In “BLACK EFFECT,” a track from Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s 2018 collaborative album “EVERYTHING IS LOVE,” Beyoncé describes a quintessential Black female form: Stunt with your curls, your lips, Sarah Baartman hips Gotta hop into my jeans like I hop into my whip, yeah The celebration of Sarah Baartman’s features marks a departure from her historical image. Saartjie “Sarah” Baartman was an African woman who, in the early 1800s, was something of an international sensation of objectification. She was paraded around Europe, where spectators jeered at her large buttocks. With...

In a Tweet praising Disney Channel show The Owl House, Mae Whitman came out as pansexual. On Monday, August 15th, the actress known for her role of Annie Marks in recently cancelled Good Girls, tweeted about how being a part of the animated show has affected her.  “Just taking a moment to say I am SO proud to be even a small part of a show like The Owl House. Being pansexual myself, I wish I had such incredible characters like Amity and Luz in my...

As the Taliban continues its rapid insurgency throughout Afghanistan—sweeping through the country and on the verge of capturing the capital city of Kabul as the country’s Western-backed government collapses—an increasingly alarming humanitarian crisis has emerged. Since the end of May, the UN Refugee Agency reports nearly a quarter-million Afghanis have fled the country, with a reported 80% of those fleeing being women and children, signaling a heartbreaking disaster for the rights and well-being of women and girls under Taliban rule.  Prior to American intervention in Afghanistan,...

A recent report released by the American Medical Association (AMA), the largest group of medical providers in the country, recommended the removal of sex designations from birth certificates by medical providers around the country.  Birth certificates are documents issued as proof of birth, and are given by medical providers but aren’t actually a medical document, although widely thought of as one. Instead, it’s used more as a legal document, necessary for many of the government formalities required to exist as a person today such as: getting...

  Wikipedia does more than just help pad term papers—a lot more. In fact, Google, smart home devices, and even cultural institutions like the Museum of Modern Art all tap Wikipedia for info. But a 2018 Community Insights Report found that fewer than 10 percent of Wikipedia’s contributors identify as women or non-binary, creating a lot of gender bias. It’s a problem Kira Wisniewski is addressing as executive director of Art+Feminism (artandfeminism.org) a group that hosts virtual “edit-a-thons” where a more diverse pool of contributors can come...

On Tuesday afternoon, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo resigned following the conclusion of a state investigation that found the disgraced governor to have “sexually harassed multiple women and violated state law.”  In the press conference to announce his resignation, set to go into effect in two weeks, Cuomo delivered a confusing and contradictory set of statements in regards to his conduct. Cuomo called the 168-page report’s claim that he had sexually harassed eleven women “falses” then later apologized to the women he had “truly offended” and...

Rihanna’s latest Savage X Fenty collection is out, and the music mogul and recent billionaire has enlisted a group of fierce, curvy Black women to model the 100+ piece collection. The Caramel Curves are an all Black-female motorcycle crew based in New Orleans, Louisiana, and are front and center in this latest campaign. No stranger to shimmer and spectacle, the cyclists often show up to their events and weekly rides in leather, heels, and rhinestoned ensembles. Speaking to British Vogue about why she chose the...

  Last month Washington Post reporter Felicia Sonmez filed a lawsuit against the newspaper for discrimination, alleging that editors barred Sonmez from reporting on stories involving sexual assault after she came out as a survivor of sexual assault herself. Now, the lawsuit has also revealed that while the Post barred Sonmez from reporting on certain stories they allowed another reporter who had been accused of workplace sexual harassment to continue reporting on similar stories.    Sonmez’s lawsuit—filed in court on July, 22nd—begins in 2018 when the reporter, who...

This year, we lost a great feminist foremother: Margo St. James, the trailblazing leader of the modern sex workers’ rights movement. Though the term “sex work” itself wasn’t coined until the late 1970s, St. James’ San Francisco-based “organization of ‘loose women,’” going by the acronym COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics), brought sex workers and allies together in an unprecedented way in 1973. Soon, other groups cropped up around the U.S., including Prostitutes of New York (PONY). Activists began fighting for “decriminalization,” a term...

With the specter of a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court in front of them, Republicans have increasingly become more brazen in their pushes to overturn Roe v Wade.   This Thursday, 228 Republican members of Congress (184 from the House and 44 from the Senate) asked the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade and stop their “vise grip on abortion politics”. The request was included as part of an amicus curiae (or “friend of the court” briefing in which a third party writes the...