by Elena Demireva ✿

‘Praise the pill, bless our pads’ was the motto of the women of the 1960s counterculture.

The counterculture rejected suburban domesticity and replaced it with spiritual, creative and sexual liberation. It devalued social dogmas which had been traditionally masculine - aggression, material success, domination, war, independance; and instead celebrated love, sustainability, cooperation, empathy, intimacy and intuition.

by Brooke Heneghan ✿

In an anonymous online survey I conducted on over 1,300 16-20-year-old girls across the UK, over 80% had experienced some form of sexual assault. Over 61% of these offences happened to young girls during their school years. These shocking yet relatively unsurprising statistics formulate two key questions…

by Beatriz Azevedo ✿

Every day more and more people dream about launching the next Google. Entrepreneurship is on the rise. However, this statement isn't necessarily true for female entrepreneurs. After all, with fewer women in the field, they face the dilemma of choosing between being the CEO or employee in a misogynistic world.

by Sean Paul Connolly ✿

The politics of the popular girls or the dark mind games that occur within cliques of affluent women, have been an endless source of entertainment since Jane Austen herself perfected the formula. From endlessly re-watched film staples such as Mean Girls and Clueless (and the darker-toned Heathers and Jawbreaker)…

by Mar Vilella ✿

And Roses is the name of the creative project developed by visual artist Mar Vilella.

An adventure that began in Barcelona in early 2018 which was born out of the illusion and desire to create an inspiring space where you can express yourself with total freedom.

by Izi Wilkowski ✿

As a child, I never had a scrapbook like Monica and Rachel of what my future wedding would be like. It’s always been strange to me (both marriage and the concept that children would make wedding scrapbooks). Some aspects of marriage seem to be the antithesis of romance.

by Izi Wilkowski ✿

When creepy men stare at you, stare back. If you're a woman, you've probably noticed that some men (in my experience, usually older men) stare at you creepily, especially in summer. I've always looked away for my safety. Well, forget that. Stare back.

by Simran Kaur ✿

“Witching Time” is inspired by Simran Kaur’s childhood memories. As a child, Simran saw witches as cool creatures who had magical powers and could do the impossible but she slowly started seeing them as fashionable.

by Caitlin Evans ✿

After officially entering the early twenties age bracket, I have decided that I want to make the most out of my adolescence (or, as my older friends keep prodding me, what’s left of my adolescence), and I want to come into bloom. But what does it mean to come into bloom, and why do we feel pressure to do this?

by Reece Wright ✿

Being a girl is almost as beautiful as it is tragic. The second you hit age five, you start dreaming. You dream of being a ballerina or an astronaut, maybe even a cowgirl.

As time goes on, people tell you that you can do anything you want. You can be anything you want. Lies. Being a girl makes people think you cannot do things, not because you lack the ability, but simply because you are a girl.

by Maddie Evans ✿

Room 9, it takes passing through an entire exhibition, then snaking through multiple rooms; sliding across timelines. 1910-1930, walls a soft grey, in the far left corner hangs Carrington’s, Farm at Watendlath.

The landscape is almost swallowed whole by green, hills exhaling luxuriously, tucking away the skies. A cottage sits central, it signals a life being lived: freshly strung laundry on the line to dry.

by Emma Randall ✿

Bimbos, Barbie, and hyper-femininity have long-been associated with the colour pink. Thought to depict weakness and heightened emotion, most teenage girls aspire to break away from the colour during their rebellion from traditional youth and stigmatised ‘girliness’.

by Courtney Kerrigan-Bates ✿

When I was a little girl, there wasn’t much I knew for certain. I knew my name, I could see my features in the mirror, I knew, from school, that I was better at reading and writing than adding and subtracting. But I didn’t know much about my personality, who I truly was or who I wanted to become.

by Holly Berry ❀

If you have TikTok, and I’m going to guess that you do because I honestly don’t know anyone that doesn’t, chances are that you’ve seen at least one video of aesthetic candid/sneak peek videos set to music that sounds like something straight out of a fairytale. If the person who posted it is conventionally attractive, rich, and/or lives somewhere so beautiful that every clip is jaw-droppingly breathtaking, it’ll probably be viral.

by Stacey Smith ❀

Once I’d turned 28 I felt a cultural shift in people’s expectations of where my life should be. And I get it. When I was 21 I for sure thought I’d be married with kids and in a good job by 30! Then again when I was 21, 30 seemed old and lightyears away! Spoiler alert – time flies in your twenties. On the route to the big 30, and I told people I was single, no longer was being young and wild and free an acceptable life choice.

by Shannon Jones ❀

With the quickly evolving role of online platforms in the modern world, access to the internet is becoming a vital part of people’s daily lives. Even more so as a result of Covid-19, ordinary tasks like communicating with friends, shopping and studying, are now being accessed remotely via a screen. In this on-going transition between the in-person and online worlds, it is important to reflect on the accessibility of these services for everyone.

by Claudia Schwarz ❀

In 2016 Microsoft launched an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Twitter chatbot named Tay. Tay was an example of machine learning; “The more you talk, the smarter Tay gets!”. For Tay to communicate with other Twitter users, the AI needed a basic grasp of language. Engineers at Microsoft used material written by comedians and anonymised public data to train Tay’s algorithm. The AI was meant to ‘learn’ by reading tweets and interacting with Twitter users. The AI could then, in theory, create content without having been explicitly coded to do so. In Tay’s case that meant becoming a typical Twitter user.

by Karolina Ct ❀

Last week I was talking about a recurring dream I used to have as a kid, I analysed it and understood that it was highlighting my fear of being seen. I shared this with someone I was working with (on a photoshoot) and they said : “Ah! and here you are on set, being looked at all day.” This small exchange made me realise I’ve been trying to challenge this fear of mine for years. I started modelling about 10 years ago, and got into acting about 6 years ago. Meaning I have spent countless days working on a set where I, seemingly, was the centre of attention.

by Gillian Fisher ❀

As I left the chemist clutching three month’s supply of progesterone-only contraceptive, I pondered how far society had come since 1961. That was the year ‘the pill’ was first introduced to the UK on the NHS. Prescribed exclusively to married women, it would be another six years before Dr Gregory Pincus’ wonder-drug was made available to the unwed. Finally, in 1974 family-planning clinics were licensed to prescribe the pill, removing the need for a GP visit. After millennia of being at the mercy of our own biology women finally controlled their reproduction, with monumental social, economic and sexual repercussions.

by Manasa Boppudi ❀

These days, English classrooms are surrounded by American and European authors who are, most of the time, white males. This never-ending cycle of having to read books by the same kinds of authors has always disappointed me as an Indian teenager living in the United States. The so-called classics are just books by Shakespeare, Hemingway, Salinger, Dickens, Wilde (and more white male authors). Where is the diversity? How are students around the world, especially in Western society, supposed to learn about different people and cultures when they are only exposed to these “classics”?