by thevagenda
Last week at work I received a distressed message from my sister alerting me to an article entitled “Signs You Are Dating a Girl Who Has Been Single For Ages.” She warned me that as it had made her (the immeasurably more placid and easy going sibling) annoyed, it was sure to evoke very strong feelings […]
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by thevagenda
Is Body Mass Index going to aid a body-positive revolution or buckle it at the knees? I put my own thighs on the line to find out… (Note: this article contains images of women in their underwear alongside their BMIs) After a couple of weeks that brought the controversial ‘skinny ban’ to fashion giants YSL and […]
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by thevagenda
I can’t stop thinking about women’s bodies. If you think this statement has anything to do with my sexuality, you’d be wrong – although I am, in fact, a lesbian, body acceptance and positivity is at the core of my fixation. Let me ask you this: woman to woman, how often do you catch yourself […]
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by thevagenda
The Times, May 23 2015 A couple of weeks ago, a few girlfriends and I were musing over where to have pre-cinema dinner. Never being one to miss the opportunity for chips, and being on a reasonably tight budget, I suggested a cheeky Nandos. I wasn’t expecting an overly-enthusiastic response, but I was a little […]
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by thevagenda
Ah Game of Thrones: what a show. It’s a pretty grim mashup of rape, incest, murder, betrayal, double dealing and just about anything else unspeakably awful that you can imagine could take place on a television screen. Every episode unleashes a fresh wave of vileness upon us, but how we love it! It’s as though […]
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by thevagenda
When I left the British Isles for Scandinavia I was expecting to get an education in sustainable development not body awareness, but I am so glad I did. If you flick through our family album you quickly see a trend emerge; from birth to the age of three I spent most of my life naked. […]
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by thevagenda
‘You have to struggle to make things better. It doesn’t come on a silver plate.’- Wangari Maathai, speaking on Woman’s Hour shortly before her death in 2011. If you knew that the changing, eroded landscapes were the root cause of the problems in your rural community, would you speak out or be too afraid […]
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by thevagenda
September 2011. “You look so ill, but so beautiful,” my booker said to me at the beginning of London Fashion Week, almost four years ago. I was 18-years-old; height: 176cm; weight: 48kg. It was the thinnest I’d ever been and, as my bookers had predicted, the most successful. I can remember the day I was […]
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by thevagenda
Images via #ThisDoesntMeanYes You’d think that by the 21st century we’d have grasped the concept of sexual consent. After all, this is the age of the internet, the era of the cronut, the decade that conceived the fourth wave of Feminism, Tinder and the iPhone 6. So you’d think that we’d have got our heads around the idea […]
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by thevagenda
On 24th April 2013 Rana Plaza, an eight storey garment factory in Bangladesh making clothes for several global high street brands, collapsed killing 1,134 people, mostly young women, in a matter of minutes. Fashion Revolution Day (#FashRev) on Friday 24th April 2015, marks two years since this happened and is also encouraging us all to use social […]
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by thevagenda
People congratulate me when I tell them my story. They are pleased for me. Relieved for me. They feel like I won. And of course, I did. I managed to get through the shit that comes with being forced into a marriage. I managed to get over the fact that they- my entire family who […]
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by thevagenda
Image via Dave the Chimp It’s hard to muster enthusiasm to vote in an election that sees the race, once again, being fought by three middle-class white men of varyingly privileged backgrounds. In itself, this is not necessarily a bad thing, providing we can trust the aforementioned three to represent all of us, including […]
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