An Australian author living in Norway

Tag: feminism

I almost have nothing to say today – almost

It’s the one day of the year I can be relied upon to post to my poor, neglected blog. International Women’s Day. Arguably the most empowering day of the year to be a woman.

But, this year I’ve struggled to find something specific to write about. Not that I’ve run out of things to say on the subject of feminism – far from it – but more because other people, other women, are already saying it. They’re saying it louder, more often, and with more conviction than I can remember hearing ever in my life before. Women whom I thought had permanent blinders glued to their faces are waking up, tearing off their sleeping masks and realising the battle for equality isn’t won. We’re not done yet. We’re just getting started.

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Is Our Strength Drowning Us?

*Content warning: This post discusses depression, PND, and suicide.

It’s International Women’s Day, and this morning my Facebook memories were filled with wonderful, empowering posts from March 8s past, but when I got to March 8, 2013, I found some posts I had forgotten belonged to this day, and the tears began to well. On this day in 2013, I said goodbye to a friend I met (oddly coincidentally) on Women’s Day in 2009 at a company breakfast. I had only been working there a few months, and was in the engineering department where there weren’t many women. I was seated between two women I didn’t know and, as I tend to do in these situations, I kept to myself and hoped someone else would break the ice.

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The Journey to Feminism

I would love to be able to say I’ve always been a feminist. And, in fact, if you had asked me fifteen or twenty years ago if I was a feminist, I would have said yes. I was never one of those girls or young women who think feminism belongs to some mythical hairy-underarmed, bra-burning, man-hating monsters. But honestly, I didn’t even know what the word meant back then. I would have said yes because I was a Lisa Simpson-esque goody-two-shoes who would identify with, and pledge allegiance to, any social justice-related cause. I wanted to save the world, even though I had no idea what I was saving it from. But if you look at some of the life decisions I made back then (case in point, moving in with an idiot right out of high school because he said all the right adoring words), you’d know I was clueless at best, a hypocrite at worst.

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A Woman out of Tech

An ode to women still in the game in 2015

Writing this post feels like playing a game of Bloody Mary. Put your finger on a keyboard and say “Quinn, Wu, Sarkeesian!” and a bunch of gamerbros will appear as if by magic to take your life and/or your sanity.

Before I was an author, I was a Woman in Tech. Yes, capital letters are needed these days, because it’s a Thing. It didn’t feel like much of a thing then, and I don’t know if that’s because I worked for a company that never made it a thing, or because Our Time hadn’t come yet, but there is something happening in the tech world that makes me glad I’m no longer part of it, and yet simultaneously sorry I’m no longer part of a solution that needs to be realised.

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