Respect my bed
7 October 2008 
Just to clear something up, my bed is not a whore. She is not OK with casually sleeping with every guy who walks in the door, especially not the ones I reject.
“My standards are as high as yours,” she said. “If you don’t want to sleep with them, then neither do I.”
I thought of her cleanly washed sheets that were unexpectedly soiled with the hair and scent of ignored men. I thought of the way I smelled the pillow the next day, turning away with disgust, and I pitied her for having that smell cling to her until I took her sheets down the block to the washer.
And she’s not alone. My best friend Kitty told me that she was looking forward to sleeping alone in her bed last night, it was clean and welcoming, and she was tired. Kitty told Igor to sleep on the couch, she went to the bathroom, and when she came out, low and behold! Her lovely bed had been invaded by Igor, his boxers, and his unattractive scent. Kitty slept in her roommate’s bed instead. She washed her bed’s sheets twice today.
In both cases, the men begged to come upstairs. And rather than argue on the stoop for 10 minutes, we let them. We knew that their intentions were none too innocent, but we also knew that our willpower was stronger.
But while Kitty and I fume over having to sleep on the couch or our roommate’s bed, or feel uncomfortably conscious of keeping a turned back and a foot of space between ourselves and the unwanted man, our poor beds are suffocating.
So boys, the next time I say “No, I’d rather you not come up,” I mean it. Don’t push it, don’t say you just want to sleep next to me, don’t whine about having to walk 10 blocks or sleep on some guy’s couch. Don’t use my bed as a way to get to me. Because my bed is not a whore, and when I tell you that I want her all to myself, I mean it.
He ruined her yellow shoes
23 January 2008 
To make sure her yellow heels were visible, she put on the skinny jeans, even though she hadn’t washed them in a week. She’d bought the heels today because…well…they were on sale. And they were yellow (something that merits notice even if she doesn’t have any yellow tops.)
She double checked the evenness of her eye liner as her foot tapped to Alicia Keyes playing in the other room. She checked the time and threw on a pink, loose-fitting shirt. The phone rang as if on cue, it was her best friend Becca, there to pick her up before they went out to their friends’ party.
The next morning, the sun rose gradually and strong, as did her headache. Her hair tossled, shoes smudged and strewn on different sides of the room, she glanced around and saw a guy from her biology class that she had flirted with once or twice. He snored on the bed next to her as images came flashing out of her dark memory of the night before, and a sickening feeling sank into her stomach that had nothing to do with her hangover. She quickly put on her shoes to walk home, and a felt a tightness rise in her throat. The right heel was broken.
Who is she? She’s your cousin, my sister, your best friend’s roommate, our friend, that girl from next door.
More importantly, what happened? Where did Becca go? Did the girl with the yellow shoes remember consenting to stay? Did she remember consenting to anything? Or did she simply accept without thinking, without even really being there.
Does she know anything more than the newspaper reporters who write later in the week that police are investigating a possible rape? And then she reads in print, “Because they are acquaintances, the case will involve a lot of he said, she said,” according to the police.
The police lieutenant investigating a rape from last weekend told me that police are not going to stop rapes that happen at private residences…there’s just no way to stop them, he said.
And she, like so many other girls who have been abused and violated, is forgotten.
