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,...
If you’re aged between 16 and 22 years of age, what would you say are the most challenging aspects of being a young woman in today’s world?...
I have mixed feelings about school uniforms. Sure, my high school was neat and identifiable because we all wore the same thing. But is appearance...
Language note: Possum uses they/them pronouns.
How many pop punk stars do you know who fly to Wellington specially to see the Muppets in...
Sometimes I love New Zealand’s ‘she’ll be right’ attitude. Not stressing over the details is great for things like playing sports or planning a...
The justice system is the skeleton of our society. Without it, everything would fall apart. When it’s broken, it causes pain, and requires...
“What are you going to do with that?” When I tell people that I study English at university, that’s the response I get. If I mention that Law is...
Imagine this: you’ve come home from uni, you’re ready to start your kickass, girl power-fuelled career – #LeanIn #GirlBoss – and you suddenly...
I first heard the word ‘incel’ (involuntary celibate) four or five years ago. I’d come across the term before infamous loser Elliot Rodger went on...
Hollywood gets a lot wrong when it comes to women. It’s disappointing yet unsurprising that largely male production teams have no idea how women...
When you hear the word ‘nice’ what do you think about? Does it denote kindness? Is it vanilla? Is it male? Is it female?
I have a problem...
I’m having a bit of a renaissance period in my life. My daughter is just entering her teens and one of the things we’ve...
When I was a little girl, I used to purposefully hate on the colour pink. I was a purple girl, thank you very much. Pink was far too girly ....
Let’s talk about love and sex in 2018. What is it? Where do we find it? Does love mean romance? And how has our increased ‘wokeness’ impacted upon...
The first thing to acknowledge in any discussion of nude selfies is that there’s nothing wrong with actually taking them.
People take them...
The music video for Helen Corry’s new song La Femme drops today, and we’re stoked to premiere it here on Villainesse. It’s the kind of video you...
When did you first see porn? I vividly remember stumbling across a grainy old website circa 2001 (okay, I didn’t exactly ‘stumble’… I may have...
Cast your mind back, girls. Do you remember when it started happening to you? Was it in primary years? Earlier? High school? Or when you entered...
New Zealand has a party culture. Whether you like that culture or not, it undeniably exists. Binge drinking is a rite of passage and for a lot of...
LinkedIn wants me to connect with my ex.
God knows why. It wasn’t exactly a good idea the first time round.
Gone are the days of...
Let’s face it, New Zealand’s sex ed is generally pretty terrible when it comes to gender and sexuality. I don’t think the word ‘lesbian’ was...
Runaway is a Dunedin-based games company. In the lead-up to International Women’s Day, they started a Girls Behind the Games campaign to encourage...
Last week, Villainesse caught up with Minister for Women Julie Anne Genter. We wanted to know what work was happening in our government towards...
Life as a 17-year-old is already challenging enough. Balancing school, new-found freedom, responsibilities, trying to have a social life, holding...
