FAIR Girls is a wonderful organization that works to prevent exploitation of girls and end sex trafficking in Bosnia, Montenegro, Serbia, Russia, Uganda, and the United States.  FAIR stands for “Free, Aware, Inspired, Restored,” which is exactly what these young survivors of prostitution and violence become.  The name, according to their site, “reflects our ongoing commitment to providing girls around the world the chance to live happy, healthy, empowered lives.” In response to the U.N.'s declaration of the first ever International Day of the Girl, FAIR...

    This Is Personal, a new social media campaign by The National Women’s Law Center, aims to educate and empower young women on keeping our reproductive rights intact and personal (since they clearly are a personal issue).       The campaign’s site provides helpful visual resources that clearly explain policies that jeopardize our reproductive rights, like a map highlighting states that require invasive ultrasounds before having an abortion. The site is laid out in a way that is super easy to read and use, with attention-grabbing facts and statistics...

  You know how it goes. It’s that trite rom-com cliché that’s been done over and over again: a guy likes a girl who sees him as just a “friend.” This guy is usually the one that treats the girl right, listens to her, let’s her know how wonderful she truly is, despite how the world has mistreated her, blah blah blah. And then he gets pissed when she doesn’t want to bone him.  Really? Like, you two were FRIENDS! Can’t you just be a good guy...

Engaging lady voters is critical to winning the upcoming election—we are the majority of the population, after all—but looking at the “female vote” as a monolith ain’t the way to do it. A panel of four prominent political women, including Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards, MSNBC host and writer Melissa Harris-Perry, pollster Kellyanne Conway, and strategist Margaret Hoover, gathered at this year’s New Yorker Festival this past Saturday to take on the complexities of the female electorate. In short, it was ah-may-zing.   The panel (L to R): Dorothy...

We all know the famous 1945 photo of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square, celebrating the end of WWII. But though we’ve seen it on countless posters and T-shirts and purses and mousepads, it is not what it appears to be.     Feminist blog Crates & Ribbons posted a piece titled "The Kissing Sailor, or, 'The Selective Blindness of Rape Culture,'" in which the author observes that what the photo really shows is not romance but sexual assault. The woman in the photo, Greta Zimmer Friedman, has...

UK feminists are taking a dramatic stand for women’s rights. On October 24, Dr. Helen Pankhurst, granddaughter of suffragette leader Sylvia Pankhurst, will lead a mass Feminist Lobby of Parliament. She will be joined by the “Olympic Suffragettes” – a group of women who performed as suffragettes in the 2012 Olympics opening ceremony – and over 200 women and men from around the UK. UK Feminista, which describes itself as “a movement of ordinary women and men campaigning for gender equality,” is inviting people across the...

Blogger Amy Bursch frequently writes about female contraception and the politics surrounding it. Although she does a lot to promote female contraception, she also “…keeps an eye on what the other side is up to, crazy videos included.” And as far as crazy videos go, this one is pretty fricken crazy.   Pro-life organization “Come Unity in Truth” recently released a video titled “You Deserve to Know the Truth: Contraception.” A more accurate title would have been “You Deserve to Sit Still While I Tell You Sexist...

Everyone hates Pinterest! News media from the Washington Post to Buzzfeed have been criticizing what Gawker called “the Mormon housewife’s image bookmarking service of choice," and all too often the criticism seems based on the fact that Pinterest is popular with women. Last week, Buzzfeed published an article called “How Pinterest Is Killing Feminism,” arguing that Pinterest is anti-feminist because much of the content is made up of recipes, home décor, fashion, fitness, mini-food, and “cupcake porn.”  “This isn’t where the Internet was supposed to take us,”...

After Katie Roiphe wrote an article criticizing feminists nowadays for being too sarcastic instead of being “serious” and “straightforward,” Amanda Marcotte over at Slate wrote a response to Roiphe’s article, saying that feminists are sarcastic these days because, well, pretty much everyone is! In celebration of snark, we’ve compiled a list of ten of our favorite snarky feminists (in no particular order). First up is Janeane Garofalo.  The sarcastic comedian is especially known for her hilarious stand up about the ridiculous body ideals placed on women...

If there’s two things I’m sick of hearing about, it’s Chris Brown’s continued existence and the women’s reproductive rights debate. Frankly, I’m just too busy to worry what goes on with my vagina, and I’m a little insulted that some politicians assume that women are obsessed with reproductive rights. If they even took two seconds to open an issue of Glamour, they’d know we care about a wide range of things, like Fall’s Nine Hottest Nail Polish Colors and...