Kennedy

“Sex work has thrived under every legal regime; what has varied are the conditions under which sex is bought and sold, and in particular whether clients and workers are subject to the coercive power of the state. So long as women need money to pay their bills and feed their children, so long as sex work is better than the available alternatives, and so long as women's subordination is eroticised, there will be prostitution.”
― Amia Srinivasan, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century

“And I say to myself: I will leave every cold man, every man for whom music is some private physics and love some unsteppable dance. I will try to make them regret. To make them sad. I am driving back toward my tiny kitchen table and I will write this: forgiveness lives alone and far off down the road, but bitterness and art are close, gossipy neighbors, sharing the same clothesline, hanging out their things, getting their laundry confused.”
― Lorrie Moore, Self-Help

“I turned to my dad, to the softness of his jaw, the soil of his eyes. How many times does it take before you can look through it? I wonder. How many times, until it's all missed? I don't want to know; I fear I'll find out regardless.

I let myself remember I love him ferociously.

Réré Ukponu, “Famine Days” {short story}”
― Declan Meade, Dublin, Written In Our Hearts: An Anthology Celebrating 20 Years of One Dublin One Book

“Girls must learn to make do with the limited spaces that they're offered. In my servant adolescence, that space was the mall.

Easily accessed, inviting no probing questions from our parents, always warm and safe. I can't begin to count the hours spent wandering the convoluted corridors of ever expanding shopping centers in Mississauga. I suppose we were lucky that given Mississauga size and growth rate, we had choices. […] despite the mall's inherent homogeneity, we entertained ourselves by looking at things we couldn't afford, imagining the cool people we'd be if only we had the right clothes and shoes. We found ways to make our own spaces, and stairwells, corners, and service corridors. My best friend Erica and I didn't go to the same school, so the mall was the place where we could actually gather instead of talking on the phone. But as we got older, the mall didn't reflect our changing identities. We needed to find the space and styles and people that would let us start to define ourselves as more Jewish girls from the suburbs.

[…]

If the mall was our default space – easy to access, parents happy to leave us there for a few hours – then downtown, as we called neighboring Toronto, was our aspiration. We could take a commuter train and in about 30 minutes we'd be at the foot of Yonge Street, one of Toronto’s central shopping and tourist districts. While we might venture into the enormous Eaton center mall, our targets were the vintage shops, used record stores, poster shops, and head shops of Yonge and Queen streets.

[…]

Of course all of this feels like a cliche now. We weren't unique. Suburban girls all over seek out ways to push back against the pressures of conformity. Like with young people we were trying to figure ourselves out and “different” space has helped us create fresh moments for self-expression.

Girls’ presence on city streets, a place where they have been deemed out of place, can and should be considered part of girls’ repertoire of resistance to varying modes of control within an adult-dominated, patriarchal society.”
― Leslie Kern, Feminist City: A Field Guide