Panting, she held her hands up to the light. Her knuckles twisted as the skin pulled tighter. The grooves of her knuckles split, the fissures like small gaping mouths from which erupted bone upon bone. She shrieked at the sting of it and tried to close the split flesh by straightening her fingers, felt the pressure grow, pulsing under her nails—saw the white of bone pale like blisters at the tips of her fingers. She stretched her fingers further and the skin burst, springing back along the protruding shafts of bone, curling back like a blooming flower.

It’s always very funny to me, the generalized received wisdom that women aren’t supposed to embrace horror, when horror is—in a lot of ways—the female condition, as well as the human one: body horror, social horror, moral horror. Some of the meat-suits we’re born into can bleed seven days and not die, or come pre-equipped to incubate, then push forth, a parasitical proto-human only partially made from our own DNA, whom we may not automatically love simply because we’re “automatically” genetically pre-disposed to. Politicians and religious leaders often seem bent on reducing us to mere extensions of our bodily functions, while the marriage-happy fairytale the media spends much of its time selling us on is alarmingly far more likely to end less in happily ever after than in violence and rancor, divorce at best, murder-suicide at worst. Turn a prospective lover down and you might get shot, get acid thrown in your face, get your baby thrown over a shopping mall balcony in order to teach you a lesson. Every woman I know doesn’t have just one #MeToo story, but a handful—at the least. The very, very least.

Browse the Internet for ten minutes (or wait a similar length of time after making a Twitter post about equalized gender representation in fandom), and you’ll soon find out that we’re Other by literal nature, pariahs, witches, bitches, Staceys—hollow things made from spare parts, malign and perverse, never content to just shut the hell up and do what we’re told. We steer dudes around by their parts, suck their virility dry in their dreams, prevent them from being the men they always expected to become by depriving them of . . . um, ourselves, I guess: mothers, wives, sex-toys. Something permanently less, perfectly designed to make any random guy feel like something permanently more.