Esther Leah Medalie Ritz

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"Susanna and the Elders" circa 1610, by Artemisia Gentileschi

The Personal is Political: What I’ve Learned from a Lifetime of Rejecting

Anonymous

When I was in tenth grade, a male friend of mine told me he would kill himself after I said I wouldn’t go out with him. The next day, he confronted me in the hallway and told me I was, among other things, a terrible person, a tease, and a slut. Later that year, a senior who I was too shy to talk to approached me and told me he really liked me and wanted to go out. He tried to kiss me at my locker, in front of a teacher, and I pulled away. Later he told his friends that I wouldn’t have sex with him and that I was obsessed with playing hard to get; that I loved the attention. Of course, this was news to me—I’d had a crush on him and was baffled when he stopped talking to me after the attempted public kiss. Later I learned that the two of them—I’m-going-to-kill-myself guy and kamikaze-kiss-guy—circulated a list detailing which sexual positions would best take advantage of my body—which, as was noted in the list, “would be really great if she lost 5 pounds.” There were other incidents that year, and many more throughout high school.

Topics: Feminism

Esther Leah Medalie Ritz

Esther Leah Medalie Ritz defended human rights throughout the myriad conflicts of the twentieth century, from speaking out against fascism in the 1930s to participating in Israeli-Palestinian dialogue in the 1980s.

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