I lost my virginity at sixteen to a boy who was just a friend. I was blessed to have friends who where very open minded and accepted that fact. I know from experience that some people would not take t...
Don’t you hate it when you see another girl and she looks perfect? You know, the way you want to look but can never seem to pull off. She has the perfect outfit, or the perfect face, perfect hair, per...
Shilpa Narayan, the woman behind the Youtube username Shilax0929's musical rendition videos had an unlikely beginning that sets her apart from the vast majority of musical acts these days. As a young ...
The UN asked me to present the first findings of a data analysis from our crowdmap of sexualized violence in Syria as the Security Council gears up to vote on international sanctions--potentially on Friday. Below is my testimony to a room that contained members of the council from France, Portugal, the European Union delegation, Egypt, Italy, and perhaps a few members from Syria (the jury's out on that).
As a little project, I recently decided to compile the gender presentation as depicted in the headlines on various popular ‘news’ websites over 3 days. Having rolled my eyes so strenuously as to pop s...
Every morning when I take the train, I put my iPod on shuffle and let various thoughts run through my head. But as I think about how tired I am or about the math test I have during first period, I don...
In the 1990s, Hogan sang with The Jody Grind, singing on their full-lengths One Man’s Trash Is Another Man’s Treasure (1990) and Lefty’s Deceiver (1992). The group disbanded after two of its members w...
I love to see women who are comfortable and confident in their skin despite being a different size or shape than what our society markets as the ideal. I love seeing a woman who doesn’t lose her confi...
With the republication of her novel set in the 1950s, Caryl Rivers considers the nuns who taught her and those who are still today the heart of the Catholic Church.
According to California-based sister trio HAIM, the origin story of their band starts with their parents’ shared love of music. As a teenager in the 1970s, their mother won an episode of The Gong Show...
Shree Bose has inspired me since I learned that she was the Grand Prize winner of the Google Global Science Fair. As her TEDxwomen's speaker's page describes: "[Shree's] award-winning project involved...
It's my nature to think in the long term. Even though I am fully aware that at the age of 18 even though I can drive, rock the vote, and go to war I still have a lot of time before I have to think ser...
This week, Seventeen magazine promised to publish un-photoshopped images of real girls, finally responding to 14-year-old SPARK activist Julia Bluhm's campaign. Such pressure must continue argues author Laura Bates.
A chat pops up. Lines start pouring in to tell me that a group of men led two young girls into a van. There is little detail after that, the chat reveals, but not before I need to ask questions I am trying not to ask.
I recently came across the concept of "Straw Feminism." Anita Sarkeesian of Feminist Frequency defines the Straw feminist as “a trope that is a deliberately created, exaggerated caricature of a femini...
Having consulted Geena Davis, who has played her share of strong female characters, the author asks, are two successful female-driven action movies released in one year a sign of good times to come for heroic women on screen?
Prodigious Swedish teenagers Klara (17) and Johanna Söderberg (19), AKA First Aid Kit, have been gathering fans apace since the release of their 'Drunken Trees' EP in February 2009. They are proud to ...
"Gayle Tzemach Lemmon never set out to write about women entrepreneurs. She was simply looking for a great—and underreported—economics story after leaving ABC News for MBA study at Harvard to pursue h...
Author M. G. Lord knew Nora Ephron socially, but appreciated her most through Ephron's essays. She writes about why they've had only the best influence on her own writing.
A dark screen accompanies the sounds of rhythmic drums and sinister music. The darkness fades into a chronological montage of U.S. Army propaganda, leading a viewer through an overview of military aesthetic dating from the newsreel era to the videogame epoch. From the opening frame, a new documentary called “The Invisible War” establishes the realm of an alternate military reality, far from civilian life. A woman explains in voiceover: “There’s a right way, a wrong way, and the Army way.”
Lately, I have been struggling with music -- specifically, rap. I am an African-American girl and rap is very popular not just in my culture but in my own family. I recently realized that the struggle...