Melissa Febos

“Girls were not supposed to be enormous. They were not supposed to be scabby and strong. Inexplicably, strong and big were what every animal wanted to be except us.”

For years, Professor Melissa Febos hid her politics—and her tattoos—from her red-county Jersey students. After the election, she found common ground with them in “an earnest desire for the safety and freedom of other humans.”

Examining the music of the female orgasm and the orgasmic language of music.

An essay by memoirist Melissa Febos in which she responds to her Sarah Lawrence students’ fears around writing about their traumas, and concerns about being accused of “navel gazing.” She rejects the notion that there are already too many stories about trauma and personal experiences out there–along with other notions about memoir as narcissistic, arguments she believes are designed to silence women. “It is not gauche to write about trauma,” she writes. “It is subversive.”