Self Care

by Leigh Stein

  My anti-inflammatory, gluten-free, dairy-free, low-glycemic non-GMO organic meals were delivered weekly by Urban Remedy. I grabbed a Rainbow Salad from the fridge, with red bell pepper, Swiss chard, pumpkin seeds, roasted beets, kohlrabi, tatsoi, mizuna greens, and arugula, tossed with an olive oil and apple cider vinaigrette with Himalayan pink salt. I ate at my kitchen island, sipping from a dark glass vial of probiotic Gut Euphony tincture between bites, and thumbing through Slack on my phone with my left hand.

  There was a DM from Chloé that said, Love that video!!! I responded with a heart.

  Eating food reminded me I was due for a colon hydrotherapy session and I posted to the #editorial channel to see if anyone wanted to come with me and write a story about it for the site. Then I sent Khadijah a DM to ask Chloé to make an appointment for me at the clinic.

  A text message popped up. It was Evan. He said, Hey.

  There was usually a reason for him texting me at night and this reason made me hold my breath and so I didn’t respond right away, just in case I was wrong. I watched the little ellipses like a livestream from his brain. Thinking about his brain made me think of his neck, the smooth pale skin at the nape, the way he hated if I touched his hair, which for whatever reason only made me want to touch it more.

  Are you watching Trump address to Congress?

  Definitely I was wrong about why he was texting me. Lol no , I said.

  You were great in the meeting yesterday. I could tell you were flustered at one point but no one else could tell.

  I wasn’t flustered. I let out my held breath with a huff. What makes you say that?

  I couldn’t help but replay the scene at the conference table in my mind. Was he referencing how awkward it was to have Maren call in? But that wasn’t my fault. All I ever did was try to protect Maren. She was so fragile. She didn’t need to know what Evan had texted me in the car when we were driving to Litchfield County; she didn’t need to know what he said he would have done to me in the walk-in closet if she wasn’t there watching us.

  Evan avoided my question. Come over? he said.

  I didn’t respond right away. “Alexa,” I said out loud. “Play ‘Shape of You.’”

  No too cold , I said. Take an Uber and I’ll leave keys under mat. My doorman knew Evan; there was never a problem with him getting in and taking the elevator up to my floor. It was better this way, more realistic than when I went over there.

  I took the time to blow-dry my hair and rub my face with three drops of frankincense oil from a tiny blue vial. I kept my underwear on and tucked myself under the covers, sealing a letter in an envelope.

  Evan texted again from the Uber. No touching.

  I’m not , I wrote back. Minutes of prickly anticipation passed, a similar sensation to the one I got right before Tressa’s classes, like waiting to let someone else captain the vessel of my body. I wanted to give up control. I obeyed Evan, but even without touching, I was already wet, predicting how our game would play out. I closed my eyes and arranged my arms in an imitation of sleep, my best fairy-tale princess in a coffin pose, an erotic Savasana.

  My phone buzzed again. You want this , he said.

  I did, but it was hotter to not admit it, and I put my phone under my pillow without responding. Like orgasming in a dream, I could almost make myself come by simply imagining what would happen next: hearing the slow turn of the key in the door and the sound of Evan slipping off his shoes and coat. Knowing he’s in my bedroom by the sound of the belt buckle hitting the oak floor. A few last seconds of waiting with my eyes shut as he softly climbed onto the bed, hovering above me like a dark shadow, pulling down the sheets. Up close I could smell him. He dragged the straps of my nightgown down to my waist and watched (I could only imagine he watched) my nipples respond to the cold before running the pads of his thumbs across them. My job was not to wake up. My job was to keep my eyes shut. And this was what I wanted, a job. He smelled my hair and kissed an earlobe, the sensitive skin at my throat, my clavicle, my breastbone, licking down to my navel, and then Evan sucked a nipple while a hand went under my nightgown and pulled aside the crotch of my panties. His long fingers were warm inside me, thrusting and beckoning like a hook. He never kissed my mouth or anywhere on my face. That was not how the game was played. The game was I did not move or make a sound. The game was I never opened my eyes. I remained limp as a doll when he finally removed my panties and fucked me silently for five or six minutes before coming all over my placid face.

  So You Want to Be a Foundress?

  Khadijah

  Hey y’all,

  My name is Khadijah Walker and I’m the SVP of editorial strategy here at Richual. Thanks so much for taking the time to contribute your feedback to this working group, so that we can create the most inclusive, intersectional user experience. The most passionate members of this group may be tapped for future (paid) opportunities, so don’t hold back! Let us know where you see problematic posts and why they’re problematic to you. You’re welcome to share screenshots of Richual conversations or just copy and paste.

  NevisFong

  @KhadijahWalker thank you for holding space for us to contribute. I joined Richual after the election because a friend told me it was a place where I could just chill and take a deep breath, in between calling my reps, but the longer I’m here, the more I realize how many posts are women opening up about horrific things that have happened to them. Is there any way to enforce a content warning, so that we can skip those posts if we want to? Thank you for listening. (Sorry so long!)

  The_s_is_silent

  @NevisFong that is a good reminder to always include content warning! TY!

  Felice

  @NevisFong @KhadijahWalker maybe there could be a button we could push if someone doesn’t include a content warning, to report them?

  NicoletteLee

  Is there a reason that I have almost 8,000 followers and I’ve never been contacted by Richual about becoming an influencer? I wonder if there’s a bias against women of size with vinyasa practices. I see @SmokyMountainHeartOpener posting videos sponsored by almonds all the time. Am I not worthy of the almond shill?

  JustDiana

  @NicoletteLee I’m one of the Richual interns helping @KhadijahWalker and just want to say I follow all your posts and you should totally be an influencer!

  Allison

  Can I get a ban on YAS QUEEN from cis straight white girls who don’t understand its provenance as a phrase of resistance in Black drag culture during AIDS epidemic?

  Gili

  What if every Richual user put their identity markers in their profile so we all wouldn’t have to make assumptions from their pic? Like Black, white, Jewish, Palestinian, cis, trans, NB, straight, bi, queer, vegan, gluten-free, Pisces, INFJ, etc.

  The_s_is_silent

  @Gili You should also have to disclose who you voted for!!!

  Gili

  @The_s_is_silent

  NevisFong

  @Gili @The_s_is_silent I wouldn’t want to shame anyone who isn’t a US citizen (and couldn’t vote)

  Aja_dontgothere

  I think if someone posts photos of themselves at March for Life, that should be cause for removal. Richual is supposed to be about supporting a woman’s right to choose, right @KhadijahWalker?

  Felice

  @Aja_dontgothere Or wearing a MAGA hat.

  Aja_dontgothere

  @Felice GIRL YES

  KhadijahWalker

  @Aja_dontgothere We definitely support a woman’s right to choose but we also support marching for what you believe in.

  JustDiana

  When I went to Lesbians Who Tech, they had a code of conduct. Maybe we could have one too! I will start a Google Doc of all these great ideas.

  I sent @JustDiana a private message: Please don’t promi
se anything we can’t deliver. We are just here to listen right now. I checked my Fitbit and my heart rate was up six points just from following the thread. We didn’t care about their ideas for improving the platform. They didn’t work at Richual.

  Got it, boss, she typed back.

  I gave my other intern, Chloé, another task altogether. I want you to go through all our users and see who is on which diet (vegan, Paleo, GF, keto, Whole30, raw, etc.) and make me a bar chart of their ranking in popularity. We had nearly two million users. This task would keep her busy until her internship was over, which was good for me, and she could put that she did “data science” on her résumé, good for her.

  It was Wednesday and I was working from home so that I could catch a 4:15 prenatal yoga class. Devin was likely pacing the office, staring at my empty desk space, forgetting that she herself had agreed to me working from home one day a week. You just have to get through this, I told myself. And then you get to go somewhere they make you breathe.

  I bit into a caramel almond Kind bar. If the Dragg & Dropp people wanted callouts and takedowns, I had to get the working group to trash specific users.

  KhadijahWalker

  Thanks everyone. @JustDiana and I would love to know if there are any users SPECIFICALLY you want to call out (or call in)? @NicoletteLee mentioned @SmokyMountainHeartOpener. Anyone else? When you think “white privilege,” who do you think of?

  Within minutes, @Allison had shared a screenshot of Devin at a charity gala, wearing a sheer dress with a plunging neckline and a VR headset, looking like the physical embodiment of a flute of champagne. So grateful to @MarcMoulin for using tech to transport us to Mogadishu. So blessed to be one of the first to experience this transformational tool for compassionate journeys, Devin had written in the caption to her post.

  Allison

  You mean like this @KhadijahWalker?

  Felice

  @Allison A DEVIN AVERY CLASSIC

  The_s_is_silent

  @Allison This is incredible I’ve never seen it before

  Gili

  @Allison Eat the rich

  Aja_dontgothere

  What about this

  It was a photo of Devin wearing a pink hat at the Women’s March, standing next to Amy Schumer, as they both took big bites out of street vendor hot dogs. Hashtag white feminism, @Aja_dontgothere said. At least she’s eating something! lol, replied @The_s_is_silent. Hashtag not all hot dogs, @JustDiana added. This is why that man is in the White House right now, @Gili typed. Devin represents the 53 percent.

  They were gleeful at the game. It was so easy—anybody could play. There was a post of Devin bragging that her blowout was on fleek; a profile of her in New York magazine accompanied by a photo of her posed in bed in a vintage silk kimono; a pic of a steaming hot bowl of pho, captioned “I’m starving,” dated the same day that two boats of Syrian refugees capsized off the Italian coast. There were layers of offense to unearth here, and everyone was on an archaeological dig.

  Devin made Richual for you, I wanted to tell them. She’s the reason we’re even here talking about this. But I felt frozen, unable to type anything in her defense. Couldn’t we talk about users who wore so much bronzer it bordered on blackface? Or what about how all the influencers opening up about their eating disorder recovery were white, as if EDs didn’t also impact WOC? If I said, Not Devin, name someone else, they’d call me Uncle Tom.

  I was back inside The Panopticon. There was a whole subset of our users who were on the platform to surveil the elite.

  Wait, @Gili posted. Has anyone seen this? She shared a link to a news article with a photo of Evan wearing a white T-shirt that said “Control the Guns” on the left and “Not Women’s Bodies” on the right, his arm around grinning bare-shouldered Devin, at the Richual launch party in October 2016.

  I took that photo for the About Us page.

  Former Bachelorette Contestant Evan Wiley Accused of Inappropriate Conduct by Three Women in Bizarre Fairy Tale Sex Scandal

  Entrepreneur, angel investor, self-described feminist, and former Bachelorette contestant Evan Wiley has been accused of inappropriate sexual conduct by three women. Fans will remember Wiley as the bachelor who made it to the fantasy suite episode in the Kimberly Hartsong season, shocking viewers by asking Kimberly the question, “What turns you on?” to which she responded, “No one’s ever asked me that before.”

  Wiley was a fan favorite to win Hartsong’s heart, but he got into an aggressive confrontation with contestant Brad Bellingham III at the cocktail party just before the rose ceremony, the two trading jabs about who respected women more, until Wiley left the cabana in protest, ranted on camera about the show’s culture of “toxic masculinity,” and then rode off into the night on a motorbike belonging to hotel staff at Playa Escondida.

  For the first time, Hartsong is coming out about what really happened in the fantasy suite. In a post on the website Richual, a social network for women interested in “self-care,” Hartsong writes:

  The fantasy suite is supposed to be a night where two people can be intimate with each other. Evan was very gentle. He always asked me what I wanted or what I liked, even though we weren’t actually doing anything. It was getting later and later. The camera guys were gone. I was getting tired and I kind of wanted him to take the lead more, to feel wanted, I guess. Finally I must have gotten in bed because it was time to go to sleep and that’s when he started. I felt weakened. He said you don’t have to do anything, just lie there. I felt tricked when he left the show. Your mind is always going to be like, Was it me? Did I do something wrong?

  Wiley is on the board of Richual and the highest equity stakeholder in the company, aside from the cofounders, Devin Avery and Maren Gelb.

  One of Wiley’s ex-girlfriends, who has asked to remain anonymous, describes Wiley’s sexual preferences more explicitly: he prefers sex with women who are “near unconscious.”

  “At first, it was like a game,” she says. “He called it Sleeping Beauty. He asked me to wear a blond wig he had and pretend to be asleep until he, you know, penetrated me. And then I was supposed to wake up.”

  But Wiley’s game turned sinister.

  “We went away to this house he had in the country,” the woman said. “It was in the spring and I had bad hay fever. I know my sneezing was ruining what was supposed to be this, like, romantic weekend, and he gave me something for my allergies. The next thing I remember, I’m in this dark kind of basement, wearing just a tank top. I went through a couple doors, looking for the bathroom, and when I peed there was blood. Then Evan opened the door, standing there, like, ‘You were so hot last night.’ We still had another whole day together, and we went to the farmers market and he got me a bouquet of daffodils.”

  The woman says she never reported the alleged assault to authorities, and stopped responding to his text messages shortly after the weekend, even though he had promised to get her an interview at Richual.

  Another woman, Rachelle Tanaka, says she met Evan at a mixer for female entrepreneurs and angel investors around Halloween in 2015. The mixer was a costume party, and Tanaka was dressed as Snow White.

  “My company is using VR to disrupt the fitness industry and Evan seemed really interested,” Tanaka says. “He was like, ‘My place is nearby. Can you show me a demo?’ And I said, I can show you a demo right now . . . I had a Google Cardboard viewer in my purse. But he said he couldn’t stay much longer, and so I went with him.”

  Tanaka says that Wiley asked her how much funding she was trying to raise, and when she told him the number, he said, “The number one thing that holds women back is their own limiting beliefs.” He suggested she dream bigger.

  “Maybe this is naive, but I genuinely thought he was interested in investing in me, in what I was doing,” Tanaka says. “He asked really smart questions about the app I was developing and my
marketing plan.”

  They continued to see each other, but Tanaka says that Wiley insisted she wear the costume whenever they had sex. He bought a second costume for her, to keep at his apartment.

  “Evan was obsessed with the near-death element of the story and asked if I would give consent to him taking photos of his hands around my neck. I said absolutely not. And he said, I respect that.”

  Tanaka says she’s speaking out publicly to warn other entrepreneurs.

  Through his lawyer, Wiley has declined to comment on the story at this time.

  NevisFong

  @Gili this is just what I was talking about. No content warning before you shared this?

  Gili

  @NevisFong So sorry!!!

  JustDiana

  @NevisFong Added to the Google Doc!

  Allison

  Sounds like my last two boyfriends. Classic narcissistic personality disorder. It’s all about power.

  NicoletteLee

  @Allison I dated NPD too. “A game.” BOI BAI

  The_s_is_silent

  I watched that season of the Bachelorette. The way she kept going back over what happened in her mind . . . oooooooooof

  Aja_dontgothere

  IMO, this story is going to get a lot of attention because Evan is a celebrity and now Kimberly Hartsong (is that her name for real?) is a celebrity, but what about WOC who are disproportionally impacted by intimate partner violence? Who’s writing about their stories? Why are we always centering white victims?

  Gili

  @Aja_dontgothere Tanaka is a WOC

  Aja_dontgothere

  @Gili I didn’t say she wasn’t?