2
" Instead of criminal, women's bodies are inherently defective, aesthetically defective. To the body whose value is judged almost solely on aesthetics, it is a devastating sentence. We are too short, too tall, too fat, too thin, too dark, too stiff, too loose, too solicitous, too yielding, too assertive, too weak, or too strong. "
― Melissa Febos , Girlhood
5
" Finely tuned to the swells of my own and others' hearts, I sensed a deep we'll at my center, a kind of umbilical cord that linked me to a roiling infinity of knowledge and pathos that underlay the trivia of our daily lives... I would read or think or feel myself into a brimming state-- not joy or sorrow, but some apex of their intersection, the raw matter from which each was made-- then lie with my back to the ground, body vibrating, heart thudding, mind foaming, thrilled and afraid that I might combust, might simply die of feeling too much. "
― Melissa Febos , Girlhood
14
" As a young woman I struck myself against everything - other bodies, cities, myself - but I could never make sense of the marks I made on them, or the marks they made on me. A thing of unknown value has no value, and I treated myself as such. I beat against my life as if it could tell me how to stop hurting, until I was black and blue on the inside. The small softnesses I found, however fleeting, were precious. They may have saved my life.
Now, I am so careful. The more I know my own worth, the less I have to fling myself against anything. When I go back, I can see all the marks that girl made so long ago. I reach my hand through the water and touch their familiar shapes. "
― Melissa Febos , Girlhood
19
" 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
