What I remind myself, regularly, is this: the acknowledgement of my privilege is not a denial of the ways I have been and am marginalized, the ways I have suffered.
We live in a strange and terrible time for women. There are days when I think it has always been a strange and terrible time to be a woman. Womanhood feels more strange and terrible now because progre...
We have all manner of music glorifying the degradation of women, and damnit, that music is catchy so I often find myself singing along as my very being is diminished. Singers like Robin Thicke know we...
We expect role models to model the behaviors we are perfectly capable of modeling ourselves.
Too many women are afraid to be labeled feminists, afraid to stand up and say, Yes, I am a feminist, for fear of what that label means, for fear of how to live up to it, for fear of feminism as someth...
These terms themselves are somewhat horrifying. Obese is an unpleasant word from the Latin obesus, meaning having eaten until fat, which is, in a literal sense, fair enough. But when people use the wo...
There are injustices great and small, and even if we can only fight the small ones, at least we are fighting.
The older we get, the more labels and categories we collect
The older I get, though, the more I realize how fairy tales demand a great deal from the woman.
The notion that I should be fine with the status quo even if I am not wholly affected by the status quo is repulsive. These
The majority of people who are stopped and frisked in New York are black or Latino because these demographics fit our cultural profile of danger. These are the supposed barbarians at the gate, not the...
The longer The Biggest Loser has been on the air, however, the more the show has disturbed me.
The girl-woman singer died in her flat, alone in bed. Too many people said, It was to be expected, because we knew this girl who was a woman was really a girl. We knew she had problems, and she did no...
The [Sweet Valley High] books were the most familiar and resonant expressions of our angst and our fondest wishes for ourselves, the girls we wanted to become.
The United States as we know it was founded on the principle of inalienable rights, the idea that some rights are so sacrosanct not even a government can take them away. Of course, this country’s foun...
Su, an Australian woman who, when interviewed for Kathy Bail’s 1996 anthology DIY Feminism, said feminists are just women who don’t want to be treated like shit.
Specific body parts, problem areas, also get labels—fupa, gunt, cankles, thunder thighs, Hi Susans, wings, cottage cheese thighs, hail damage, muffin tops, side boob, back fat, love handles, saddlebag...
Sometimes, when you least expect it, you become the girl in the woods. You lose your name because another one is forced on you. You think you are alone until you find books about girls like you. Salva...
Sometimes, I hope that by telling these stories again and again, I will have a better understanding of how the world works.
Somehow, though, it is only books by women, or books about certain topics, that require this special women’s fiction designation, particularly when those books have the audacity to explore, in some ma...