Sasha

“By the time I was thirteen, I had divorced my body. Like a bitter divorced parent, I accepted that our collaboration was mandatory. I needed her and hated her all the more for it.”
― Melissa Febos, Girlhood

“It is essential [...] that discipline should not be practiced like a rule imposed on oneself from the outside, but that it becomes an expression of one's own will; that it is felt as pleasant, and that one slowly accustoms oneself to a kind of behavior which one would eventually miss, if one stopped practicing it.”
― Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

“The more I think about it, the more amazed I am that anyone realistically expects young women to easily say no to anything, least of all the sexual desires of men. If I struggle to say no to a lunch invitation, a work request, any number of less fraught entreaties, when I have some pressing personal reason, how can a teenager be expected to stop a man’s hand as it reaches under her clothes? Some do, of course, which seems miraculous.”
― Melissa Febos, Girlhood

“I forgive myself for ingesting shame I did not choose but was fed anyway,” says Aja. “I may not yet be unashamed, but I am wholly unapologetic.”
― Melissa Febos, Girlhood