feminism

We live in a culture that simultaneously claims to embrace the equality of men and women and at the same time seriously devalues femininity.

Here’s something nobody talks about when you’re trying to become pregnant: it becomes an obsession and takes over your life. There’s just something so incredibly frustrating about not being able to do this thing that EVERYONE else can do without a problem.

Bad Feminist is the best thing to happen to my literary life in 2015. It is smart, insightful, and full of sentences that hit you straight in the heart.

In case you need still more proof that feminism is desperately and unequivocally needed, here are three completely horrible stories from this week alone.

There are only a few people around who haven’t seen the video/picture of the group of sorority girls at a baseball game doing nothing but taking selfies. These women have become the butt of jokes all over the Internet and are being held as an example of the supposed egotism and self-obsession of today’s youth.

Street harassment. Eating disorders. Rape — three times, including one storyline that involved Zoe being sexually violated at a party by two star athletes who filmed the assault and distributed the video online. Intimate partner violence. Sexist school dress codes. Police brutality and racial profiling. Islamophobia. Sexting and child pornography.

A couple of days into my period my family and I were sitting at the kitchen table eating dinner. Halfway through my father said he could, “smell my maxi pads in the garbage in the bathroom.” I was horrified and instantly started to cry.

I’ve been writing about body positivity on the Internet for a couple of years now, but I have to admit that if anything, loving my body has become harder than when I started. Since then, I came to understand that I had an unresolved eating disorder that I battled for six years, I’ve started working out and I’ve discovered a passion for cooking.