Girls Outloud - Issue 1

We, the editors, have been fortunate enough to be born into the era where uttering the word feminism does not have the same bitter tang as it previously did. As friends from birth, we’ve never let each other doubt the importance of feminism. We’ve matured together - encouraging each other to go from seeing sexism as simple, black and white inequality between genders to complex theoretical work as well as the intersections between class, race and gender. But the lack of feminist conversations and overflow of discussions that occupy wholly the wrong topics, has begun to really worry us.

As younger girls, we along with many others took pride in wearing the newly popular term “feminist”, speaking and fighting without the consciousness of those who were against it. But that was when our generation was in its true youth and misogyny felt like only a boy’s favourite colour could be blue. As we have encountered Everyone’s Invited, Me Too and the world at large, the feminism that felt so pres ent has become fractured and at times seemingly hard to find within our generation. But we have de cided on the importance of feminism, we’ve never let that initial anger and spark wither - only fostering it and discovering more so what feminism can do for us.

Together we’ve seen past the pink tint that western society has washed over the world, trying to convince us that misogyny is eradicated - that feminism is a practice no longer needed. Without our friendship, which pools together experiences from a classic all-girls, British private school and an American/International school, our complete faith in feminism wouldn’t be so whole. To highlight, however, this support is dynamic and not a roundtable of agreement. The use of the pronoun we is to convey our unity on feminism, but in discussion we use our varying opinions to see new paths. Fem

inism is individual and we want to admit that at times the collective we may change to I. But this sup port has eased the harrowing experience of being what feels like the sole believer. Resisting the preva lent misogynistic culture and remaining complete in your feminism requires an acceptance of conflict and strength. Without someone, something, to reassure your beliefs there is no wonder why the fem inism of our generation has become muddled with performances, the falsity of social media and the complete fallacy that feminism is about the persecution of men (as much as we joke).

We’ve had conversation after conversation on how to communicate our beliefs without causing con fusion, anger and the unfortunate but inevitable attack on feminists. We’ve reassured one another that mistakes will be made and that it is ok to indulge part of the larger culture. Our bond provides a base that reassures our feminism, but we have not been able to share that base with others, we’ve not been able to reassure others. To us this zine is a gift - believer to believer - a headquarters to reignite trust and reassure the individual that there are feminists with which unity can be formed.

With this zine we invite you to of course read, but to also debate and argue - become involved. Like we mentioned, simple discussion of feminism can further the movement and develop individuals who are committed to feminism. This zine will consist of opinion pieces, creative writing, art, poetry and much more - if you feel a connection to the feminist movement please email girlsoutloud23@gmail.com with any submission ideas. We want to build a strong rapport with you, the reader, and create a relationship where you can turn to this zine, reassure yourself of your feminism and be able to see that there is a whole movement out there.

- Dasha Rahman & Evie Morris

The following content is our first push, our first step in creating a zine fit to the complex themes and topics of feminism. While this issue is laying a general foundation, existing without an exact theme besides womanhood and feminism, the issues following will be defined inidividually and thematically.

‘Men lookat women. s T o p:

Women watch themselves being looked at’.

The use of women as iconography

The use of women as pornography

The use of women as props

Her bed smelt like the incense from the store we bought the coriander from. I watched Nani here, tugging her hair straight and rolling it against her red curlers.

The vanity was littered with our lost hair. I could hear the whistles from prayer through the shut door, while she pulled out a Black-Magic jar from Bobbi Brown and ran it through her tightline. The eye, batting. A red, named some food, sat on her lips near the beauty mark while a shawl kept her figure correct. Her skin was bare but golden: no lines thanks to no sun. She never told me to do the same: no bleach, no scale,

no shade for me - or her, anymore. No correct or its inverse. Good enough, she smiles. A form of protest with those words.

Dasha Rahman

The Vanity’s Protest

The Death of the Awkward Teen Girl

Remony Burlingame

When my mom pulls up a picture of herself when she was my age, she looks considerably more awkward . Even my friends’ older sisters notice a difference in young girls’ appearances between five years ago and today. There are less awkward haircuts, acne, quirky outfits, ill-fitting clothes and toothy brace-filled smiles. Girls are losing the ability to look awkward and not beautiful, to experiment with their appearance, and decide what they like for themselves. The loss of the awkward-tween/teen phase is an epidemic that’s killing girls’ individuality and forcing them to grow up earlier.

Technology and social media have revolutionized everything about growing up for the younger generation. Stephen Balkam, CEO of the Family Online Safety Institute, said, “It was once typical for kids to get phones in high school or sometimes later. Today, 95% of all teens have access to a cell phone, according to the Pew Research Center. In high-tech families, the average age kids get cell phones is 7-and-a-half.” With the rise of social media among the youth, girls are being aggressively exposed to appearance standards that are perfect and polished. The pressure is placed on being beautiful, adult, and sexy — adjectives never before used to describe young girls. Social media thrives off teenage girls’ insecurities: spoon feeding them “thinspo,” diets, butt and ab workouts, skin-clearing products, teeth whiteners, makeup products, and advertisements for push-up bras. The message literally couldn’t be clearer. And with increasingly younger and younger girls using these social media platforms and being advertised this product, and being shown that inspo pic, girls today are able to skip their awkward-tween phases.

But what’s so wrong with being “beautiful”? As Billie Eilish, a singer who was thrown into the public eye via social media at 15, put it, “To always try to look good is such a loss of joy and freedom.” Social media teaches girls that they are evaluated using beauty and sex appeal as metrics - and pretty much nothing else. It makes girls’ internal and external perception rely on never having bad hair days, untimely pimples, or big metal braces. It embraces one specific, impossible look and shuns all others. So it’s no surprise that when impressionable young girls get access to this “universal truth” with countless “problem” solving products being advertised to them — an enormous pressure for the awkward, experimental phase to disappear is present. Suddenly girls online look less and less like their childhood selves and more and more like models. But they don’t match this expectation in reality, and they set a standard that relies on editing, lighting and perfection - one that is impossible to achieve daily, ultimately leading to extreme insecurity.

When I hang out with my friends, we try on clothes and stare at ourselves in full-length mirrors, ruthlessly critiquing our underage bodies. We hate ourselves for not looking like the 14-year-old tik tokers or 16-year-old Instagram models filling our feeds. The more we compare, the more flaws we find in ourselves. All of a sudden, it’s not just boobs and butt; we care about our shoulders, arms, legs, stomachs, noses, skin, fingers, and literally any other part of our body. Social Media forces the beauty standard on increasingly young girls, and when we realize what the world expects us to be, we lose our true selves.

Favourite Lines

Through these stories, the patriarchal veil that hides the terrorsim of women by blasting familial, marital and religious duty, becomes ridden with holes, and we see that no matter a woman’s actions she will face some sort of persecution.

Dasha Rahman, Edna&Ophelia

Daughters

Enough of pulling off high heels to run Or else waiting alone in unclaimed ugliness.

No more crying out for guitar heroes Or going back to old loves for the safety.

Let us build bonfires of those unanswered prayers. Let us learn how to leave with clean and empty hearts

Let us escape these attics still mad, still drunk, still raving

Let us vacate these badly lit odd little towns

Let us want none of what anchored our mothers

Let us never evolve to be good or beautiful

Let us spit and snarl and rattle the hatches

Let us never be conquered

Let us no longer keep keys in our knuckles

Let us run into the streets hungry, fervent, ablaze.

You

Are a mighty thing

A captive animal, woken with a taste for blood. Feed it,

You Amazon, you Gloria, you Swiss army knife of a woman.

Phoebe Stuckes, four time winner of the Foyle Young Poets Awards

Sugar Mountain is a tether and warning

A reminder to not let go too fastleaving there too soon.

You’re leaving there too soon.

Sage Bellinger-Wehner, SugarMountain

A browny-red stain sat between my thighs: what was once inside, pulled out. I knew what it was - it had happened once before, in the middle of February, but whatever was inside of me chose to wait until the warmest day of August to make its appearance again. . . .

Then the anchor warned us of poachers, who might try to take the biggest crabs and extract their blood - a coveted blue, bluer than the bay upon which our house sat - for use in life saving medical treatments. Their lives must be protected, she said.

Mahalia Eddy, Horsehoe

My sister would always get away with a “No gracias” or would scramble out of reach.

I have never been skilled at such scrambling, never wanting to hurt someone’s feelings or create unnecessary tension. I remember the moment I became conscious. I couldn’t have been older than three because the thought of putting what I was feeling into words felt inconceivable.

Ines Terrien Moneo, Pistachios2014SuperBowlCommercial

If you were to run your fingers across one side, you would merely feel the bite of cold steel on your skin but as you turn the hilt around and run your fingers along the same expanse, the silver-plated ridges would draw your blood. Magenta or charcoal black, depending on the goodness of your soul. A double-edged sword is the image that comes to mind when I think of mirrors. It could be a passing glance in a concave mirror, your silvery reflection on the surface of water, looking into someone’s eyes, looking into someone’s face, looking into a woman’s face. They show us reality, as it is. They show us a distortion of reality. They show us what we could be but are not. They show us at twice our size like an engorged balloon. They show ourselves diminished. It is simply the twist of a wrist, the jerk of a joint that is the difference between beautiful or hideous, intelligent or dull, slut or prude, violent or heroic—a coin, a double-edged sword, a fine line, a mirror.

A highly metaphorical mirror, like many things that come in contact with women and gender laws. Are we a looking glass? Are we a mirror that reflects their deepest desires, like the mirror of Erised from Harry Potter. I remember being confused as a child, how could someone not know what they wanted? But desire is different from want. And so, men turn to women for inspiration; a boost of the ego; a need for submissiveness or superiority. And oftentimes, men turn to women for support. Yes, for the ego, to flatter them but emotionally as well. Instead of tending to our own needs, we are there to help them with their shockingly basic emotional skills. How could society have failed us so majorly? Surely we can deny this service, yet being the “protected sex” we cannot help but guide them. Continuously our male friends are falling in love with us when they realize that we can meet their emotional needs and unlike with their equals, don’t have to engage in a battle for superiority since it is an inherent thing. It is a constant battle between men, a battle surely to be won with women (or maybe for women?)— and from there violent and heroic action are derived. Two fundamentally male traits. What would society be without them? Without men are we deemed uncivilized? Or simply incompetent, futile, worthless.

Mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action

By Ines Terrien Moneo

New Sentences

It reminds me of sitting at the piano, hands folded in my lap, the window panes slightly ajar. I feel as if the humidity is compressing me like when my grandmother rolls up meat in a kitchen towel, making sure it is vacuumed sealed before placing it in the fridge—except I am not placed in a fridge but instead am left on the piano stool to rot and spoil. This is interrupted by the beam of sunlight that illuminates the flecks of dust and paint that slowly peel away and drift. As I utter the sentence aloud the “squat chimney stacks’’ rolls off my tongue effortlessly like the triplets drumming from the stems of my fingers into the ivory keys of the piano, like the r’s that roll off my mothers tongue, my mother tongue. And much like the ray, my father tongue (if that even is a term, because men do not have enough dominance) cuts through my music that has streamed and pooled at my feet. And he splashes through it and I am transported to a mid-december afternoon when the sun has already set and it is so cold that streams of condensation billow from my nose as I blow hot air into my hands. And the Thames appears to move like one large mass, lapping its pebbly beaches and depositing any unwanted rubbish on its shore. There are moments where I want to be swallowed whole. I do not want to put up a fight but simply be inundated, not diluted but be filled up. I want to be another droplet within this mass, identity lost (not stolen, merely given away) only to wash up on the banks weeks or years or centuries later. How sweet it must be to be unknown (not that I am known or anything) but to exist in a world where you could not trace or be traced.

I remember my father telling me about a nor’easter that hit NYC in 1996. He was supposed to catch a flight January 6th (formerly known as Three Kings Day but now warped in our memories as Trump’s insurrection) to Madrid to see my mother and her family. He didn’t have a phone, he didn’t have service so he walked out of JFK, his suitcase trailing behind and went back home; the next day my mum went to pick him up at the airport but he never showed. Despite his annoyance at losing his flight, he was filled with an overwhelming sense of freedom. He could disappear off the face of the earth and no one would know and somehow to him, that was incredibly liberating. And now I look at David (who ironically shares a name with my dad) as he bathes in his anonymity yet cannot bear to be himself. In 1956, Norma Jean could not bear to be herself and changed her name to Marilyn Monroe, essentially selling her identity to the film industry. Anonymity died with Norma Jean that day.