Spice + Sugar

To be considered feminine, a woman has to pry a man from his friends and cleave him to her; sex is her lure. To prove he is masculine, a man has to show his friends he is a sexual conqueror; an emotional attachment to one woman can feel like a trap. In their peer groups, the closeness of men’s bonding is masked by sex talk, especially boasting of sexual conquests: ‘Men need to shoot the breeze, talk shit, chase women and run the jungle together’ (Simmons 1992, 401).

The heterosexual boy’s goal is conquest: ‘To the young man, the woman becomes, in the most profound sense, a sexual object. Her body and mind are the object of sexual games, to be won for his personal aggrandizement. Status goes to the winner, and sex is prized not as a testament of love but as testimony to control of another human being” (Anderson 1990, 114).

Let someone love you just the way you are – as flawed as you might be, as unattractive as you sometimes feel, and as unaccomplished as you think you are. To believe that you must hide all the parts of you that are broken, out of fear that someone else is incapable of loving what is less than perfect, is to believe that sunlight is incapable of entering a broken window and illuminating a dark room.