My mum took her first job in 1980, when she was fourteen. In my childhood, she worked as a medical receptionist. For every hour she worked, she was almost certainly paid less than a man in a job of ‘comparable value’. For every curtailed pay check, there was a lower superannuation benefit, a lower amount left for savings at the end of each week and, inevitably, a lower amount to put towards a house deposit.

‘Well, it’s just that no-one has ever wanted to come here,’ my cuñada tells me.

In the silver light, the brumbies’ plush manes glisten. A soft dusting of snow clings to the thick hair that hangs around their hooves. We pull our car to the side of the road and watch in silence as the band trots down into the still, white valley. There is something majestic about the scene. The hillsides sparkle in the headlights. ‘They are Australian?’ my Colombian partner asks me. ‘Yes,’ I reply, but falter.

Grease-black, the Californian sea lion moves through the pool like a slick of oil pushed by a strong current. Propelled by rear flippers in a momentous leap, a halo of water spins from its glossy head, and, as the awkward mound flops down, a large splash rises to an elated chorus of laughter. A cool bead hits my arm. The smell in the air is cold fish mixed with the scent left in a room after a dog has been bathed.

I recently discovered that being topless outdoors is a wonderful sensation; one that many women deprive themselves of out of societally enforced shame, or fear of the leers our bodies so often evoke. Back pressed to the warm granite, I soak in the rays, totally at peace. Half an hour later, there is a rustle in the bushes behind me. I turn to see Andy, concealed among the trees, touching himself. He slinks away, but I feel disappointed, objectified, and more than a bit pissed off.

I think about the notable women who have chosen a mononym instead (Cher, Madonna, the French author Colette), but I decide unless I want to join the millennial poets of Instagram and Tumblr, the mononym isn’t the right move for me as a writer. Even then, I learn that Colette’s mononym was inspired by her father’s surname. I start to wonder if I am reading too much into the whole thing, then decide that I am not seeking a name that is devoid of gender, just one that feels like mine.

While the term stealthing may not be preferential, it isn’t the first time that movements have had to reclaim terminology in order to initiate their own conversations. From the feminist pop culture magazine titled Bitch, to The Vagina Monologues acrostic classic ‘Reclaiming Cunt’, to the now common usage of the term queer in the LGBTQI community – as Paul Baker, a professor of English Language at Lancaster University in the UK says, ‘control language and you control the society.’

Clicking from source to source, I’m not surprised to find the same detailed descriptions of her clothes over and over. ‘She is believed to be aged in her 20s wearing a black long sleeved top, blue denim shorts and white runners …’ I wonder what I am supposed to deduce from this information.

Despite common beliefs about carefree gen-Y lifestyles, millennial women are not only using less birth control than our mothers, we are also having less penetrative sex with fewer sexual partners. When my twenty-one-year-old colleague said condoms were her preferred contraceptive, I asked what she does when her partners don’t want to use one. ‘I don’t have sex with them,’ she replied, with a ‘duh’ look on her face. Millennial women are more discerning about what goes into their bodies in more ways than one. Sexual freedom doesn’t just mean the right to have lots of sex, but also the right to decline.