The Red Maiden

by Emma-Lee Moss

My matchmaker is a man. A man in a crisp, white shirt and trousers. ‘Shouldn’t you be an old lady?’ I ask. He bridles. ‘That’s kind of a cliché.’ I’m two weeks into my first trip to China. As a kid living in pre-Handover Hong Kong, China was a terrifying, monolithic presence. Now, it is a place I long to understand.

The Sex Column #4: Unfuckedness

A person writes, “I’d be curious to see you discuss sex lives that can feel non-existent … how to feel comfortable with your sexuality when you’ve not been intimate with someone for well over a few years.” This month’s column is named after a poem by my friend Amy Key, Lousy with unfuckedness, I dream.

The Sex Column #3: How to Be Good

The following question was posed to me: ‘I know all modern sex havers have to be GGG (good, giving, and game), but at what point [in a relationship] can one stop being GGG?’ ... I think, in general, one should accommodate a partner’s desires on occasion as a mark of generosity, which is what being GGG entails, above all.

Night Wind

The devil was already inside Amenze when she walked past Goodies on Awolowo Road. At first, it was squatting inside her small stomach, leaning against the walls and eating ground up groundnut from the day before. Then she felt it becoming a fuller presence from her waist, expanding through the width of her chest.

Grenfell: Community, Spirituality and Safe Spaces

We’ve reached a strange impasse when a generation that shuns organised religion claims to be more spiritual than ever. When it believes enlightenment will come via lunchtime vinyasa flow—if only the west African churches next door could keep their 'massive ghetto blasters and screaming' down.

Dreamed As Medicine: Meditations on Gender and Spirit

I think that I am non­binary. I’m not sure exactly what this could mean. If gender is the way one is read and received, I don’t know who I could be if I only had to read and receive myself. I think that I might be non­binary, because I only feel fully at ease around the queer, trans and gender non-conforming.

My Favourite Utopia

Following the news cycles’ unremitting misery, I’ve started to imagine a utopia where women don’t have to constantly engage in dialogue about their experience of oppression. It’s a world where women meeting for the first time bond over their favourite books rather than their respective brushes with sexual assault.

The Sex Column #2: Consent

I distanced myself from the digital furore for the sake of my own mental health. I couldn’t go on twitter or Facebook without being exposed to things that I found triggering. Women’s voices were being amplified—an indisputably good thing—so why was my internal dialogue conflicted?

First Refrain from Doing Harm

I once thought boredom to be beautiful. Not that I experienced anything beauteous when bored, I just assumed the sheer mass of non-experience was, in itself, an experience. It took place in such loaded, symbolic surroundings that I considered it beautiful. 

The Sex Column #1: Disgust

I won’t be replying to a series of individual questions in this column, rather writing about themes that I see recurring—the most common being straight men asking how to 'fuck good'. And I'm never going to deal with that. It has been dealt with. Please leave me alone.