"… one day a friend from the department read my paper and said something that really hit me in the gut: “You discuss how the horror genre doesn’t afford the Final Girl a humanizing sexual freedom, how she’s relegated to a desexualized existence as the survivor and heroine, how being masculine and virginal as opposed to hyperfeminine and sexually experienced are seemingly oppressive. What if her asexuality is her greatest source of liberation? What if not having sex with men or not having sex period is her freedom?” These comments deeply resonated with me and still strike me as a beautiful, radical departure from everything that we’ve ever been taught about sexuality and gender. There is so much to be said about the cultivation of sexualities yet, at the same time, we never discuss the significance of non-sexualities. Being non-sexual or anti-sexual in a world which has been devoured by rape culture, swallowed whole by compulsory sexuality, and strangled to death by heteronormativity is a brazen form of rebellion that unfortunately gets watered down and depoliticized by people who still poke fun at “virginity,” by people who assume that every woman who has yet to go to bed with someone is waiting to be laid by a man who can “show her the ropes,” “deflower” her, transform her into a pleasure chest which is to be continually unlocked, sealed, and pried open again by a multiplicity of male gazes and straight suitors. We need to reconceptualize both the absence and the negation of sexuality. We need to envision a society where women acquire the keys to their own pleasure chests, or where our survival doesn’t depend on the undertaking of a pleasure chest at all."

"Nothing haunts us like the things we don’t say."