I took a seat on a vinyl chair next to my father in the event room of the American Legion in Weehawken, New Jersey. Weehawken is an urban township across the Hudson River from New York City, and its g...
A few weeks ago, I sat in the Chapel at Vassar College, surrounded by a multitude of individuals with varying intersectional identities and causes, listening to feminist scholar Angela Davis speak. Th...
I recently came across a great piece of advice from the inimitable Mindy Kaling: Your image in high school, she observed, usually has very little to do with your success later in life. In fact, they’r...
The announcement that a gender-swapped reboot of Ghostbusters will soon be in theaters has generated quite a bit of excitement. Considering the top-notch comedy actresses at the project's helm, includ...
“It’s just an excuse for sluts to be naked all the time.”
This was my mother's response to my attempt to explain the importance of the Free the Nipple movement. Although I disagree, I also know that ...
The musical duo Harmony Trividad and Cleo Tucker, also known as "Girlpool," have a lot to say about the rigid expectations girls face growing up in America. Through unsettling harmonies and raw, cre...
A few weeks ago, I took my seat in the huge auditorium of my East Coast college preparatory boarding school for Proctor Training. The week-long event involved a series of workshops and lectures that t...
Though it appeared in Vanity Fair last year, a photo for which Kate Winslet posed sans makeup recently inspired a social media-based no-makeup selfie campaign. Fans were encouraged to post their own n...
"Where are you really from?"
"What are you?"
"You don't look Latina."
"Microaggressions" are “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unint...
In theory, dating can be an incredible opportunity for two individuals to model gender-based equality and mutual respect. In practice, however, women are still frequently degraded and regarded as subm...
It happened a couple of weeks after my 12th birthday. I hadn't entered high school, I didn't have my period or a crush on anyone. I was too young to experience the best, empowering parts of my sexuali...
Despite composing the majority of video game players, women are frequently attacked within the gaming community. Though it has persisted for years, this horrifying treatment entered the public conscio...
“Why does she stay?”
It's a question outsiders continue to ask about those in abusive relationships. The situation may seem black and white to many: If someone is assaulting you, then you should leav...
At the end of his VMA performance on Sunday night, Justin Bieber began to cry. This image has already launched debates about his motivations and as someone who has spent the past 4 years imme...
Society obsesses over the concept of virginity. Young girls are taught that they must meet standards of “purity” and “cleanliness” — standards that are determined by whether or not we have had sex yet...
The spring semester of my freshmen year of college, I took a class called "Intro to Political Theory." I was obsessed with the syllabus (Kant and Marx make my head hurt in all the right ways) and more...
I used to be a White Feminist. As a white woman, I thought it was my only option. But, as a video produced by the Huffington Post and a thoughtful post by the young star Rowan Blanchard both explai...
Planned Parenthood is a reproductive health care provider that is "dedicated to offering men, women, and teens high-quality, affordable medical care," according to its website. The organization also “...
He whistles. "Hey beautiful, look at that ass. Damn, can't you at least smile?"
I have faced plenty of unfair, gender-based double standards in my life. I've been told from a young age to never be alo...
Ok, I’ll admit to watching an episode or two (or six) of The Bachelorette this season. For those who haven't watched, the show focuses on one woman's quest to find a perfect match among a group of mal...
Many people think a low-wage worker is a young adult making minimum wage to earn a bit of pocket money or save up for college. While these workers make up some of the low-wage workforce, the vast majo...
In September of 2013, a law was passed in the Dominican Republic that effectively caused mass deportation and displaced countless Haitians. The law ruled that children born in the DR to non-citizens d...
Megyn Kelly has been widely praised for her skillful moderation of last Thursday's GOP debate. Many noted that the Fox News host asked sharp yet substantial questions and took a no-nonsense approach t...
"There's a big problem in Hollywood today," Kevin Bacon says at the start of a recently released video. "In so many films and TV shows we see gratuitous female nudity, and that's not okay."
While rai...
I saw it in middle school, and later in high school: If the girls in my class didn’t excel in science, no body was surprised, since girls are never expected to excel in the subject. But if they receiv...