Sonya Renee Taylor: The Body is Not An Apology

Sonya Renee Taylor @ Seattle Poetry Slam Feb 2011

launching the revolutionary idea that the body is not an apology, that radical self love and body empowerment is as needed as it is a radical notion

"In this picture I am 230lbs.  In this picture, i have stretch marks and an unfortunate decision in the shape of a melting Hershey's kiss on my left thigh.  I am smiling, like a woman who knows your watching and likes it.  For this one camera flash, I am unashamed, unapologetic."

You can find the story and the movement here
+ check out the tumblr

TEDxTeen: Tavi Gevinson on Still Figuring it Out

The most awesome rule-breaker Tavi Gevinson talking about being a teenage girl,

You can find her fashion blog The Style Rookie here, the Rookie Magazine she's talking about here, and the pop culture role models she's mentioning are Lindsay Weir, Angela Chase and Stevie Nicks.

Oh, IAC...

Hey, we are drooling over our IAC'2010 photos and preparing our Global Village activities for IAC'2012! 

We'll have the pleasure to have two Global Village sessions on July 26, one on Society, Sexuality and Pleasure and an I ♥ Being a Girl Tea Party.

We are saving the date already!

Much love,

your YSAFE  

The International Women's Day- All about the girls

 Here are the responses we got from all the lovely girls we met on the 8th of March. We asked:

If there was a SUPERWOMAN her superpower would be:

Lilly: Love!

Brankica: Always to bring smile on people's faces! 

 From left to right:

Ishita: Super-speed and fast reflexes. 

Pavan: To freeze time. 

Izeefa: To fly 

Faridah: Invisibility.

Greta: The supersonic ability to change people's minds and opinions.

Maria: The ability to make things RIGHT!

Shariema: Invisibility.

Adriana: To bring peace.

Dusica: To spread love around the world!

Maya: To bring change!

International Women's Day Campaign: the boys perspective

On the International Women's Day we tried to involve both girls and boys in our campaign. We asked boys: "If you were a girl for one day, you would......?"

Here are some of the answers we got

Aleksandar : I would encourage boys to talk to girls more about girls/women rights!

Saken: I would use girls' charm and potentiall to bring change.

 

Martin: ...I would talk to as many girls I can, because I'd really want to know what are their conversation topics!

Sami: I would talk to guys and see how they treat me.

Mohammed: I would pamper myself, go shopping or to visit beauty saloons.

International Women's Day Campaign

                              If there was a SUPERWOMAN, her superpower would be:

Ivet:(left):  "having strong intuition and making he right choices."

Katerina:(right): "the power of compassion and the abiIlity to bring people together."

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..."