In 1893, we were not classified as people in New Zealand. Personhood hadn’t yet been extended to women. We were non-entities; vital to the future...
Dear Kristy, Mary-Anne, Claudia, Stacey, Dawn, Mallory, and Jessi – by way of Ann M....
First, a humble disclaimer: This story is not about consensual dick pics that people ask for, or that are exchanged during some consensual steamy...
Abigail Johnson chatted with emerging indie artist Josie Moon about music, aesthetics, and trying to put...
When people call parenting the ‘hardest job in the world’ I often pick up a faint whiff of condescension. It seems like something people think...
Abigail Johnson caught up with pop-country songstress Jamie McDell to see what she’s been up to,...
I’m a white woman who maintains a biweekly yoga practice, and to be honest, I feel pretty uncomfortable about it.
As with many things, the...
I’m old enough (read: not that old) to remember when people said ‘kiwi comedy’ was an oxymoron. The quip still pops up in the rubbish dump that is...
It is suffrage year fellow suffragists...
Sightings is an exciting play; it’s not every day that an all-female cast takes to the stage to disrupt theatre conventions with powerful,...
Trigger warning: This article contains anti-trans hate speech.
Glossary: TERF – Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist. See here for...
In the olden days of 2012, ask.fm and anonymous questions on Tumblr were the main platform for online harassment. People could send hurtful...
If you’re anything like me, you probably made some kind of New Year’s resolution to read more books in 2018. Well, guess what? It’s almost...
Admit it, we’ve all had that one (or many) moment(s) in our lives when...
I love doing my makeup.
I also rarely, if ever, wear it.
That’s less the smug statement it may seem, and more a testament to my...
For me, menstrual cups are a godsend. To some people, they’re an uncomfortable, one-time experiment that will never work for them. With most...
It's a weird and wonderful time to be a woman, depending on where in the world you live. The likes of the #MeToo movement, the Free The Nipple...
When a friend asked novelist and famed feminist, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, advice on how to raise her young daughter as a feminist, Adichie wrote...
A few weeks ago, New Zealand’s warrior princess Lucy Lawless fired off a tweet stating she wouldn’t be bothered if she saw someone burning the New...
Sexism is real. I hate to be the one to break it to you. It sucks and I wish it didn’t exist. But it’s here, in the world around us. There have...
Abortion holds a unique space in our society. Few other medical procedures are wished to be both ‘legal’ and ‘rare’. Few medical procedures sit...
Giulia Romanó created ‘Leaky Week’ as her final project in a Bachelor of Communication Design at AUT to encourage positive discussion and views...
Whenever we, as a society, discuss allegations about sexual assault, a story about false rape complaints is told. And that story is distorting the...
I remember once having a heated argument with a friend about why any woman would voluntarily wear a hijab. As a non-religious Iranian, I come from...
Ah, birth control. That niggly aspect of having sex we hetero and bisexual women have to deal with for the majority of our adult lives. Having...
It feels like I write a piece like this once every few months. Another day, another cringe-worthy example of cultural appropriation, this time...
Drop the word Millennial and you’re guaranteed a response. Whether the response will be positive or negative is hard to say. But you’ll get one....
The Prime Minister is on maternity leave, there’s a female majority on the Supreme Court,...
Most of us reach a point in our lives where we look around, and suddenly realise that all our mates are either engaged or married. We’ve been so...
We need to talk about free speech. More specifically, who it protects and who it doesn’t. Human rights are a good thing, and free speech is...
There are a number of gems in Aotearoa’s cultural calendar; The Comedy Festival, The Arts Festival, WOMAD and all the big summer music festies....
A few years ago I had no idea what the term ‘TERF’ meant. It popped up occasionally in my Twitter feed...
My girlfriend and I were grinning from ear to ear as we left our screening of Ocean’s 8 . We hadn’t devised some feminist conspiracy to love the...
Feminism is a broad concept, right? Recent efforts to make feminism mainstream (which have been relatively successful) have expanded the...
The local mags love to tell you what to do with your two days off a week. Which café to check out, which piece of experimental theatre take in....
I never thought I’d spent my weekend sewing rhinestones on to G-string. Nor stalking the internet for 4 hours to find a 80s leopard print thong...
The Kiwi OE is a fantasy that I was brought up to believe in. In my pākehā, upper-middle-class world, your 20s are not complete without wandering...
I’ve recently rediscovered Hailee Steinfield’s Most Girls . It’s the song I’m most likely to be singing at the top of my lungs while I’m sitting...
In the wake of Eurydice Dixon’s tragic murder, there have been many things I’ve realised. One of them is that a lot of dudes have absolutely no...
The way some people talk about reality TV, you’d think it was a symptom of everything wrong with modern society. People who watch it are...
How is this happening? Do I even want to do this anymore? As a female law student, revelations of sexual assault in legal workplaces throughout...
Adulting. The older you get, the more unavoidable it becomes. Sadly, there comes a day for all of us when we are forced to realise that we have...
There’s a big gap when it comes to teaching young women about money. We don’t do it because money is like sex or peeing in the shower - people get...
More than 20 years after Paris Is Burning , New York’s queer vogue ballroom scene continues to usher in a new generation of stars, as seen in...
Satire. In which the writer imagines life from another perspective.
There is nothing worse than political correctness. Cancer, famine,...
Dear Jacinda,
As you’re probably aware, our baby is due any day now. I say ‘our’ because let’s face it, we all feel some sort of parental...
Put down your phone. Stop focusing on the tasks you have to do. Think about why you’re here. Breathe.
It sounds simple. But… I’m really...
I remember hearing the lyric, ‘I was 27 surviving my return to Saturn’ in Katy Perry’s By The Grace Of God some years ago. I thought it was some...
Imagine yourself finishing {insert relevant high school/university/graduate course etc} and you’re about to enter the workforce. You’re feeling...
Elon Musk’s Twitter account is getting pretty weird. He’s turned on the media , auto workers, and now is even criticising science (you know, that...
For the first time ever, this Queen’s Birthday weekend, the number of women receiving honours outnumbered the...
Honestly, drunk Pākehā doing the haka in London on Waitangi Day was bad enough. As a...
It seems like New Zealand is falling behind. Irish citizens have spoken and they want abortion...
Last week, University of Otago staff dumped an estimated 2000 copies of Critic , a student-run magazine, in skips around campus. Why? The cover...
I realised I was bisexual at age 14. There was no denying it; the attraction I harboured for girls was just as strong as the one I had for boys....
If you haven’t yet heard of Womanly , chances are you will soon. The newly launched magazine provides a platform (both online and in print) for...
“Today was so unproductive. I got nothing done.” I often find myself measuring my days in terms of how productive I’ve been. In other words: if I...
My flatmate and friend Ishmam*, 26, grew up in Bangladesh before moving to the US for university when she was 18. She began identifying as queer...
Blood, women’s suffering, and endless parallels with current events. I frequently ask myself why I’m...
I vividly remember the moment when I first discovered Zara. I was 19, on a trip to the UK, when I stumbled into an alternative universe of...
There are some words that are only ever used to describe women: Ditsy, feisty, frumpy, loose, and hysterical are just a few that spring to mind,...
