Dear Right Wing,
On behalf of my country and my gender, I would just like to say that I’m so sorry the media has cruelly misconstrued your obviously well-intentioned musings on rape and rape-related ...
Over the past month or so, rape has been a popular subject in the media due to Republican senate candidate Todd Akin’s comment about “legitimate rape.” After doing some digging, I discovered that last...
I think that most people can agree that being a mother is one of the most important jobs in the world. Mothers shape future generations and thus the future failures and successes of humanity. Being a ...
Recently a girl in my area was walking to her car after sports practice with a boy with whom she was on good terms. She had flirted with him a little at a previous football game and he figured that ...
I am not someone who attacks others for their personal beliefs. I do not openly ridicule people for having a specific belief system…unless that belief becomes a law by which I am forced to live my l...
More than ever, the women’s vote is important in the 2012 Presidential Election. All of the attention around the politics of health care for women had made the Republican Party and the Romney campaign...
I’m sure you’ve seen it in the news this week. The headlines are everywhere and my Twitter feed is decorated with rants from various people I follow: a man running for senate named Todd Akin used the ...
After-rape is to be consumed by emptiness, isolation, fear, shame, and anger.
And after-rape at college is to be confronted by my rapist every day—on the quad, in the library, at breakfast. It is to ...
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...
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...
*Trigger warning: the following story may be upsetting to survivors of / those sensitive to descriptions of sexual assault*
Eve is a palindrome. Reverse the order of letters, and the word remains the...
One of the main problems with calling yourself a feminist today is that it can be hard to explain why it is still needed. On the surface, many goals of feminism seem to already have been achieved and ...
Did she mention how I’m the girl of the moment?
Splashed across magazine cover pages like dripping acid from batteries
Radioactive toxic waste
How could you.
How could you.
Your bright blue eyes,...
There you are at three in the morning, sprawled out on someone else’s bed in a foreign room that smells like sex. Your body doesn’t even feel like yours -- it feels like you're standing over yourself,...
When I was 13 years old, I was raped by my then 15 year old boyfriend. For years, I held back from telling anyone except for some of my closest male friends. Why did I hold back from telling anyone? I...
In its formative days (in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and then in the 1960s and ‘70s), feminism was, above all, about promoting equal social and political citizenship for women. Contempora...
Recently, I participated, in a willing, great hook-up. The week before I participated in a willing make-out session. I just moved to a new town. I don't know anyone around here that well, and the unfo...
I've always hated chain letters. They're never nice, like, 'Just for receiving this, you get a free puppy'. No, it's always, 'If you don't forward this to ten people you're going to die alone and ge...
People often ask me why, as a man, I am so passionate about women’s rights. The answer is that I got into women’s rights because I have seen so many women put through so many horrible things. There is...
My name is Brenna, I'm eighteen, and I've been glossy-magazine-free for nine months now. That's right. Back at the advent of 2011, I decided to eschew Cosmo, Glamour, Seventeen, Vogue, Marie Claire, L...
New book from Rachel Lloyd, “Girls Like Us”, is more than a memoir—it’s a life-changing experience. Lloyd, Founder/Executive Director of Girls Education and Mentoring Network (GEMS), tells the story o...
This past weekend, I went to Slutwalk NYC. I could talk about what an incredible, inspiring experience it was. I could talk about how I did feel conflicted about what I saw as certain gaps between the...
A few weeks ago, I went to see the movie Bad Teacher (not my choice, okay?). A preview for the movie 30 Minutes or Less came on. The movie is about a guy who gets a bomb strapped to his chest by guys ...