Sasha

“Solitude: it's become my trade. As it requires a certain discipline, it's a condition I try to perfect. And yet it plagues me, it weighs on me in spite of my knowing it so well.”
― Jhumpa Lahiri, Whereabouts

“In Samuel Johnson's 1755 dictionary (the precursor to the Oxford English) a slut is simply a dirty woman, without any sexual connotation. In the nineteenth century, a slut also becomes a female dog, and a rag dipped in lard to light in place of a candle. Though in the twentieth century its meaning solidifies as an immoral woman, "a woman who enjoys sex in a degree considered shamefully excessive."

It is a brilliant linguistic trajectory. Make the bad housekeeper a woman of poor morals. Make her maid service to men a moral duty, and every other act becomes a potentially immoral one. Make her a bitch, a dog, a pig, any kind of subservient or inferior beast. Create one word for them all. Make sex a moral duty, too, but pleasure in it a crime. This way you can punish her for anything. You can make her humanity monstrous. Now you can do anything you want to her.”
― Melissa Febos, Girlhood

“There’s a Susan Sontag book called Regarding the Pain of Others, which Frank made me read — there’s a bit where Sontag talks about how when people see terrible things happen, they used to say it felt like a dream, but now they say it feels like a movie. Movies have supplanted dreams in the popular consciousness, and have become our benchmark for the unreal, and the almost real. Today has been a movie, playing on an old, warped videotape.”
― Eliza Clark, Boy Parts

“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