Viva la Feminista

Well Thanksgiving is over and that means full steam ahead on the winter holiday season! For many of us that means managing our holiday card list. I keep my list in an excel spreadsheet. Although now that I type this out, I think I need to still update my 2015 list. Oops. Oh well. I missed a year. While holiday cards are tedious, they are one of the highlights of my year. I love sending cards to friends I see often and friends I only see via holiday cards. I even love reading holiday letters that come attached! But managing the writing, the addressing, and the picking out of cards while working & parenting can be a PITA. That's where Paperless Post can come in! In addition to the holidays , Paperless Post offers great cards for other occasions, such as baby shower invitations or housewarmings. Although snail mail cards are my fave, sometimes it can be too tedious or life throws you a curve where  you find yourself days from a holiday still needing to send out a pile of c...

Three years ago two feminists tweeted out #FeministSelfie in the face of a condescending article attempting to label all selfies as anti-feminist and a cry for help. Since then countless feminists have used the hashtag, or others it inspired including #365FeministSelfie , #366FeministSelfie (leap year!), and #365FeministLife, to showcase their daily feminist actions whether it is escorting at a clinic, painting a son's fingernails, or exhibiting our bikini bodies from sizes zero to 32. Most days our #FeministSelfie is just the ordinary day of someone who claims the label of feminist. For us a selfie is revolutionary in a society that still worships and values young thin white bodies. It is revolutionary to share one's journey as a transgender person in a world where using a public restroom is a battle. It is radical, not narcissistic, to want to share our selfie that shows our "flaws" and scars. It is radical to show pride in our family composition. It is communi...

Six years ago an inspiring daily mediation on self-love was released. Recently Rosie Molinary released an updated edition of Beautiful You: A Daily Guide to Radical Self-Acceptance . From my initial review of the book: Beautiful You: A Daily Guide to Radical Self-Acceptance by Rosie Molinary is a self-help guide for those of us who don't like self-help guides. Beautiful You is a book of 365 daily life prompts that not just asks you to reconsider how you see yourself, but to push you to try new things (stop apologizing: ever notice how many times you start things with "I'm sorry but...") that help you readjust how you view yourself, the world and how you connect to the world. In the new edition there is obviously a new cover, but also a new introduction, a new acknowledgments and then about 50 posts were either updated or replaced. Rosie's favorite new post is Day 362. Rosie gave me the scoop on the new edition. When approached by Seal Press t...

The world of girls magazines is a scary place. Walk up to the magazine aisle of your fave drugstore and flip through girl-centric magazines...then try to sleep well at night. Recently Girls Life came under fire for exclaiming the secrets of dream hair on their cover while Boys Life was all about planning for a solid career. Someone "fixed it" via Photoshop . I have a ton of issues with the original Girls Life cover, but have some issues with the "fixed" cover as well. First of all is the shaming of the actress on the original cover. Olivia Holt is yet another young woman trying to have it all through the Disney empire. She sings! She dances! She karate chops! She acts! Having a teenager myself, I have watched plenty of Disney shows. And while there are some things to improve in their narrative, you gotta give props to these teens who are slowly building their own empires...critique of Disney aside cause I'm already on a way tangent. Next, while I love...

I get a lot of pitches to cover musicians and musical acts. My usual screening is based on my time and a quick web search. That's when I realized that Sarah Potenza is not the usual musical artist. She's making waves with the title track of her album, Monster , including its fun video (posted at the bottom of this post). I had the chance to chat with Sarah as she prepares to return to Chicago for a show at The Hideout on Saturday, November 12th . This is not a transcript, but taken from notes.   VLF: I really enjoyed your album. Right now you are getting a lot of praise for your song, Monster. It has been called an empowerment song. Over the past few years, empowerment has been used to describe a lot of things. So what does empowerment mean to you? Potenza : Empowerment is something that makes you motivated. Something that makes you feel a certain way. I read something about body love and since then, over the past year I have made an evolution about how I feel and see m...

As anyone paying a teeny bit of attention to this year's Presidential campaign knows we are now one week away from election day. Much has been written about taco trucks , emails, sexual assault, and adorable old (mostly white) ladies who were born before or around the time women's suffrage was written into the US Constitution. No matter what the outcome is, November 8, 2016 will be a historic day as it took 96 years from suffrage to having a woman as a candidate of a major political party. Many women have run before , but Hillary Clinton is the first to be steps away from being the first woman to be elected to the highest office in the USA. This means for many women we are reflecting back. Reflecting on our grandmas and mothers who were our first women's studies teacher, who role modeled strong womanhood, and who could critique Hillary while still sporting a "I'm with her" button. It also means reflecting on the countless women who fought for suffrage in...