A Message to Women From a Man: You Are Not "Crazy"

 ”…women bare the brunt of our neurosis. It is much easier for us to place our emotional burdens on the shoulders of our wives, our female friends, our girlfriends, our female employees, our female colleagues, than for us to impose them on the shoulders of men.

It’s a whole lot easier to emotionally manipulate someone who has been conditioned by our society to accept it. We continue to burden women because they don’t refuse our burdens as easily. It’s the ultimate cowardice.”

Read the rest of this article by Yashar Ali here.

Set the Cosmopolitan down, because the answer is yes.

The other day, my friend Lauren and I were talking about a study that was done on Cosmo from 1960 to now by Jesse Lawson of The Male Feminist, and how while the magazine did make strides for women in terms of opening eyes to the existence of women’s sexuality, it was not a good media representative for women overall, remaining largely male-centric and, later, overly promoting image consciousness.

Despite the fact that such content has not changed over the last 50 years, however, Cosmo remains the number one magazine for young women and is promoted as such. Other magazines aimed at the same demographic tend not to be much different.

This got me asking myself - why has this happened? What happened to the girl-power movement of the 90s? Did it only exist to produce a couple of Spice Girls albums?

The point is, I know a lot smart and ambitious women who want to read magazines for them that are also about them - not about other people, but them. I also know a lot of smart and ambitious men who would like the opportunity to contribute to something like that.

And so I started this blog. Yes, I have hopes that it may one day shift into a magazine format. But right now I would like for this to be a place where people of all backgrounds and beliefs can come to discuss things candidly and challenge their views about the things that concern young women, whether that be inequality in the workplace or the challenge of wearing a hijab in the current Western society or the best ways to combat sympathetic shopping or the impossibility of Andrew Garfield’s hair. Because, yes, we like talking about guys and looking pretty and whatnot, but we are so much more than that. We have hopes and dreams and ambitions and goals, desires as well as ideas that deserve to be heard.

Why the title? Well, quite frankly, I think it’s what any headline or title should be: informative and catchy. This blog is, quite literally, about all of the different parts that make different women.

It’s a blog among millions, and it may die out in a couple of weeks or months, but then again, maybe it won’t. Maybe it will provide a new voice for people in a section of media where such voices are rarely heard. Maybe, just maybe, it will make a difference.

 Come one, come all. Welcome to “The Lady Parts”.