Pop-Culture | Posted by Julie Z on 09/16/2011
College Confidential: Disorientation
The bottom line of college orientation is that it’s a paradox: feeling simultaneously deeply comforted and entirely thrown off your axis, spinning rapidly towards the unknown. Or at least, that’s what orientation was like for me.
This paradox manifested itself at the very beginning of the journey from Ohio to New York. After posting my obligatory, “Leaving for college. Thanks for the memories everybody!” Facebook status, I packed all of my earthly belongings into the family car. That’s when I realized that all of my earthly belongings fit into the family car. While the reality of this totally satisfied the fatalist in me (look how easy it would be for me to escape with so little materialistic baggage to weigh me down once the zombie apocalypse hits — yippee!) it …
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Feminism | Posted by Marie B on 09/5/2011
Introducing “FBomb Talks Sex”
Sex is probably one of the most taboo, yet most highly discussed topic in any teenager’s life. If you’re not talking about sex, you’re probably thinking about sex. Even if you manage to push all sexual thoughts from your head for a minute — something I’m still working on — you’re bound to be bombarded with some sex-laced commercial, reading, or comment. Regardless of the position you take on sex, it exists and that’s why each and every one of us is here.
We deal with slut shaming, virgin shaming and everything in-between on a daily basis. Now more than ever in a sex obsessed world girls need to own the fact that we are sexual beings. I’m neither encouraging people to sleep around or to keep their legs shut …
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Articles, Feminism | Posted by Julie Z on 08/26/2011
Campus Confidential: My Freshman Year, I Vow To Major In Unafraid
I’m proud to announce that for the next school year, I’ll be writing a column for The Frisky about my Freshman year in college. I’ll be writing about everything from frat parties to relationships to financial aid, all from a feminist perspective. The first post in this series was published this week, and is reprinted below. I hope you guys like it and continue to read!
I wouldn’t say that I was a nerd in high school. Although I have adopted the art of procrastination as ardently and with as much love as if it were a tiny puppy alone on the side of the road in a rainstorm, I did in fact manage to get some studying in. But despite grades and test scores that were high enough …
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Feminism | Posted by Anna D on 08/19/2011
Go East, Young Woman
Ever since I made my decision to attend Wellesley College, I find myself having to defend it to most of my high school classmates. Many of them know nothing about the school, and when I tell them about it they ignore its academic reputation and amazing alumnae. To them, it is simply a women’s college. And since I’ve decided to go there, they have surmised that I must hate men, am a lesbian or am doomed to life as a crazy cat lady.
It gets tiresome hearing my classmates’ reasons why I shouldn’t go. One boy even told me, “You won’t know how to interact with men past the age of 18.” (Forget the fact that I will have male professors and will interact with some of the …
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Feminism | Posted by Natalia K on 07/29/2011
Life Lesson #1: Love Yourself First
Whether we like it or not, we all have to go through a long list of “firsts” in life: first kiss, first date, first “serious” relationship, first time you have sex, and the first serious breakup (which is never, ever, an easy thing to go through), to name a few. But being a feminist definitely made it easier for me to make a dreaded and life-altering first decision.
I had my first serious boyfriend right at the end of high school when I was 18. I was young, naive, sheltered, and completely confused about what I wanted in life. He was an amazing first boyfriend, though. He respected me, we were very compatible, and most importantly, he was always supportive of all the changes I went through (the best boyfriend …
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Awareness | Posted by Julie Z on 05/30/2011
Feminism and Education: The Truth About Student Loans
I would argue that the most difficult thing about the entire process of higher level, collegiate education is not getting in, though that is what the public conversation at large is about. The most difficult, troubling part of higher education is paying for it once you do get in. Even with financial aid, even with other scholarships, so many people end up with crippling debt by the end of their college years.
These past few months, I’ve watched my class celebrate getting into college. Then I’ve watched everybody have an “Oh, shit” moment trying to figure out where the money is going to come from to fund the next four years of their life. I’ve watched brilliant people decide to go to schools they are beyond over-qualified for because they …
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Feminism | Posted by Oliver L on 04/4/2011
I’m A Boy
My interest in feminism could have started when my mom told me that people “aren’t weird, they’re just different.” It could have started when I was teased in elementary school for having braces or in high school for having overbite. It could have been those journalism classes or seeing how Native people in my high school were treated by my peers. Maybe it was because I had to come out as queer and then again, as a transgender man.
Hell, for all I know it started because I watched the Beatles animated film “The Yellow Submarine” every day with my brother when I was nine. All of those happy people dancing, becoming frozen because some Blue Meanie didn’t like music. Unjust, I tell you! I grew up listening to the …
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Feminism | Posted by Becka W on 03/17/2011
How Do We Solve A Problem Like Kappa Sigma?
This week, USC’s chapter of Kappa Sigma sent around an e-mail describing how to be an effective “cocksman,” calling a woman’s vagina her “pie” and her mouth/throat a “gullet.” The writer of the e-mail tells his fellow brothers to send him all of their hook-ups in “Tucker Max format” (Tucker Max is a douchebag who notoriously glamorizes his womanizing and drunken antics as epic adventures) and females are “targets” who “aren’t actual people like us men. Consequently, giving them a certain name or distinction is pointless.”
That isn’t even the worst of it. The e-mail classifies women’s “pies” by race, and says “non-consent and rape are two different things,” and includes a rating system to evaluate each woman’s looks. (Read the whole e-mail here on Jezebel). The chapter …
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