Weeks passed before Ella, 25, began to confide in her friends that she had been raped. While she didn't find them to be exactly unsupportive, there was still a consistent and major hurdle: "They are oftentimes surprised when they realize it was a woman who assaulted me." Most of my fellow inmates were bigger, tougher, meaner, more desperate, and had less to lose than me, so I never let my guard down.” The night before I left on the cruise, two of my best friends got married. Watching one of my friend’s dads talking at the wedding dinner about how much he loved his daughter and her new wife, I teared up a little and said something to my partner about it: “This is actually pretty nice, huh?” But they wrinkled their nose at me. They’re not a fan of weddings — the pomp and circumstance, the big, grand displays of public affection.

We both like Justin Bieber, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, babies, spicy foods, and romantic comedies, as well as traveling, swimming, dressing up, having sex, being tall, biking (“cycling,” she’d say), and making detailed plans well ahead of time. We also appear, at this admittedly early stage, to be each other’s scarily perfect sexual complement; lesbian sex can look like a million and one different things, and we like so many of the same ones that it is, honestly, a miracle we ever got out of bed and did anything normal, like eat dinner or generally interact with other people. (Turns out, there was nothing wrong with me during my sad stretch of a dry spell after all — I just hadn’t been having the sex I actually wanted to have.) I’d never considered before that being a femme with a butch partner needn’t be some inequitable hetero horror show, but instead could be something imbued with incredible queer comfort and power. It could be fun. It could be hot. Knox admits that prison relationships can be about sex. But mostly, she writes, it’s about human connection. I would go straight to my friend Dom’s house, not even stopping at home to shower first, where I told him that I was, indeed, having a quarter-life crisis.

Discipline and Punishment

We all have those little voices in our head that tell us what to do. Sometimes it tries to convince us that our disobedience is okay. The voices are very convincing at times and then we have guilt riding with us until we come clean. Read The Article

Punishment is one of those areas which is not what it seems. Before you can develop tools or methods of punishment you have to look at the concepts behind the issue itself. Read The Article

The following night, Alaina's friend hosted a party in her dorm. Other freshmen arrived early to get ready and put on makeup—"nerdy outcast" types, Alaina remembers of the tightknit group who were all acquainted with her host. Alcohol and Coca-Cola had been bought for mixing, but Alaina opted just for the Coke; she didn't feel like drinking that night. I'm going to talk about a submissive's mindset when it comes to repeat patterns in behavior and why we just can't keep our feet on the straight and narrow. Read The Article