There are women who live in U.S. with maybe one abortion clinic. The right wing is trying to make it impossible for women to get abortions, even if they are technically legal. This is done in a literal way  -  you can't get to a clinic, you can't afford it, you have to tell your parents  -   and by making it something that young people feel they can't talk about, can't ask for help with, can't do anything about but try to either induce abortions on their own, alone and unsafely, or have children they don't want and can't care for. It's just an assault on all sides.

When I started to internalize fat positivity and believe it, my response was the same one I had when I started to understand the scope of gender inequality: deep indignation.

I feel like women in comedy have staked out space for themselves and circled the wagons in this inspiring way to say that it's absolutely unacceptable and ludicrous to suggest that women aren't funny anymore in 2016. It just makes you look like a dinosaur.

On a practical level, I'm uncomfortable at comedy clubs because there are so many shitty dude comics who have made my life miserable. If I go to a comedy club and I look around, I don't know which of the dudes lining the wall told me that I was too fat to get raped. It makes me nauseous. But that was a couple years ago, and meanwhile, comedy has changed a lot.

I've always been an escapist, I guess, and I spend so much time on the internet absorbing ideas and processing the horrors of the world that when I'm actually going to read for pleasure, it's always something ridiculous about a dragon. I'm so saturated with the injustice and torment of the real world that it's really hard for me to get myself to read anything that's even set in our universe, because I'm exhausted by our universe.

Indignation and determination are much more constructive emotions than shame and embarrassment. And feminism was this engine that turned one into the other.

I'm fortunate to have a hilarious, fun, brilliant family that I love spending time with that keeps me in a healthy head space. The internet can be so enthralling in a bad way, in a toxic way, where you feel like your brain is submerged in this sewer and you can't climb out of it. The main thing is spending time with real physical people who remind you who you are. It can be so tempting to believe that you are who the internet says you are.