...to every white woman who responded to this post with an anecdote about your own hair and/or tattoos:

SHUT. THE. FUCK. UP.

For your reference: I am writing this as a white woman with tattoos, piercings, and hair that get and have gotten touched, consensually and otherwise, more than I am comfortable with.

And I think that while it is cool that your first instinct is to look for common ground in your own experiences, your responses to the original post are incredibly appropriative, insensitive, and just plain fucking STUPID.

Neither you nor I--and I don't give a fuck how much race or gender studies either of us has read, or how many friends of color we have--has any real sense of what it is like to have our bodies commodified the way the bodies of women of color are and historically have been commodified. We have NO FUCKING IDEA what it is like to grow up in a culture that teaches us to hate our bodies the way that black girls are taught to hate theirs.

I do not mean to diminish the experience of any woman. It is always traumatic to be touched without your consent, and most women have experienced, to greater or lesser degrees, the cultural commodification of their bodies and the self-image issues that those raise.

But it is not always the same experience, no matter how hard you pretend otherwise, and race and gender are not mutually exclusive filters. This is not your sob story, and if that privilege makes you uncomfortable, GOOD. It should. Now own it and get the fuck on with your life.

I'll even give you the first step: Sit down, shut up, and listen.