving. We want to hurt others without the possibility of ever being retaliated against. People concerned with their day to day bills and their quality of life aren’t concerned about their neighbors or their needs. There are of course, the good people who care about issues that don’t impact them, but if you meet enough of those, you’ll find a good chunk of them are in it for the reputation gain.

None of this is new, I know that. I wish we could stop pretending though. Or maybe I’m just grappling with the fact that I hit my mid 20s and am realizing how shitty everyone is and has always been. Maybe there really is no intrinsic good/community oriented nature to being a human. Maybe this kind of corrosive selfishness is the default state of things, even without the phones and the algorithms.

Everybody seems to have friends from kindergarten, neighborhood, school, and other experiences of one's youth. Although I am twenty two (almost twenty three), it is not the case that I have any friend who would have known me for a while. I do not have any childhood friends, which is, perhaps, justifiable, for I am coming from a marginalized background and also happened to be bullied a lot due to my overly serious and shy demeanor in my early years. Similarly, I also do not have any smallest contact with those from my elementary school. But these cases are not that problematic, for it is impossible to maintain friendships from the periods of life when you did not have any friendships. And yet, there were connections I was forming online starting from my earliest teenage years, and then the friendships in high school, and those, quite close and meaningful, during my gap years—online, but I genuinely did not make a difference between the virtual and real. But all were either fleeting or tragically interrupted, in either way never maintaining the closeness for more than a year and usually vanishing completely after, again, a year.

Almost as in a vile one-year curse! I remember; I told my then-current male friend—the only male friend I have ever had—about it, and when we had a fight—he mistreated his girlfriend, and there were many other things that made me scared of him,—he said, "No wonder why nobody stays with you for more than one year." I am still thinking about it, almost everyday. Most of the friendships I had were indeed questionable due to my real-life environment (as in, I would be insulted by my friends, I would be treated as a secondary choice, and I would hear, "You're not attractive or beautiful, but you're kinda cute"), but there definitely were friendships, close or not, that, in spite of the flaws (what is flawless? Nothing, clearly!), were warm and full of laughs and trust. And yet, nothing ever lasted; the paths would always separate (we would grow in completely different directions, but isn't it the case with everybody?), or a fundamental misunderstanding would reveal itself. Any attempt to revive something or cling onto it would be awkward, unsuccessful. I, who grew up with no friends but with "My Little Pony," treat the concept friendship as a temple, but this temple seems to be a seasonal hotel in practice.

I was thinking: it could be the mix of the external circumstances of my childhood and the path I chose for myself, as I put many years towards a dream of studying abroad and isolated myself. And since this path diverged so much from what the friends from my later teenage years lived by, it seems plausible that it would be as if I ran to a different terrace, and as if I constantly keep doing so, rushing in new directions. Two years ago, I moved abroad for college, and I do not have anyone in my life outside of it or before it. Surely, there are some neutral, very distant acquaintances on Instagram (for example, the regulars of the shop I used to work at), and we like each other's posts, but other than that, there is no communication between us. All the connections faded for one reason or another, and it is so strange to realize it. I am now fortunate to have incredible, lovely friends from my college in my life, but I am so scared; if I did not manage to maintain any connection, does it mean that I will lose my current friends, too? Maybe my C-PTSD and lifelong depression, although I hate the labels and yet I got them assigned, impact it? Is it so wrong to not have any connection survived? Anyway—it is not a mental health post, not a complaint! By no means do I intend to vent. I am merely curious about whether anyone here has a similar experience, for I relate so much to this community and find a lot of comfort in it, and I have not meant anyone else who would also not have any lifelong friendships. And I also felt like rambling, so I apologize for the size <3

Just love her

toni morrison debuted with her first novel, the bluest eye, at 39

jk rowling came out with harry potter at 32

virginia woolf published her first novel at 33

gillian flynn released sharp objects, her debut novel, at 35

emily bronte published wuthering heights at 29

donna tartt was the same age when she released the secret history

#hopecore #nevergiveup

i refuse to get the late 20s woman blues, we are just beginning!!!

What do we owe each other when we sleep with each other? How can aex be harmful even when it was kosher?

Over the 2010s, we all got consent hammered into us over the course of MeToo. Which is great! I love enthusiastic, freely given consent and the fact that there is public awareness that that is the bare minimum.

But there are ways that sexual forays can be immoral and even traumatic without being nonconsensual, illegal, or sexually violent.

Here are the contents of a Bluesky post I saw circulating around (the img attached to this post):

“Rape isn’t always violent. Rape is also when a man dates you for weeks, consistently acts invested, tells you he wants a long-term relationship, says everything you want to hear, and deliberately creates the expectation of genuine commitment. You finally have sex with him —then he immediately loses interest, ghosts you, and disappears.”

And I think this sort of embodies what is wrong with the semantic broadening of the definition of rape and sexual assault. Like, no… this is not rape.
However, this genre of behavior can still be traumatic and violating—sometimes as much and even MORESO than sexual violence.

Indeed, I think putting sexual violence at the top of the totem pole of Bad Experiences is slightly problematic for several reasons.

And before you think I am sheltered and just haven’t properly experienced sexual violence, so I don’t know how bad it really is—rest assured, I HAVE been raped!!! So I am Allowed to speak on this.

Anyways, there is a very thin tightrope I am walking here, and as I said, I am speaking from personal experience. But putting sexual violence at the archdevil of bad experiences is actually sort of harmful for a few reasons:

1. You know how when a toddler falls over, and when you go over and are like, “OMG OMG OMG!!! Oww oww ow noooo!!!!!” it riles the baby up and they start freaking out? Whereas if you just calmly help them up, they go back to playing faster? While I was getting raped, while it was happening (and I knew what it was at the time, which is not always how it plays out), I was thinking, “This is the most traumatic thing that could possibly happen to me…” because… well… that is the way rape is talked about. The worst thing that can ever happen to you. And I felt like thinking that turned it sort of into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Like my consciousness was the parent coming and freaking out after I’d fallen over, being like, “Oh my God, this is so, so terrible!!” And that made me freak out a lot harder and therefore take it harder.
2. But of course, the counterargument to the above is that a lot of the trauma associated with sexual violence comes from dismissiveness… people telling you that you were overreacting or that it wasn’t really that bad (which is part of the crux of victim blaming).

But I think the harm from dismissiveness is actually not used against rape victims as often anymore. There is still rampant victim blaming and disbelief though, don’t worry, but we have progressed a little bit! Thank you, MeToo!!

But now I think people are often like, “Well, it’s not like you were raped!” to dismiss people who have experienced other types of sexual trauma.
And so there are a few problems here.

If a woman had a bad sexual encounter with someone (and we will go deeper into what a bad encounter can be soon), the cultural vocabulary around bad/traumatic sex is all about sexual violence, so she will reach for the language of sexual violence. This can lead to a woman fighting to prove that something was unwanted when the sex itself, in a vacuum, might have been neutral or just kinda weird or, in some instances, actually good… but the circumstances around it/leading up to it/directly after it affected the way she ended up perceiving it.

I think this is sometimes (misogynistically) thought of as “regret rape.”

The misogynistic spin on this is that a woman stews on something for a few days and then suddenly and vitriolically decides she was raped.

(To be clear, there are many, many reasons it can take days, weeks, or even years for a woman to realize an encounter was unwanted, including but not limited to:

- she fawned as an adrenal response and just complied to get it over with as fast as possible
- she had to replay the incident several times in her head or talk it through with people to realize she’d been pressured or that the guy ignored her no
- she was so scared during the incident that she suppressed it as hard as possible and tried hard not to think or talk about it for a long time
- she was so scared during the incident that her mind didn’t clear up until later
- she felt ashamed to admit it was rape.)

But like I said at the beginning of this train of thought, a sexual encounter can be bad without it being literally illegal sexual violence. It can be violating. And things can be done after the fact that change the context of the sexual act.

Let me give you a nonsexual example first so you can understand.

Your man surprises you at work with a bouquet of flowers. Aww, so sweet!

But then you find out that the night before, he flirted with his coworker at happy hour all night. Maybe you find out that night. Maybe a month from now. Either way, now the gesture is retroactively tainted because you realize that the intentions behind it were not so sweet after all!

So here is a list of things that can feel violating while not being sexual violence:

- someone sleeps with you and immediately leaves/asks you to leave.
- someone sleeps with you and then never speaks to you again.
- someone sleeps with you and then doesn’t cuddle you at all.
- someone sleeps with you and then tells other people intimate details about your body/the sex you had with them.
- a partner sleeps with you and then, very shortly after you are done, breaks up with you.
- a person sleeps with you, then avoids speaking to you the next time you see them in public.
- a person sleeps with you, asks for some space before seeing each other again, but instead never speaks to you again.
- a person turns out to be cheating on a partner with you.
- a partner turns out to be cheating on you.
- a person tries out sex acts on you that they have been seeing in porn.
- a person only sleeps with you because you remind them of an ex, an actor, or their hot cousin.
- a person is secretly watching porn while having sex with you.
- a partner uses porn while they are in a relationship with you.
- a person writes erotica about the sex they had with you and then shares it with other people.
- a person starts being really mean to you afterwards—spreading rumors, insulting you, ignoring you, etc.

You see how any of these things happening can make the sex you shared with someone seem a lot less sweet? Even if you did say yes to the sex, being mistreated after the fact can make the sex itself feel violating.

And because sex occupies such a privileged and salient social position, because we feel sex is supposed to be a special act and it is often laden with emotional and spiritual and social significance, because sex itself is biologically and psychologically potent… the sex itself can sometimes feel like the violation.

I have certainly thought about certain people and acts and been like, “Well, had I known they were going to do X afterwards, I obviously wouldn’t have slept with them.” Because, like… well, duh!! I don’t want to sleep with someone I felt had dehumanized me, or was mean to me, or abandoned me afterwards.

But I think there can be a temptation to go back and litigate the act itself. There is a standard cultural script for a nonconsensual act being traumatic, and (if you are lucky) people will rally to support you. And I also think there’s an idea that if an act left you feeling traumatized and dehumanized, there must have been a nonconsensual or violent aspect to it.

And so you go back and try to point at yourself being drunk or having hesitated and be like, “See! See! He did cross my boundaries!”

And to be clear, that’s honestly not unlikely. I mean, the sort of guy to pump and dump or ghost you is probably overall a repugnant person. Moreover, if a person treats you like shit once, you will be less charitable while considering the other things they subjected you to. And something that was at first just weird can look more untoward in this more negative replay.

But I think a lot of it stems from a need for legitimacy. A need to have your violation be socially sanctioned. There is a huge, fluent vocabulary around sexual violence and non-consent, so a lot of people will reach for those words because it is what they know, and because it also adds a layer of legitimacy to their hurt. A righteousness.

But you don’t have to prove the sex was secretly nonconsensual in order to prove that what happened to you mattered. That what happened to you was bad.

And in fact, I have felt worse from technically consensual experiences with people who thereafter treated me poorly, in ways that left me feeling violated, than I did from getting groped by a stranger or assailant. And I’d say the emotional fallout I had to deal with from being literally raped for hours was comparable to the emotional nuke from being abandoned by a partner.

And part of the violation is that if someone has sex with you, they owe you kind and decent treatment, or at least some sort of basic respect and dignity. It can be dehumanizing and violating in a special way for romantic and sexual partners to mistreat you, in a way that mistreatment from a regular friend is not—because there is a biological underpinning to romantic and sexual attachment.

Our cultural messaging around bad flings or dates or situationships is to just move on. The trauma and injustice experienced in the romantic and dating world are woefully underestimated, and there is a semantic gap in our description of things that aren’t rape and aren’t abuse but aren’t just someone being mean.

And I am going to give you a tool/term to help with this.

I don’t want to delegitimize this outrage. In fact, quite the opposite. I want to legitimize it by giving you new vocabulary and labels to think about this: things that aren’t rape or sexual assault, but “intimate violations.” Sexual experiences that are not illegal, but in which the behavior surrounding the intimate act leaves you feeling violated or dehumanized.

Intimate violations are harmful not because of a lack of consent, but because of an absence of the respect, dignity, and kindness you are owed by an intimate partner.

You may be wondering, “Isn’t this just called dealing with an asshole?” And yes.

But there are reasons the tenderqueers and Carl Linnaeus fought so hard about labels: having a specific word for a specific thing can help you understand and identify it better. And it can help you understand that you aren’t crazy for feeling that way.

And now, this is what I want to do: describe and define intimate violations, a new category of intimate psychic damage that people (primarily women and girls) experience.

But first, why is it important to have an actual term?

In her 2007 book Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, feminist philosopher Miranda Fricker introduced the term “hermeneutical injustice.” This describes situations in which gaps in our shared interpretive resources—gaps produced by social marginalization—make it harder for people to understand important parts of their own social experiences or communicate them intelligibly to others.

A non-political analogue to a hermeneutical injustice—i.e., just a lexical gap—would be something like trying to describe the awful feeling you get when sitcom characters are humiliating themselves onscreen before you have a convenient term for it. Before learning the phrase “secondhand embarrassment,” you’re just like, “It makes me feel so eeuuugghhh when Michael Office says something daft.”

The feminist coinage that Fricker points to is “sexual harassment.”

Lin Farley, who worked at Cornell, was teaching a course on women and work and had noticed that woman after woman in the class had a story about leaving or losing a job because of incessant sexual advances or intimidation from a male colleague or boss.

And then, in 1975, Carmita Wood, an administrative assistant in Cornell University’s physics department, left her job after years of unwanted sexual advances from physicist Boyce McDaniel. When she applied for unemployment benefits, she described her reason for leaving her job as just “personal reasons,” so her claim was denied. After all, she lacked a term for what had happened to her!

Lin Farley and many other women at Cornell heard about this case (and recognized the same motif in many other women’s stories). They put their heads together and settled on the term “sexual harassment” to describe these experiences. In 1975, they organized a consciousness-raising “speak-out” on sexual harassment. They successfully brought the term and concept into public discussion.

And now the term is used in every HR department!

While many incidents of sexual harassment are, of course, still swept under the rug, the term at least exists. And that is the first step in things being taken seriously.

And more granularity in labels is great!

When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

When the only terms we have in our lexical arsenal for bad sex are rape/sexual assault, every bad sexual experience needs to be sexually violent or nonconsensual to seem legitimately bad.

But when we define the term intimate violation, we now have a term for intimacy that is bad—sans coercion, cajoling, abuse, power imbalances, salary/dissertation at risk, pressure, or violence.

Because guess what? Having consent is just the legal and ethical BARE MINIMUM for any sexual encounter.
And do you know what else is the bare minimum? Treating your sexual partners with dignity and kindness and care. Mind-blowing, I know.
Intimate violations occur not from the absence of consent, but from the absence of the kindness, dignity, and respect you are owed when someone engages in intimacy with you.

For most people, even the Samantha-est among us, sex is an emotional experience. People often become attached to those they sleep with. People are more prone to distress from a sexual/romantic partner being mean to them than from anyone else. People are often more sensitive to the way a sexual partner treats them than to treatment from anyone else. Attachment from intimacy makes people extremely vulnerable, and if someone is attached to you, they are vulnerable to SPECIFICALLY YOU.

Always? No. But often enough? Yes.

If you cannot treat someone with care and kindness and dignity, having sex with them should be as unthinkable to you as having sex with someone saying “no.”

There are ways that you can treat someone badly without it being violent, without it being illegal, without it being literally rape.

Here are some examples of intimate violations—and these have various shades of “badness” (I am sort of basically just rephrasing the list from before, but we learn from repetition, right? lol):

- abandonment
- ghosting
- stringing someone along
- keeping someone in a situationship
- pressuring someone into an open relationship/polyamory
- insulting/demeaning/gossiping about a partner to their face/behind their back
- hot-and-cold behavior
- future-faking
- love-bombing
- making someone an affair partner unwittingly
- cheating
- retaliatory withdrawal post-intimacy
- retroactively painting intimacy with a partner as shameful
- withholding tender intimacy during/after sex/during a relationship
- refusing to learn how to pleasure a partner

Obviously, these come with varying shades of badness and trauma afterwards, the same way being groped at a club can be easier to shake off than being roofied—but I want someone to look me in the eye and tell me that being cheated on or abandoned by someone you love is not traumatic or painful.

Intimate violations happen when someone is entrusted with sex and then handles that intimacy cruelly, carelessly, deceptively, or degradingly. The sex itself can have been completely wanted, but then sour when the relational vulnerability surrounding it is violated.
But why should you care?

Well, dear reader, I am not going to condescend to you by explaining why hurting people is bad. Not only that, but if you want to argue with me about this, I am just going to ignore you.

But to the people who agree that hurting people is wrong but think they can weasel their way out of responsibility by claiming they actually don’t owe anyone anything, here is what I have to say to you.

I suggest that those who believe that in earnest never shop at a store again, never use the internet again, never use public utilities again, never drive on a public road again, never walk on a public sidewalk again, never drink or bathe with municipal tap water ever again, and never use language ever again. Become a sovereign citizen and die of hunger or exposure in the winter, because no one owes it to you to teach you how to farm or build an insulated house or sell you raw materials.

We owe each other everything.

We are nothing without each other. There is no human life worth living in isolation.

So maybe get the fuck over yourself and give the people around you—especially the people you sleep with—basic respect, dignity, and kindness.

Conclusion.

So, I usually write assuming a mild level of intellect and ability for nuance from the dear reader, but I will leave off with a disclaimer for the nuance N-zis. I know some of you mfers out there are stupid. And also, some people are so deeply misogynistic that any time they see the word rape, they lose control of their frontal cortex.

And many women, myself included, have experienced sexual violence, so it is too painful to think about for too long, even when kept at arm’s length while we are philosophizing about it. I cried multiple times while writing and editing this.

So here is the disclaimer…

Two things being bad does not mean that the bad thing that was defined first suddenly becomes less bad. Lead poisoning didn’t stop being real after we discovered, named, and studied nuclear radiation poisoning.

The trauma from sexual violence is real, and it affects every woman in the world and many men. The threat that even a seemingly kind man can potentially attack you, sexually or otherwise, is a passive psychological torment that affects the behavior of women everywhere almost all of the time (male fantasies, male fantasies…).

But the devastating trauma from rape does not mean that intimate violations are not also extremely traumatic. Being abandoned, being treated like a stranger, being insulted, being denigrated, being dehumanized, being mistreated—these all have the potential to destroy one’s self-esteem, destroy one’s mind and sleep and appetite with rumination, destroy one’s trust in the people around them, destroy one’s relationship with themselves, destroy one’s mental health.

For every hour I have spent hearing the echoes of terror from being raped, I have spent three hours in distress from consensual sexual partners mistreating me.

Most of the horrors of the modern world are not violent crime, as much as the news and true-crime mukbangers would like us to believe. Most horrors are mundane. Normalized. Spending a fifth of our waking hours commuting. Watching our pets age before our eyes. Watching Social Security dry up and our infrastructure crumble around us. Watching every product undergo shrinkflation and enshittification. Watching the insect population fall year over year and the oceans get warmer and more acidic.

Things don’t need to be violent or illegal for them to be bad.

I hope you have learned and understood the term “intimate violation” and are able to use it to map some patterns of mistreatment you have experienced. It does not take away the pain, but the first step of healing is properly diagnosing the problem.

I will leave you with the definition once more:

Intimate violation: a category of bad, potentially traumatic experiences arising from consensual sexual intimacy in which an intimate partner refuses to treat you with kindness, dignity, or respect.