For over a year, a pink hooded jumper has sat folded between the neutrals and blacks of my wardrobe, smelling of mothballs and awaiting patiently for me to end its hibernation by ripping off the price tag and caressing it against my skin. It’s not that I dislike the hoodie; in fact, I think it…
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Fast fashion is the world’s second largest pollutant, behind oil. This fact may surprise some; the outer appearance between oil and fabric pollutants seeming vastly different – and they are. Still, it’s the sheer volume and waste associated with the process of fast fashion that is making it deadlier than it seems. According to Business…
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International Women’s Day began in 1909 after the women’s suffrage movement protests and since, it has become an internationally recognised occasion for celebrating efforts of the past and planning for the future. For over a century, March 8th has been celebrated as a day we put women on the map. This year, the focus of…
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We’re bouncing between baking sourdough bread and practising Yoga with Adrienne. We’ve fiercely committed to comfy pants and rejected jeans. We’re bemoaning our expanding waistlines and the media have responded: just google Covid/quarantine kilos. We’re months into the global Covid-19 pandemic and weight worries still manage to be a concern. We’re lucky that in Melbourne,…
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The room spun around me, blurring the faces that stared out at me from all directions. I reached for the wall to steady myself and realised too late I’d missed the mark. My body fell to the floor. Ashley laughed at me and continued her drunken dance to Arrested Development’s Mr Wendal. From my…
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In 2009 I broke the law in NSW and had an abortion. It was not a decision I made lightly. I discovered I was pregnant and carrying the child of my then-boyfriend, who was someone I deeply cared for. But we weren’t in love. At 27, I was at an age when many women I…
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It was a photograph. Flipping through Christopher Lloyd’s The Story of the World in 100 Species (2016), I came across a classic mad scientist image: glass specimen jars, books, a microscope, test tubes and at the centre the scientist, sleeves rolled up above the elbows, wielding a pipette and engrossed in the all-important experiment of…
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There’s a rookie female politician who is gaining the ire of her colleagues and the way she’s coping with her newfound platform is particularly interesting. Her name is Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, or AOC as the US media often refers to her, and she is refusing to be another notch on the sexist media’s belt. Indeed,…
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Feminism is defined as “the belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities”. The broad spectrum of feminist ideologies (from radical, Marxist to liberal) have different expressions of this core belief, but they are all fighting to create an egalitarian society. Many branches of feminism also place emphasis on intersectionality, which considers…
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I think my first encounter with the word “feminist” was around sixth grade, when a friend of my older brother told me that if I ever wanted a boy to like me, I best not join Feminist Club when I reached high school. At the time, I took his advice seriously. He, a cool high…
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As a little white girl, naively comforted by the romances of Madame Butterfly and Disney’s Mulan, I had developed a pretty enduring schema by which to evaluate Asian women: they must either be supplicants donning opulently embellished kimonos, or they must be men. By the time that movies like Godzilla and Aloha came around,…
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On 8 November 2016 I found myself watching the Clinton—Trump showdown from a remote town on the Pacific Coast. In its aftermath I joined the masses in experiencing a carnival of emotions, namely, the overwhelming sensation that I had been sucker-punched. I’m now sitting in a sandy cafe listening to a blonde with a drawling accent…
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Rohingya. When you hear this word, does it spark any thought in your mind? Does it spark any segment on the news you’ve seen recently? Anything you learned in class? Does it sound familiar… at all? When I asked some of my friends if they’ve heard the word “Rohingya”, the answer was “no”. And this…
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Until I began writing for Lip, I’d made a conscious effort to keep my feminist thoughts separate from my social media channels. Now, you could argue that this makes me a bad feminist. After all, it’s arguably one of the tenants of modern feminism that people are aware of the cause and what it stands…
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