sherahbeck - Tumblr blog

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Aging in women is 'unbeautiful' since women grow more powerful with time, and since the links between generations of women must always be newly broken: Older women fear younger ones, young women fear old, and the beauty myth truncates for all the female life span. Most urgently, women's identity must be premised upon our 'beauty' so that we will remain vulnerable to outside approval, carrying the vital sensitive organ of self-esteem exposed to the air.

Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth

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Agreed

If you design and create a product or a business, you *are* responsible for the impact it has on other humans and the world.

— Hilary Mason (@hmason)

March 29, 2016

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#tbt the first time I ever did standup comedy, June 2013

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I bought like a billion rose patches (seriously, this isn't even all of them) to put around the giant tiger on my jacket and I'm trying to figure out placement

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This legit sounds like a joke I would send to someone while we both experienced a ridiculous event, but no, it's an actual project

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Grit is a character trait I have tried to foster more of over the last few years. I believe it is important. That said, sometimes I feel that I am embodying a different definition from the original one I had intended to...this one.

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I look like this today hi

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cactus doodles. no relation to labradoodles

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Texts with bf

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today I doodled this

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A man in India went to great lengths to research and develop low-cost, safe sanitary pads for women after learning that only 10-20%t of all girls and women in India have access to proper menstrual hygiene products.

I’m touched by his empathy.

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Girls Doing Stuff

When I was eight years old, I told my whole family that I wanted to be the President of the United States when I grew up. I was visiting my grandparents in Mississippi, and my aunts and uncles and parents and brothers were around to hear me say it. This was probably a holiday of some kind, the timing of which I had most likely planned to make my announcement on in advance.

I wanted to hold an election for the Presidency of the Family, to prove that I had what it took to be the actual President someday. My dad had, after all, warned me that I would need “a lot of experience in politics” before I became the President, so I wanted to get a jumpstart at eight years old. I was enamored with being “the youngest X in the world” at the time, X being such titles as “songwriter” (I wrote and recorded my first song, a country song about birds, at age 9), and radio show host (I pretended to have a radio show when I recorded bits of the radio and then my voice over those bits all the time).

So, at age eight, inside the little brick house where my family had just finished having a leisurely dinner, I distributed handmade ballots for the Presidency of the Family. The candidates were three: me, my brother Randy (six years old at the time), and my brother Zachary (three).

“We don’t want to have to pick someone, you’re all special to us!” my stupid, stupid family would say as I went around reminding them to vote after they had just put their ballots down on the table like it was a game.

“Why are you doing this?” Grandma asked.

“Because I want to be the President of the United States someday.”

“Don’t you mean the First Lady?”

“Um, nope, I want to run the country, my husband can be the First Lady.”

Sometimes I think about this story when I hear about young women who have been told from early on that they can’t do something men can do. I’m sure that my Grandma, the strongest and most nurturing force in my life, was positive that I could do anything I wanted to do, but the culture we come from paints lines around our experiences, puts things neatly into buckets in ways that are no longer acceptable but still exist for others as orderly, logical tradition.

That’s the case for Malala Yousafzai, a young woman from Pakistan, a Nobel Prize-winning activist for women’s rights to education. I recently watched He Named Me Malala, a documentary made about her life, which is a beautiful film that made me cry all over myself until I was a pathetic pile of goo.

Malala was shot in the left side of her head by the Taliban as she secretly attended class in the back of a hidden school bus in her hometown, because girls are banned from going to school in the Swat Valley of Pakistan.

“There are many problems, but I think there is a solution to all these problems; it’s just one, and it’s education.” -Malala Yousafzai

In my work at the Wikimedia Foundation, I have seen many people from around the world speaking in this way about education. Like many people in the US, I’ve taken it for granted that I had structured education for at least 13 years of my life and complain about my student loan debt. But imagine not even having the option. Imagine being shot in the face in the 10th grade for doing it.

Sadly, my entire platform when I was eight years old and running for President of the Family was literally “burn down all the schools so we can party!”. I was not elected.

But I still feel a connection with women pushing through and rearranging the lines drawn for us. I find so much inspiration in women like Malala and in the projects I work on that will hopefully make it easier for those with even just a cell phone be able to have access to knowledge and education, and maybe a little bit more freedom, maybe inching closer to a dream or destination that was out of reach before. Sometimes I feel like it’s not enough, and I’m trying to figure out what to do with that feeling.

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Gothy goth hiking at Point Reyes Beach this weekend.

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The first song to reference twerking, from 1993 in New Orleans. I lived 1.5 hours away in Biloxi, Mississippi during this magical time.

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(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJFRvkNF6Wg)

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ice cream medicine