The Weight of Men I’ve Never Met
I woke up this morning in physical pain. The stress knot I’ve been carrying in my shoulders has migrated — crept around my ribs like it’s looking for somewhere new to settle. My period, which was supposed to arrive this week, is nowhere to be found. It spotted all last week, confused, and now: nothing. My body is keeping its own calendar, tracking something my mind hasn’t fully named yet.
Then I read about Crystal Harris.
Hugh Hefner’s former romantic partner is pleading with the Playboy legacy foundation not to digitize 3,000 of her late husband’s scrapbooks. Inside them: photographs of women before, during, and after sex. Hugh tracking their menstrual cycles. Some of them are girls. Before he died, Hugh gave Crystal one request: “only say good things.”
She was given a leash attached to nothing. She was free to go. And for a long time, she stayed.
I thought about the two-clicks-to-the-right version of my life. A worse mother. A worse father. A worse financial situation. Or — and this part really got me — a conventionally better life: more approval, more belonging, more of the markers that say you’re doing it right. I could have ended up a photo in that book. Not despite my ambitions, but because of them. Because I was a little girl who wanted to be a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader. I wanted to dance. I wanted to take up space. I wanted to be celebrated in a room full of thousands of people. That desire was real. It was good. The system it lived inside is what has the reckoning coming.
I feel the weight of men I’ve never met.
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I heard a comedian say that women’s biggest turn-on is time. It landed as a joke. It isn’t one.
Time is what we’ve never been freely given. Time to decide. Time to develop. Time to know our own bodies before someone else arrived with a claim on them. Time to figure out what we actually want versus what we were handed to want and told to be grateful for. The scarcity isn’t incidental — it’s architectural. Hefner had decades. Epstein had decades. Les Wexner had decades to build the infrastructure of what women were supposed to look like, and then profit from the gap between that image and the women standing in front of their mirrors. They bought time. They bought the pipeline. They bought the insecurity and called it aspiration.
No wonder we don’t really know how to say yes. No one gave us enough time to learn what we actually wanted.
My body is keeping a different kind of time right now. The stress knot knows something. The missing period knows something. We carry this history in our nervous systems, in our hormones, in the way we brace before we speak. The misogyny we’ve absorbed isn’t abstract. It has a physical address.
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We need to start saying certain words more.
Gossip. Pornography. Propaganda. Systemic misogyny. Holistic consent. These words were made heavy on purpose. Made shameful. Made “too much” and “too political” so that we’d put them down before they could do their work. Making women’s language suspect was always a time strategy — keep us from naming, keep us from organizing, keep us grateful for the leash even after we noticed it was attached to nothing.
The word “gossip” originally comes from god-sib: a close female friend, the women who gathered around a birth to witness and protect. Patriarchal structures twisted it into something petty and dangerous. Female networks of information-sharing — including information about harm, about power, about who to avoid and why — were reframed as idle chatter. Casting gossip as negative was never neutral. It made women’s voices suspect so that when we named what was being done to us, it could be dismissed.
Naming is the first act of reclaiming your own timeline.
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I’ve been listening to a podcast about Wuthering Heights — Emerald Fennell’s adaptation, specifically — and one of the reviewers called it soulless. Just vibes. No substance.
The eggs. The wind. The fingers.
Emerald didn’t make a mood board. She made a body with a clock inside it. Two hours and sixteen minutes isn’t enough time to portray centuries of misogyny — and that’s precisely the point. The film doesn’t explain the system. It makes you feel it from the inside. When the sensation is the substance, and we call it empty, we are doing the system’s work for it. The podcast said it should have been 'crazier.' Huh?? We've been fed a firehose of content for so long that we arrive at art already distracted, already half-scrolled. That's not the film's failure. That's the diagnosis. Are your eyes on? Did you hit record?
Look at what Wuthering Heights is actually about. Catherine and Heathcliff’s love doesn’t fail because it isn’t real. It fails because the system won’t give them the time or the conditions to let it breathe. Their class difference, the inheritance structures, the marriage market — these aren’t obstacles to the love story. They are the love story. And without Catherine, Heathcliff doesn’t transcend. He metastasizes. He becomes the very thing that crushed him. He takes his grief and turns it into dominion over every person within reach. The system wins twice: once by separating them, again by converting his devastation into cruelty.
And Isabella — aspiring toward love the only way a privileged woman could at that time, through literature, through the romantic hero she’d been promised existed. She arrived with her collar already on. The leash was attached to nothing.
Another reviewer said they were disappointed Emerald didn’t explore the characters’ dark sexuality more. The disappointment, I’d argue, belongs to the system — not to the film. Art should not be reviewed in a vacuum. Art exists in a world. And in this world, a woman made a film about what it feels like to be trapped inside the story you were given and to love someone anyway, impossibly, from inside that trap. The fashion wasn’t just a vibe. The sensory overload wasn’t aesthetic indulgence. It was an experience designed to make you ask: how does this make you feel? And more importantly: why?
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This is where I want to introduce a concept I keep returning to: holistic consent.
Not the legal threshold. Not the technical yes. The question underneath: what world was she standing in when she said yes, and how long had that world been building around her?
A yes formed inside scarcity is not the same as a free yes. A yes formed inside “marry rich or else” is not the same as a free yes. A yes formed inside a body that learned its value was its compliance, its availability, its willingness to be documented — that yes deserves examination. Not shame. Examination.
Everything is political. That includes sex. It includes desire. It includes the particular way a woman learns to want things in a world that has been deciding what she should want for hundreds of years. The Epstein files. The Victoria’s Secret pipeline. Hefner lurking over women’s menstrual cycles in his diary. These aren’t separate incidents. They are a system with an extraordinarily long memory. And a yes formed inside a system with that kind of memory — that kind of reach, that kind of patience — is a yes we need to look at more carefully.
This isn’t about assigning guilt to women who said yes. It’s about assigning accountability to the architecture that shaped what yes even meant.
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The story we’ve been fed since Wuthering Heights — love as escape, romance as rescue, the beautiful cage as the best available option — is starting to rot from the inside. You can smell it. The Epstein files smell like it. The scrapbooks smell like it. The “only say good things” smells like it.
In the Tarot, The Devil card depicts two figures in chains. The chains are loose. The door is open. They could leave. But the system has done its work so thoroughly that freedom doesn’t register as real. This is Capricorn energy in its shadow: the belief that the structure is the only structure, that the rules are the only rules, that what has been is what must be. Your Capricorn friend asks how much he makes when assessing a romantic partner. Not who he is. What he makes. We’ve been living in the shadow of that question for a very long time.
These aren’t unprecedented times. These are culminating times. The difference matters. Unprecedented implies we have no map. Culminating means the map has been leading here, and we can trace it. We can see exactly how we arrived. Hate begets hate, control begets control, war begets war. Systems that dehumanize compound. The architecture of exploitation doesn’t disappear — it adapts, privatizes, digitizes.
We don’t need a new story yet. We need to let this one rot all the way through. We need to feel it decompose. And then — from that honest ground — we build.
Holistic consent will not be understood intellectually. It will need to be felt in our collective bones. Down into the marrow of things. It will be visceral before it is theoretical. It will be a woman waking up one morning with a stress knot in her ribs and a missing period and the news of 3,000 scrapbooks landing before she’s fully upright, and feeling — in her actual body — the weight of men she’s never met.
And then putting it down.
Not because we’re done being angry. Sacred rage has its place — it’s fuel, not a flaw. The systems have enough momentum on their own. It’s time to name, to delineate what we want to carry forward. And now time, finally, belongs to us.
I am first generation Family of One. This is first generation for a lot of us, all at the same time. We are inside a crux of time equivalent to the discovery of new land, the discovery of electricity — an enormous collision of momentum landing on people whose attention has been deliberately fractured. We have a lot of work to do. We cannot do this alone. Be the message. Acknowledge the system. Because naming is the first act, and we are only at the beginning of what we’re willing to name.
The body and the politics are the same thing.
The personal and the systemic are the same thing.
Sacred rage and absurd love are the same thing.