Birdee

We needed Lily Allen’s edgy lyrics and sweet voice when she first stole our hearts with her 2006 album, Alright Still. Her songs poked at problems within society and tore apart the particulars of pop culture; she had a knack for voicing the insecurities we felt as young women. Allen’s new single, It’s Hard Out Here (a play on Three 6 Mafia‘s song) takes aim at a bunch of new…

I so wanted this song to be an anthem to get behind, but it turns out Lily Allen’s It’s Hard Out Here epitomises the biggest problem within the feminist movement: racism. Update: Lily Allen has responded to critics who argue her song is racist, claiming in a short blog post that her motivations were well-intentioned and she did not mean to be racist. However, as Jezebel points out, an…

People are always banging on about how important exercise is for… everything.  Perhaps one of the biggest and most-touted benefits of doing regular physical activity is that it increases happiness. Yep, exercise = better mood. Duh! We get it! But before you click that little ‘x’ at the top of the page, take a look at what actually happens in your brain after a 20 minute walk: Significant chemical changes…

Is Brazilian waxing to blame for the rise in demand among Australian young women for labiaplasty? Melbourne GP Magda Simonis told the ABC last week that the trend for young women in particular to remove all hair from their vulvas was leaving many self-conscious about the appearance of their labia, even when they looked clinically normal. Dr Simonis, who has consulted with patients as young as 17 seeking referrals for…

I was 22, had a good job and was in a long-term relationship when I had an abortion. It started like I expect it does for everyone – my period was late. I was on the Pill but sometimes got really paranoid when the crimson tide hadn’t come a couple of days after it should have, so I bought a pregnancy test. I’d done this a couple of times before,…

Last week, along with eighteen other young women from Sydney Uni, I had my vagina photographed to make a political statement on the front cover of Honi Soit, Australia’s oldest running weekly student newspaper. We believe that the way the media represents women’s vaginas is neither realistic or fair, and causes women to feel uncomfortable about how they look. It also gives men a distorted idea of what a vagina…

I’ve always found it fascinating to listen to boys talk about their penises. From a young age, it seems like they are taught to be very well-acquainted with their junk. Whether it’s bragging about how far they can pee, coming up with questionable pet names, or just letting the world know how many times they’ve wanked today, dick conversations are always on the table. Maybe it’s because our bits tend…

Making your own clothes is the best. Once you get a hang of it (and I promise you that it’s not hard, I’m an entirely self-taught sewer – thank you, YouTube tutorials!), you get total control over the design and structure of your clothes. You’ll own a completely unique piece of clothing and best yet, if someone compliments you on it, you can say that you made it yourself! Things…

Nancy Tucker devised a fiendish system of plastic bags and shorts with removable weights. All her energy was spent on putting together clever schemes to deceive her friends and family, teachers and doctors. Day after day, she didn’t eat a thing. Tucker’s memoir The Time In Between is a painful yet artful account of the throes of anorexia, and later, bulimia. Painful is the right word because when Tucker describes…