Spotlight on Guante

I'm late to the party, but I just discovered Guante. His poem "Ten Responses to the Phrase Man Up" has been viewed over half a million times and will be published in the Button Poetry anthology "Viral". I heard that poem first, and it got me hooked, but his poem "Action" truly moved me.

"Rape Culture is silence." I don't think I've ever heard a more perfect definition of Rape Culture the one he gives in this poem. It is silence. It's us not having the conversations we should be having with our friends and our siblings and our kids. We should be telling our girlfriends to stop slut-shaming and our guy friends to stop using violent terms for sex. We should be telling our kids about enthusiastic consent. ("Consent is not the absence of a no. It's the presence of a yes.") Rape Culture is perpetuated by our silence, by our fear of the potential social isolation that comes from standing up for what's right. Well whatever. I'd rather lose a friend than my integrity.

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Our Family Story, Part 1

I was never good at monogamy. I cheated on almost every boy I dated in high school, and I dated a lot of boys in high school. It wasn't just for cheap thrills, either. I would legitimately develop crushes or sometimes fall in love with multiple people at the same time. There's a cultural myth that you can't actually love two people at the same time. You really truly only love one of them. This is a guiding principle behind so many romantic comedies and a major plot point in both Gone With the Wind and The Once and Future King, which were big influences on me growing up. So when I was young and struggling to be monogamous, I fluctuated between distrusting my own feelings (because it's impossible to actually love multiple people!) and believing myself to be broken (because actually loving multiple people isn't normal/acceptable). I was regularly called a slut, and I carried a great deal of self-hate. At age 16, when I fell in love with my current husband, Rob,

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Feeling Is First

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