Melissa Petro

Would Sheryl Sandberg be able to get away with leaning in while donning Zuckerberg's signature v-neck T-shirt and jeans? History says no.

Stock photos seemed to get pregnancy and parenting all wrong. When a Facebook friend posted looking for a real life pregnant stock photo model, I offered.

We’ve all been in a situation where we've thought NO ONE CAN EVER KNOW THAT THIS HAPPENED TO ME.

Sure, "friends forever" sounds nice. In theory. But sometimes it's better that two people just not be friends.

There was nothing easy about recovery, but it helped that living the trainwreck lifestyle had stripped me of everything. Within sixteen months, I was unemployed with no job prospects, barely scraping through my last semester at school. I was drinking every day. Sex with classmates had led to casual encounters which bottomed out at trading sex for cash, something I spent a whole lot of time justifying.

Hate hurts us all, but we don’t all receive it with the same systemic intensity. Those of us with the privilege to do so need to push against the borders of what is “permissible” in this society. We need challenge the idea of “normal” — rather than conform to it — so that all of us can live more closely to our truths.

The biggest fashion mistake of my lifetime may not be what I wore, but what I didn’t.

Mark prayed to Saint Francis, a patron saint of drunks and (according to Mark) lost causes. Mark wasn’t religious, but he wore a St. Francis amulet around his neck, a gift from his father. Nights when he didn’t come home, I prayed to St. Francis, too.

“If you believe in the decriminalisation of sex work,” Ian Dunt rightfully points out, “you will instantly come under a sustained and highly emotive attack on your morality and your identity.” In this vein, when a man comes out in favor of sex worker’s rights, he becomes “a betrayer of women, a gender Judas encouraging violence against them.”

You may have heard the old joke that 98% of people masturbate, and the other two percent are lying.