Smart Girl

When I grow up, I want to create a safe space where girls can go and figure out what self esteem means and how to be awesome at being a girl. Amy Poehler and co. started this amazing initiative called Smart Girls at the Party and I was really inspired by the amount of positivity it is built upon. There is a deep, dark problem in the way girls and women relate to one another. Bullying, bad role modeling, and a lack of understandable or relatable feminist perspective about what it actually means to be a woman set girls up to be in a liminal, ill-defined female space and at risk for the perpetuation of these problems as grown-ups. The way the female body has been made into a political object in addition to a media object further clouds this issue with confusion for a girl coming to terms with a body and trying to be comfortable in her skin. I would like to find a way to to make a difference in this niche. I want to create a place where girls can relate and respect and tolerate and have opprtunities that they might not have in overcrowded classrooms, underfunded public schools, and within the restrictions of neighborhood boundaries. I want them to understand that feminism is more than what Katy Perry denounced on TV and I want them to be proud of their bodies and learn to use words other than "bitch" and "slut" when referring to one another. The young woman's bill of right's should include some basic knowledge of self-esteem and it needs to be instilled in every way possible in a world that is so eager and desperate to rip it apart. This project is lofty and involves many resources I certainly don't have, but here it is, whispering in my ear everytime I read that John Mayer is dating someone new or see tween girls waging tiny acts of verbal violence at one another on the bus downtown. I haven't figured out the baby steps yet; I'm still working backwards. But when I think about Belle and Kira and Tessa and Eloise and Zoey growing up in this current female climate, I find that my jump-to-action jumps up.