Girl
(page 2)
'What will people say?' is a feeling every Indian girl grows up with.
Being a teenager is an amazing time and a hard time. It's when you make your best friends — I have girls who will never leave my heart and I still talk to. You get the best and the worst as a teen. You have the best friendships and the worst heartbreaks.
I read this book when I was young. It's about a black girl growing up in Heaven, Ohio. The cover has a black girl with clouds behind her. It was the first book cover I ever saw with a girl that looked like me.
Despite girls' sparkling resumes — including rates of college enrollment and high school grades that outstrip boys — sexism is a barrier that still leaves girls ambivalent about power. Opening doors has not amounted to ambition to lead for many of them, even those with options, networks, and resources.
Failing well is a skill. Letting girls do it gives them critical practice coping with a negative experience. It also gives them the opportunity to develop a kind of confidence and resilience that can only be forged in times of challenge.
I have written a book called 'In the Wonderland of Numbers'. It's about a young girl, Neha, who is very poor in mathematics, but in a series of illusory experiences, she becomes a great mathematician.
Girls are socialised in ways that are harmful to their sense of self — to reduce themselves, to cater to the egos of men, to think of their bodies as repositories of shame. As adult women, many struggle to overcome, to unlearn, much of that social conditioning.
My hope is that 'Blk Girl Soldier' is a freedom song for black women today who are fighting the macro- and microaggressions of daily life in our city/country/world.
Gender equality is not only an issue for women and girls.
I pray to God I get inside a girl's head one day and see what in the WORLD they are thinking.
Sometimes, though only in my most unguarded moments, I can still think of Annette Winters as my first love. At fifteen, she was tall, slender, very dark: an intelligent, sly girl possessed of what I think of now, though I didn't think of then, as a kind of debatable beauty.
I must be very clear in one thing... Being a pageant girl is not who I am or what defines me.
I first realized I wanted to model when my mum and I were at a local carnival, and she took me to a fashion show. I had never been to one before, and when I saw the girls on the catwalk, I fell in love with them.
When my girl do better than me, I still win. When I do better than her, she still wins.
Social media forces girls to bear witness to painful realities of relationship that were previously hidden from view. It is a new kind of TMI, or 'too much information': publicly posted photographs of an outing or party you did not attend, or a personal web page like Formspring, can send a girl into paroxysms of anxiety and grief.
I love women, but I feel like you can't trust some of them. Some of them are liars, you know? Like I was in the park and I met this girl, she was cute and she had a dog. And I went up to her, we started talking. She told me her dog's name. Then I said, 'Does he bite?' She said, 'No'. And I said, 'Oh yeah? Then how does he eat?' Liar.
I am just a girl chasing her dreams and having an amazing adventure.
Growing up, I wanted desperately to please, to be a good girl.
A simple compliment goes a really long way — for a guy to just come over and say, 'You have great hair' or 'I really like your dress', and then just smile and walk away. That's a great move, because he's sort of putting himself out there by doing that, but it won't lead to any embarrassment if the girl isn't interested.
I am passionate about acting. 'Girls in our family are not allowed to act' is quite an outdated thought to have. They did it till my mother, but now no more.
