Howl

Please note: This essay contains nude portraits of the female body.

They have come in large crowds. There are so many — too many to identify by name, mostly white men. They wear them in plain sight. They make a show of them on the floor of state capitol buildings when legislators are in session. No one is arrested. This is all legal — not just legal, but encouraged by questionable interpretations of a constitutional amendment.

Ginger Pierro brought hers to a beach in New Hampshire in the summer of 2016. She, too, wore hers in plain sight while doing yoga. She was arrested and fined (though the fine was suspended). Two more women, protesting the arrest, were also arrested and fined. …

I woke up on January 6th with a borderline migraine — not an auspicious start to the day. I took a sick day, stayed in bed, and watched The Good Place for the thousandth time.

As you can guess, my sitcom indulgence was soon replaced with NPR. And when they didn’t publish new information fast enough for my panic-induced compulsion for more, I started watching videos on CNN, and then (god help me) on Twitter.

Images poured across my computer screen: mostly white men in camo, sweatshirts, beanies, and the now-famous buffalo-horned headdress. Many of these men had long, scraggly beards, or abundantly hairy chests — we know the latter because so many of them felt the need to bare their torsos in what I assume were attempts at masculine displays of power. …

Howl

In the last four years, one of the most fascinating things I learned about modern culture is that world leaders have an unprecedented amount of freedom on social media platforms. They are not held to the same standards as other users and are allowed to break many of the rules that would get someone like me permanently banned from the platforms.

I’d guess that this is a surprising lesson that every American learned in the past four years, watching our president use Twitter to share racist comments, conspiracy theories, and threats of violence.

What’s particularly fascinating is that this social media exemption for world leaders was created after Trump became president, in response to his unprecedented behavior. …

As a woman, I learned early on that any engagement I had with my sexuality should only be indulged in for a “ good reason.” Women aren’t supposed to have sex just to have sex. Or watch porn just for our own sexual gratification. Or masturbate just for funsies.

Female sexuality is somewhat excusable so long as it takes place with another person, in a loving, virtuous, monogamous relationship that is either marriage or leading to marriage. It’s somewhat excusable if we masturbate for a lover’s gratification more than for our own. …

When I was six years old, I found an injured songbird in our backyard. I immediately told my parents, and my dad dug an old birdcage out of the garage, then carefully placed the injured bird inside it.

The winged creature was incredibly weak — so much so that my father had to pick it up every few hours to give it water from a dropper. He even cooked hard-boiled eggs, chopped them finely, and tried to feed the bird little pieces of the egg with the end of a toothpick.

In between feedings, I sat next to the birdcage, watching it for hours, to make sure it didn’t stop breathing. I was so obsessed with this bird that I wrote maternal love poems for it in my Little Twin Stars diary. I named him Chirpee and wrote his name all over the pages of that pink book, as if attempting some kind of magic ritual in which the repetition of his name in writing would bring him back to health. …

Howl