She told me she wanted to end up with the kind of person who’d spontaneously buy tickets to Brazil. Who’d tell her pack your bags, we fly tomorrow. She was like that, even at 17. She had a boyfriend of sorts who never was like that and probably never would be; who left her when she lived too big and too wild and got left by her when she wanted to…
“As most of us probably know, our sex drives are most definitely not an exact science. They can be influenced by anything and everything around us: our routines, our sleep schedules, our stress levels, and societal pressure (period sex is amazing, but unfortunately not everyone agrees yet!). It’s worth noting that, commonly, the more sex you have, the higher your sex drive tends to be – if you’re…
“Periods aren’t exactly wallflowers. When they’re ready to arrive, they arrive with a bang – and an entourage of symptoms announcing their imminent arrival.
Admittedly, your period might be a meek little thing that suddenly appears in your knickers without so much as a twinge of the uterus muscles – if that’s the case, I envy you. For most of us, however, something clues us in. Sure, we may…
A fallen sun; not merely setting past the horizon, beyond the earth, but into it: the extra-terrestrial made earthly.
Handmade 1:100 scale model – elevation
Competition
Every year, designers, architects, artists, and landscapers design conceptual gardens and art installations in a competition to be featured in the annual Jardins de Métis International Garden Festival. Held in the Reford Gardens…
The heat here is oppressive. In the middle of the day we close the balcony doors and shut the shutters tight. To me, an English girl who was raised on refrains of ‘what are you doing, wasting this beautiful day inside?’ and conditioned to worship any sliver of watery sunlight that felt like wafting down, this still feels like some sort of blasphemy. But my Englishness also means I am the first…
Sav arrives home from school late, flushed from cold air and aching limbs. She had circled her bike up and down the length of the prom between Callum’s house and the turn off for her road for hours. She had thought she might run into Callum, or find a nice spot to sketch the ocean some, but she had become transfixed by the thrum of her bike weeks against the scattered stones, the beat of the…
“Despite what urban legend would have many of us believe, there actually isn’t any scientific proof that hormonal birth control directly causes a drop in the libido of the person taking it. In fact, in 2013, the European Journal of Contraception and Reproductive Healthcare published a study which evaluated all the results of every study conducted between 1975 and 2011 on the effects of the…
“On social media, in the hands of these artists and brands and activists, the male gaze becomes redundant. There is absolutely no question of who these images are made for and who these bodies are serving. They’re for us. You can only look at our bodies because we chose to show them to you, chose to upload them onto your social media feed, chose to create the products that serve them, and chose…
June. Skin everywhere. I remember that much. On the bar top. Legs almost as high and just as exposed and bare and covered in the dust which always collects in pubs like that one. Pubs that have always been and will always be old. Old in dusty corners and in smell and in the men stooped over a cheap pint. Old despite the paint job and the fancy hipster food no one ever bought. Her skin was…
The things we read when we are very young, and feel at once older than our years and far too young for our expectations of them, stay embedded beneath our skin like first loves, no matter how much we try to exorcise them from our being. When I was fifteen years old and as angry and angsty and weighed down by eyeliner as the next teenage girl, I discovered On the Roadby Jack Kerouac, and thought…
There was this girl I knew when I was a kid. Ten, eleven maybe. We were in a few classes together. Her name was Marcella, but everyone knew her as Marcy. She was intimidating in that way that girls in the mid-2000s who played football with the boys and wore baggy basketball shorts and held eye contact for too long were intimidating and I can still remember the way she would obsessively scrape…
I hate it when dudes try to chase me But I love it when you try to save me ‘Cause I’m just a lady I love it when we play 1950 It’s so cold that your stare’s ’bout to kill me I’m surprised when you kiss me
So tell me why my gods look like you And tell me why it’s wrong
– 1950 by King Princess, 2018.
From the music video for ‘Girl Like Girls’ by Hayley Kiyoko, 2015
The scene-setting notes for the novel I’m reluctant to even admit I’ve started (commitment and I are not pals).
Here there are quarries pink and lined like the life lines inside a tree. Sometimes, if you’re very far away from a town, you’ll find one with an old piece of machinery or two nearby. I’ve seen the decapitated arms of rusted tractors draped over the mouths to quarries. Seen these…
At the world-famous ‘running of the bulls’ festival in Pamplona, Spain in 2016, an 18 year old girl was gang-raped by a group of men who called themselves ‘La Manada’ or ‘The Wolf Pack’. Recently, a court charged the men with abuse rather than rape, sentencing them to just 9 years in jail. On Friday, 4th May 2018, Protesters took to the streets across Spain to protest this ruling on the grounds that it places blame for such attacks on the shoulders of the victims. Fight harder, scream louder, dress more modestly, etc., etc. – we’ve heard it all before.
To learn more about the case and the protests this HuffPo article has some birds-eye view photos of the Madrid protests as well as pictures from protests around the country.
Here is my photo essay from the ground:
Manifestacion Feminista: Feminist Protest. Translation: “The streets and the night are also ours.”
Translation: “When I walk home I want to be FREE not BRAVE”
Translation: “Stop rape culture: The streets and the nights are ours too”
My Pussy Grabs Back
Translation: “I want to go home without fear, without terror.”
Mid-march. Plaza de Cibeles.
Wearing purple or donning a purple ribbon has become a symbol of solidarity with the feminist movement worldwide.
Marchers wore purple and carried purple signs.
Translation: “It was gang rape, not abuse.” The courts convicted the so-called ‘wolfpack’ of abuse, not rape.
Marchers swarming into the end point: Plaza Villa de Paris, the home of the Tribunal Superior De Justicia De Madrid
Speeches were then given and a silence was observed outside of the Tribunal Superior De Justicia De Madrid.
