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1 " Only skinny enough when starving, only successful enough when exhausted. "
― Bri Lee , Eggshell Skull
2 " How could I tell him what was actually eating at me, rotting on the inside? How could I do that to my mother and father—make them as sad as I knew they’d be? At least if I carried my Secret alone, there would be only one casualty. "
3 " ...I'd felt dread about how average and suburban Brisbane seemed. The normalcy was stifling and that I yearned for bigger things, that I missed New York. "
4 " I read once that the human body slowly pushes shrapnel back out through the skin. That a shard of metal can take years to reach the surface and finally truly be expelled. Veterans get bits coming out of them decades after wars. Could the same thing happen to memories? Perhaps that was what I was feeling: an itchy, irksome thing, a foreign object inside me, moving just millimeters every year, tearing through me until it breached. "
5 " Driving and sex are both privileges granted at certain ages, both can do irreparable damage when done recklessly, but only driving requires tests, checkpoints and licences. I don’t understand why the government—at schools and through public education programs—doesn’t teach people about consent the way we teach them about drink-driving. After all, overconsumption of alcohol often leads to horrific consequences in both activities. Why can a man be charged with negligent, reckless driving after getting himself drunk, but he can argue that the same level of voluntary intoxication led him to honestly and mistakenly believe a woman consented to intercourse, and be acquitted of a rape charge accordingly? "
6 " Judges tell juries: if a defendant lies, it doesn’t necessarily mean he’s guilty, but if a woman is crying as she dials triple zero after being raped, she might just be putting on a show. "
7 " The majority of rapists aren’t actually repeat offenders; they’re not afflicted with an uncontrollable lust. Mostly they’re regular men, with otherwise regular sexual preferences, who see an opportunity and take it. "
8 " Why didn’t he think about how it would affect me? To molest a child is to completely disregard their humanity. Their personal and physical autonomy. To commit irreparable damage to a still-soft, still-forming mind. "
9 " found it very difficult to determine my worth independent of him. Since puberty I had accepted, as a fact of my existence, that I wasn’t worth anything; that the ugly thing was ever-present inside me. That it was the dark truth, a rotten core, and that the smiling daytime Bri was the facade. It wasn’t until years later that I learned that so many of the feelings I struggled with are perfectly normal for abuse and trauma survivors. "
10 " It wasn't just him in the same way it wasn't just me. It was because I was sick of men like him. Because I'd seen them all, each as unoriginal in their selfishness as the next. "
11 " They weren’t children anymore either, and juries aren’t kind to women unless they’re ‘perfect victims’. "
12 " In Australia, where more than one in ten women have been sexually assaulted before they turn fifteen "
13 " Every act of sexual abuse is either deliberately or negligently cruel: each involves a terrified victim whose life experience an abuser completely devalues. "
14 " It’s the ultimate terror—perhaps the worst form of gaslighting—for a woman who complains of being raped to be told she isn’t desirable enough for that to be true. "
15 " He had deposited an experience into my lifetime, and that experience was now a memory I couldn’t forget, but it wasn’t an unknowable, mysterious, evil thing. There was space inside me for it to live alongside all my other memories and thoughts and feelings. I would never beat the demon, I could not exorcise it, I would simply learn to live above it. "
16 " Finally feminist enough to realise I was all out of ducks to give. "
17 " Finally feminist enough to realise I was all out of fucks to give "
18 " Neither would be sorry if they hadn’t been caught, for the same justification they’d used, perhaps subconsciously, to act in a wholly selfish manner in the first place—it is rare that we behave truly abhorrently to people we consider our equals. The law allows us to hit our dogs and our children because they fall under our dominion. We are in control of them. The language of ‘necessary discipline’ applied to women until very recently too. "
19 " A child in a courtroom is always a curious sight, like a live lamb in a butcher’s. "
20 " Defence couldn’t ask this little girl about what contraception she was on, then draw inferences to her promiscuity by reminder her that she also didn’t have a boyfriend. They asked her what she was wearing to actually test her memory, not to suggest a shorter skirt had been selected to indicate willingness. She could, in no way whatsoever, have ‘known what she was getting into’ or ‘asked for it’ or ‘made a drunken mistake that she regretted the next morning. "
