“We had dorm rooms next to each other freshman year. We mainly just played a lot of board games: Risk, Scrabble, Scattergories, a Trivial Pursuit game from the 1980’s, which everyone sucked at. But we became best friends, and the next year decided to get a house together. That’s when things started to get tense. We began sitting closer together. We were touching more. We’d play with each other’s hands. Never holding hands, but playing with hands. And we’d even fall asleep in the same bed together. There was a time that she told me goodnight, and I swear I felt her brush my lips, but by the time I opened my eyes she was out of the room. Neither of us had ever dated a woman. And I was terrified to try anything. We were such good friends. There was always this fear that if I voiced the desire, it would ruin our friendship. But one night we were out for drinks at a hotel where Al Capone used to stay. I was feeling pretty drunk, so I leaned over and said: ‘Sometimes I feel like I want to kiss you.’ And she replied: ‘Sometimes I do too.’ I didn’t say a thing. I wasn’t even sure that I’d heard her correctly. I just kept thinking: ‘Oh my God, it’s happening. It’s happening.’ Then once we finished our drinks, and started walking home, I stopped her in front of a bridge. I said: ‘Shall we do it here?’ It was December 12th, 2002. And even though we got married five years ago, that’s the day we celebrate as our anniversary.”
who remembers this lil b*tch lmfao! i used to scam the girls on neopets because i was so desperate to get her lmfao i only had d*al up so my computer was too slow to play the games but i was literally rabid to get one so i like got some items from the like giving tree or whatever and i would like message people on the f*rums and tell them i would upload rare items to my shop at a specific time and i wanted to give them like first dibs or whatever lmfao and i would tell them to buy it at that exact time and then i would click to remove it from my store but then instantly u*plug the internet and it would like gl*tch it out and they would buy it but it would stay in my store! lmfao anyways i got one of these little things after like three weeks and i loved her so much lmao i called her Egg Roll
being brown makes my body hair visible and that’s one of the many things that has marked my material body as a racialized entity and has distinguished me from the pale, hairless(-appearing), skinny, smooth bodies of white women, which further contributed to my body dysmorphia and bodily self-hatred in early adolescence (which is coming back to me with a vengeance since i hate my body again) so. lmao. white girls thinking they know more about what body hair trauma make me laugh.
it’s one of the many things that prompted men (including men of color but mostly white men) to claim that i look “manly” or “like a man”.
fifth grade, being told that my facial hair (every brown girl has peach fuzz lol, it’s inevitable) makes me look like a man. middle school, being told that i have manly shoulders (i used to be a swimmer). middle school, being told that my skin is so dark i look like a man (and in terms of phenotypic range of light to dark skin among south asians, i don’t fall at a skin color shade/tone that marks me as most vulnerable to colorism, and yet even i’m too dark for white people).
and i know many girls of color can relate. one of my bengali girl students from my summer internship was sharing a story about this and the trauma made her break down in tears.
white girls know nothing about the trauma we have just by occupying our material bodies. white girls like to make those trite posts about “womanhood is x” using purple prose and overly flowery and macabre language but they know nothing.
brown girls have visible peach fuzz and visible side burns and visible leg hair and visible arm hair and all of that marks them as targets of bullying and harassment.
i remember talking to a white girl in high school who says she shaved in the shower three times a week. who the fuck has time or energy to that? like i’m a depressed bitch and i love showering because it makes me feel human but i’m not going to waste my time on something that ultimately has nothing to do with health and hygiene (shaving your body hair doesn’t make you more hygienic).
