Confidence.

I have heard often that no one is always as confident as they seem. that the key to confidence it acting like you are confident. In my photo classes we are told we can access a lot of places with our camera if we simply look like we know what to do and seem like we are supposed to be there.

This concept of “faking” it has fascinated me for sometime. As someone who wears my heart on my sleeve it seems unnatural to pretend to be confident when I don’t feel confident but I started doing it a few years ago and the strangest thing happened. I became confident.

I was sitting in class this morning annoyed that I had to take a class on something I thought was so stupid in order to graduate. We were making portraits out of brown paper bags. Not exactly what I would consider fine art, but whatever. It’s not like I am paying thousands of dollars to go here. The room was quite as I made lists in my head about all the things I hate about waking up at 6 am.  but I began cracking jokes and asking everyone else about their portrait and before I knew it our whole table was talking about whether or not its gross to wear your socks more than one day in a row.
I thought back about my years in high school and how painful it was for me engage other people for fear that I was lame.
Sometimes pretending to be confident makes you confident.

I thought about this with my body as well. We all have an image of what is beautiful ingrained in our mind from the time we are given barbies and watch Cinderella. So when we look at our own body and its not poreless, hairless, blemish-less, cellulite-less and muffin-top-less we feel less than happy about those things.  But what if we just faked it?

What if like Fabienne from pulp fiction we thought pot bellies were adorable? And we rocked one with a t-shirt two sizes to small to show it off. What if our tan lines were like paper doll underwear, our freckles, moles and scars natures tattoos and our short nails cool because we could play the guitar. What if we let our bodies take the form they wanted with our health in mind and not our measurements? What if we worked out for strength, ate for nourishment and was ok with the form those components took. We could stop beating ourselves up over the things we dont like and start loving ourselves for the things we do like.

So I say we stop looking at our "flaws" and embrace the parts of ourselves that are unique to us, like Patti smith’s mustache and Frida Kahlo’s uni-brow, and we rock it, and maybe one day learn to love it.

Girl bashing.

Who hasn’t learned the Golden Rule?

Do onto others as you would have them do onto you.

This seems simple enough. In our culture where girls are competitive with other girls, and movies like mean girls are popular, along with songs like “hey, hey, you, you I don’t like your girlfriend” It would seem as if we never learned the “Golden Rule” in grade school.

Growing up I had very few girl friends, which I attributed to the fact that I thought most girls were bitches. I threw around words like “skank” and “slut” to girls who had the audacity to talk to the guy I was talking to.  As I got older, i began to notice that all of this girl bashing stemmed from insecurities. That I wasn’t pretty, thin, or wanted enough or that I was too wild, too weird, or too loud.

So I propose our first rule to radical self love- Love other ladies.

Because if you think about it, it makes perfect sense, in a society that makes it seem like we have to fight each other for attention, girls who are secure in themselves don’t have the time to start cat fights over other girls.

So let’s stop.

Let’s never use the word slut again- after all you don’t hear boys ripping on their guy friends for sleeping with whoever they want to.  Don’t perpetuate the double standard.

Lets not behave as if we are in a race with other ladies- in school, work, or any other aspect of our lives lets stop looking at other women as competition and start looking at them as allies, even if those women dont have you same, moral, political, social, or fashion standards. It seems pretty basic, but try it, it’s not as easy as it sounds.

Lets agree that when we see a woman hammered when we are out we wont comment on how she looks, but keep an eye on her drinks and how she gets home.- because we have all been there and being judgmental causes wrinkles, I say we look out for each other because that’s just good karma.

Let’s agree that that girl, the one that really gets under your skin doesn’t have to bring you down- just because she plays the competition game doesn’t mean you have to. Even if she flirts with your husband and insults your parenting, realize that you like yourself too much to let what she says bring you down. You don’t have to like her- but don’t bash her to other people. It’s not cute. Instead focus on all the things you are doing with your life that make you awesome and surround yourself with women who do the same.

Don’t be too prideful to lend or accept help- a lot of times we hide all our insecurities because we don’t want people to know we aren’t perfect, or we won’t help others when we can because we don’t want to let go of the leverage we feel we have. Give compliments and encouragement to other ladies, if you’re good at something-help. If you’re struggling- ask for help. This is how we connect with people and it’s a great way to be encouraging not discouraging to other ladies. No one is perfect and it’s silly to try to appear like it.

Don’t let a boy be the reason you fight- if I look back half of my female feuds have been because of a boy. How stupid. Let’s just agree that if we are fighting over a boy, we should consider it a loss and keep a friend before a fling. Guys have this down so much it’s become “boy code” bros before hoes... well chicks before dicks. I am not talking about legit marriage issues here just to be clear, I am talking about the kind of fights and jealousy that spurs because of male (or any other) attention.  When I was younger I was jealous of my friend Cherish because she had curly hair, was tall like a model and had “cherry” as a cute nickname and whenever we would go out guys would say "cherry  is so tall!" and I was 5'2" so I wasnt going to be a model any time soon. Don’t let things like that come between friends. Ask yourself why things really bother you and sometimes you will be surprised at how silly it is. And girls who know how kick ass they are don’t have time to be jealous over silly things.

And lastly and my most hated form of girl bashing

Don’t talk shit about a girl because of her appearance! It’s hard enough for all of us to like ourselves and nobody has any room to throw insults about weight, clothing, or anything else. A girl who loves herself doesn’t need to belittle someone else because of the way they look. It’s not at all attractive and you’ll find it harder to love your own flaws when you are judging everyone else for theirs. Not to mention that some of the greatest woman in history have been ugly. Looks aren’t everything so STFU about them if you don’t have something nice to say!

So feel free to leave comments that add too the rules for Revolutionary no girl bashing!

Compliment the women in your life!

Love and lollipops.

The F word.

I am a feminist.

There I said it.

Now for a second can we ignore the man-hating, hairy legs, “dyke” stigma

And just call it for what it is.

“Belief in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes.”

Women who want to be seen as equal, (not more or less).

 To earn, think, live, behave, work and be who/what we want to be.

It doesn’t seem scary when you put it that way.

It doesn’t seem like the kind of philosophy that will tear apart the family.

I took my first woman’s studies class completely on accident.

I grew up an only child with a mom who worked and was strong willed and with a dad who was a feminist with out really knowing it and so the idea that I could be who ever I wanted to be wasn’t something that was revolutionary to me.
But the word 'feminist' conjured up the idea of angry women who hated men. And that was not something that appealed to me so I never really took the time to consider “feminism”

My first semester at Columbia I took a class called “woman and art” I took this because I thought there were so few woman artists that were famous, so I wanted to know these ladies secrets, since I was going into the art world.  It never occurred to me to ask why there were so few women in museums, and why they had a separate class specifically about woman when I had literally taken over 6 art history classes up to this point. But when I did ask those questions I felt like all of a sudden a lot of the way I had felt growing up began to make sense. The first day of class, our cute little, lesbian, burlesque dancing professor stood at the front of the room and asked us to raise our hand if we were feminists. I did not raise my hand. I went home that day contemplating dropping the class, and wondered what sort of liberal nut job education system I had gotten myself into. But I ended up keeping the class mostly because I was too lazy to walk further down Wabash for a film studies class during the same time. Luckily my laziness paid off, because that class started an intense search for answers for me, I ate up every book I could on the subject. And I would now raise my hand proudly, because by opening my eyes to the world around me I began to see patterns we re-create and perpetuate with out thinking. I began to find so many things I just “lived with” and thought were normal (like an intrinsic fear of walking to the train station at night alone to be apart of the patterns of being a woman)- and when I recognized it, I knew it was not fair .

So that’s how I ended up a feminist. I shave my legs, I get angry sometimes but most of the time I feel pretty hopeful, I love the men in my life for their strength and also for respecting mine. And I am not a lesbian, but I don’t think it’s a requirement so my lesbian friends are ok with me still being a feminist.  So its not a dirty word, and I hope it doesn’t scare you from reading my blog- and it's ok If you dont call yourself a feminist, I hope that if you continue reading you will feel like a bad ass anyway.

and in the beginning

I have been thinking about starting a blog for woman about the experience of being a woman for a long time. Since I have gotten into photography it has been interesting to me to be able to connect with other woman and also have the unique experience of hearing all the things woman feel less than good about themselves. It is so common for me to hear "can you fix this" before I ever even pull out my camera to start photographing, and that's if she works up enough courage to even be photographed in the first place.  I am a Photography major, a woman's study minor and a feminist and It was my goal when starting this blog to spread body positive information while starting a community for woman to connect with other woman.

My goal is to be the magician that tells her secrets. As a photographer I know how easily images can lie, and in today's world woman starve and cry to look like woman on magazine covers when because of post processing and Photoshop those models don't even look like that in real life.  The standard for beauty has seen set to unrealistic expectations  and so many of us are left not feeling like we can ever measure up. I changed my life to take my first digital class and see how incredibly easy it was to remove any trace of 'flaws'. I begin to look at my own body differently and it has been a huge encouragement to me to see that with a little skin softening and liquify tool, anyone can be' beautiful'.

but like any good feminist I know looks aren't the only thing  a woman has to offer this is why my hope is to write in this daily- or as much as possible. I want to include an interview by a woman  each month so that other women can share her career and life. Also Topics on feminism, body image, self esteem, sex,  woman artist, a day of the week devoted to things that I like or feel are encouraging.  Photography, fashion ideas, book recommendations,  food ideas, and I also wanted to have guest bloggers.

So this is the beginning of this endeavor to spread some love to my friends who are women. Jasmine Star a wedding photographer and blogger says "dare to fail"  and this blog may turn into an epic failure but I think my goal and the heart of why I wanted to do this is just to create a space for positivity and woman encouragement.  so that on days when any of us feel too much or not enough we can get a little boost of sisterhood and self love from this little corner of the internet.

It has become so common for us to hate our bodies that talks of "diets" and being "fat" are conversations girls in trainings bras are having with their friends.  what would it look like if we didn't allow that way of thinking in our lives?  If we loved our bodies enough to be healthy but we weren't concerned with being a specific size? What if instead of diets and self loathing we shared compliments and encouragement? what if instead of worrying about  "looking" like  a certain type of woman, we "did" the things we wanted to, like start bands, paint masterpieces, start businesses, go back to school, were the kind of mothers we wanted to be  and allowed ourselves to do what makes us happy?

I saw a movie with Sandra bullock a long time ago and a line from it stuck with me despite not remembering anything else about the movie "Don't be someone's slogan when you are poetry"

here's to realizing- we are poetry.