But in February, we received an email from our editor-in-chief. She explained that the new owners were trying to gear the site more toward fashion and beauty. We covered fashion and beauty already but our writers had also opened up about their mental illnesses, rapes, eating disorders, and abortions. We covered racism, sexual harassment, inequality and the atrocities of being a woman in countries where women are seen as subhuman, as well as the issues that were going on in the U.S. We had established ourselves as a feminist site that catered to an equally feminist readership, and now we were being asked to scratch all that.

At the time I was working on a piece about the rape and murder of two little girls in India. I responded to the email questioning the new direction:

“Based on this—should we toss all feminist/news stories out? I have one scheduled for 10 a.m. tomorrow about another rape in India... should I kill it?”

The editor-in-chief apologized, but yes, the rape in India no longer had a place on the site. I knew it hurt her just as much to send that email as it did for me to read it. But apparently this story wasn’t as important as what some celebrity wore to some event, or how wearing the color red was the best way to attract a man.

For a couple weeks, we managed to adhere to the new direction, but we eventually reverted back to what we’d been covering before the email. I can’t speak for the other writers, but for me, it was a way to stand my ground. Who was this company to come in and try to make our site just as cloyingly sweet as the other sites it owned? We had been told things wouldn’t change.

I wanted to leave the site, but for some reason I hung on. It was only after my editor-in-chief had had enough and left for a better opportunity that I wrote my resignation letter, which then sat in the drafts folder of my email for months.

As a freelance writer, I wasn’t privy to the meetings in which the higher-ups discussed “the list” of words that we could no longer use. I heard from my fellow writers through email and Gchat that a list was being compiled, and on it was “abortion,” “rape,” “slut,” and “vagina.” (Since I left the publication, "vagina" has made a comeback, but only in the context of pregnancy.) How were we supposed to cover women’s health, sex, and reproductive rights? How were we supposed to teach our readers the harm of slut-shaming? Simple: we weren’t supposed to. The site was now a fashion and beauty site, end of story.

I received the official email banning those words at 4:34 p.m. on August 22. It emphasized that every story now needed to fit within the site's editorial mission, which apparently didn't have room for words like "sexual assault." I emailed my long-dormant resignation at 5:09 p.m.

It was hard to leave a site that I had loved so much—a place where I had made close friends, grown as a writer, and most of all, grown as a feminist. I had bared my soul on the site, as did many others. I had written honestly about my depression, my highs and lows in relationships, a date rape, coming to terms with the fact that I’ll never be free of antidepressants, and the piece that was most important to me, on my abortion. In an election year where women’s reproductive rights were at stake, I wanted to put a face to the word abortion. The hate mail and death threats that followed were worth it knowing that I made at least one woman feel less alone.