Stupid Girls (?!)

You pretend you're high
Pretend you're bored
Pretend you're anything
Just to be adored
And what you need
Is what you get

Disease's growing, it's epidemic
I'm scared that there ain't a cure
The world believes it and I'm going crazy
I cannot take any more
I'm so glad that I'll never fit in
That will never be me
Outcasts and girls with ambition
That's what I wanna see

(Obviously, those are not manifestos against certain appearances as such. We're just sayin' that you don't have to maintain them. And that it might be a curious and healthy excercise to ask yourself where do those ideas/constrictions come from...)

Sonya Renee "What Women Deserve"

Sonya Renee is the director of Peer Education at Helping Individual Prostitutes Survive (HIPS), a non-profit organization that promotes HIV prevention and empowerment programming in Washington, DC. At work, she recruits, trains and supervises current and former sex workers to act as sex educators in their communities. In addition to her professional job, she is a National Poetry SLAM-winning performance poet who is committed to using the power of spoken word to bring empowering and progressive ideas to the public.
This poem is dedicated to Choice USA.

(Read more about her here!)

Sista Queen "Try Being A Lady"

"Try being a lady?
Use me as your trophy so you can parade me...
Use my vagina to only birth babies...
Be your damsel in distress so a brother can save me...
[...]
If my tongue was a trigger, you'd have been shot...
Get real - I'm gonna stay inappropriate until I fucking rot...
I don't talk about love,
I don't talk about sex,
I don't talk about things that'll put your dick on erect"

Sista Queen

"I wasn't expecting much when a 19 year old newcomer from Atlanta with the cliched name of Sista Queen was announced. Well, this performer blew me away, and I hope that anybody who wants to see Def Poetry at its best will find a way to catch her three minutes. She's an intense, loud, fast talker with an endless supply of breath. Her piece is about the self-cheapening of womanhood, and as her performance built to a crescendo she shot back and forth between mocking poses of cute fawning femininity and furious denunciations of the same poses, switching so quickly you were still catching up with the last change as she shot off into the next one. This is the kind of performance I want to see when I turn on this show. I don't know how Sista Queen got so good at such a young age, but I'm pretty sure we'll be hearing more from her." (Levi Asher on July 25, 2005)

Staceyann Chin "If Only Out Of Vanity..."

"I want to be the dyke who likes to fuck men
I want to be the politician who never lies
I want to be the girl who never cries
I want to go down in history
in a chapter marked miscellaneous
because the writers could find
no other way to categorize me
In this world where classification is key
I want to erase the straight lines
So I can be me"

Staceyann Chin "If only out of vanity..."

Inspirational movies: Becoming Jane (2007)

Becoming Jane (2007) will entertain you and will give you the always needed push reminding how important independence and feminism is for well educated young ladies with ambitions. Also, it will remind you that a happy ending might not be what you imagined it to be.

And you may want to read a Jane Austen book after all.