As well as being a feminist, I am an Orthodox Jew. While I had always been active in gay rights advocacy through my feminism, I never really thought about how Orthodox individuals who are LGBT+ grappl...
As you get older, more and more of your peers have sex. I’m currently 19 and know plenty of people who haven’t had sex. But because of the media's stereotypical portrayal of young people as raging sex...
I was born and raised a Christian. From the time I came out of the womb, I was immersed in a highly religious family, and I lived most of my life with blinders on. I never really questioned anything a...
I was lucky enough to have been raised by open minded women. Never once did the idea that girls are only supposed to be a certain way come up. Early on I learned that girls and boys are equals. I was ...
It’s always pissed me off that I can’t seem to hang out with any one of my guy friends without the nature of that relationship being called into question. You talk all the time and you have so much in...
I don’t have a diagnosed eating disorder and that makes me sad. That might sound like a strange thing to say, but what I mean is that I think it's wrong that my daily obsession with counting calories,...
Widows in India have a pronoun problem. The estimated 40 million women widows in the country go from being called “she” to “it” when they lose their husbands. They become “de-sexed” creatures.
Michael Kimmel is among the leading researchers and writers on men and masculinity in the world today. The author or editor of more than twenty volumes, his books include Changing Men: New Directions ...
I volunteer at the children’s service at my synagogue on Shabbat (the Sabbath). Every week, the kids walk around with kid-sized Torahs, some of which are stuffed toys. The Torahs are red, yellow, blue...
I never thought much of gender construction as a child. I just knew what I wanted to wear, how my hair should be cut, and what interested me. Did I want to proudly wear my new matching dragon shirt an...
I can’t pinpoint one event that transformed me into a feminist activist – rather, a succession of small personal events led to a decision to co-found my own women’s rights organization and make a life...
When I thought about what my college experience would be like as a high schooler, I never for a second even slightly entertained the faintest thought of joining a sorority. As a self-identified femini...
Recently, I was taking a course on linguistics, and we were discussing syntax. My professor asked the class-- a room of roughly a hundred English students, mostly female-- what pronoun to use when rep...
As I was doing my AP Psychology homework about the psychology of language recently, I came across some interesting studies about the effect of using gender-neutral speech.
Janet Hyde, a professor of ...
Merry Christmas, FBombers! While I'll personally be celebrating Christmas by sleeping in, eating Chinese food and seeing a movie later, I recognize that this actually is a holiday for many people! So,...
I'm still a little obsessed with Maria Bamford and look for basically any opportunity to share her with the world. Because it's Christmas Eve, it seemed like the perfect time to post Maria Bamford's C...
In high school (and in life) people learn that they have to have priorities. Do grades come before sports? Do friends come before family? Does my boyfriend come before everyone/everything else? Af...
Procrastinating is always loads of fun, and thanks to the Internet, it’s really easy to do. One such time that I was putting off doing something important, I noticed this picture (embedded in this pos...
Props to my English professor for sending our class this video with the commentary: "(This) definitely got a "really?" from me...I find it hard to believe that they can get away with these kinds of ge...
When I was fourteen, my dad told me that the most important thing I would ever learn was how to be alone. Granted, he said this as he took away my cell phone, Facebook and cut off all ties I had to t...
You know the saying that history can repeat itself? It sounds cliche, but it’s kind of shocking when it happens to you in real life.
Before I was a proud feminist/atheist/vegetarian I was unfortunate...
The bottom line of college orientation is that it’s a paradox: feeling simultaneously deeply comforted and entirely thrown off your axis, spinning rapidly towards the unknown. Or at least, that’s what...
I’ve always wanted to be in the spotlight, to make it big in the music industry. But at seventeen, I really thought that my music career wasn't going anywhere. I constantly compared myself to other pe...
I used to have a little tradition of buying a cheesy teen magazine during the first week of summer and lying on the beach reading about the perfect nail polish color, or how to make your skin appear f...