Not being assaulted is not a privilege to be earned through the judicious application of personal safety strategies. A woman should be able to walk down the street at 4 in the morning in nothing but her socks, blind drunk, without being assaulted, and I, for one, am not going to do anything to imply that she is in any way responsible for her own assault if she fails to Adequately Protect Herself. Men aren’t helpless dick-driven maniacs who can’t help raping a vulnerable woman. It disrespects EVERYONE.

[TRIGGER WARNING: Rape] Fat women are treated as utterly undesirable in our culture [and] are often turned into a ‘bizarre’ fetish object. The result is that fat women are told to be grateful for any sexual attention they receive from anyone, whether they themselves find that person sexually appealing or not. In other words, even more than your average women, fat women are only allowed to be occasional objects of desire and are regularly denied their right to have and pursue sexual desires of their own.

That way of thinking becomes very dangerous when sexual violence is mixed in. When fat women are raped, they’re often told they should be grateful that anyone wanted them, or, alternatively, disbelieved because it doesn’t seem plausible that anyone would want them ‘enough to rape them.’ These arguments not only rely on the dangerous myth that rape is about uncontrollable sexual desire (it’s not), but also propagate the message that fat women’s bodies aren’t valuable enough to the culture for their violation to be taken seriously.

And if a woman should say she doesn’t want to have children at all, the world is apt to go decidedly peculiar: ‘Ooooh, don’t speak too soon,’ it will say — as if knowing whether or not you’re the kind of person who desires to make a whole other human being in your guts, out of sex and food, then have the rest of your life revolve around its welfare, is a breezy, ‘Hey - whevs’ decision. Like electing to have a picnic on an unexpectedly sunny day or changing the background picture on your desktop. ‘When you meet the right man, you’ll change your mind, dear,’ the world will say, with an odd, aggressive smugness.

I can go to school and be ‘the feminist’ and explain things really technically and read about feminist theory. But when you’re really frustrated like if I’m really fed up having to live in a sexist world, I don’t want to read a complicated essay. I want to listen to girls screaming.