Thanks Sareen for this post telling us about Feminist Killjoy, a blog written by Sara Ahmed, an against-the-status-quo queer brown feminist and professor at Goldsmiths, University in London. There she discusses losing self-confidence, queer phenomenology, sexual harassment, and the historicity of feminism, among so much more. She writes powerfully and substantiates her academic voice with wide gender studies research.

Last week, my SHEzaadi co-founder with teeth Queenzarrr went to a panel discussion hosted by menstruation advocacy group Let’s Face it Period, where Kiran Gandhi and Rupi Kaur (*swoon*) debuted their music video “Sun Spills”, and hosted a discussion about lifting the taboo of menstruation. Read Zara’s post about it here, and Kiran’s message about the movement here.

I just read Mindy Kaling’s second book Why Not Me?, which is hilarious and thoroughly enjoyable (sounds so editorial of me, hehe), and more wizened than her first one. I wanted to reproduce a part of it that I loved so much in the last chapter. Mindy is the guest at a Q&A panel hosted by a magazine to discuss her life and career:

At the end of the interview, the moderator opened the floor to questions from the audience. I noticed that the small group of people who lined up to ask me questions looked very different to the majority of the crowd. They were mostly young women of color. After a few people went, a young Indian girl stepped forward to take the microphone. She looked about fifteen, and not only out of place in that crowd but also really young to be asking a question in front of such a large audience. I think she felt it, too, because I could see from the stage that she was shaking. After a moment of nervous silence, she asked, “Mindy, where do you get your confidence? Because I feel like I used to have it when I was younger but now I don’t.”

Context is so important. If this question had been asked by a white man, I might actually have been offended, because the subtext of it would have been completely different. When an adult white man asks me, “Where do you get your confidence?” the tacit assumption behind it is: “Because you don’t look like a person who should have any confidence. You’re not white, you’re not a man, and you’re not thin or conventionally attractive. How were you able to overlook these obvious shortcomings to feel confident?”.

But this wasn’t coming from a white man. This was coming from a vulnerable young woman who thought maybe, when I was her age, I too had faced similar obstacles. All she wanted was guidance, or maybe a little empathy.

This part made me cry. Everyone has been that girl, and some of us have been that Mindy caught off-guard who needs to process the gravity of that question. I thought about the purpose of this publication being for that very girl and many more like her.

By now we know that you’ve completed a full obssession cycle over Zayn Malik’s album like we have; you’ve annoyed your friends about it, played it on repeat during your commute, cried over not being Gigi Hadid, and most of all, told your parents about Intermission: fLoWer, where he sings in Urdu. If you are like us, you’ve sent paisley bat signals into the night sky just to alert the slumbering public that Zayn is our gift to the world. You can read the translation of the simple yet beautifully lamenting lyrics here. He expresses his stance on his cultural and religious identity quite beautifully; which is, almost not at all. Good on him for keeping personal things private!

Our loins are absolutely ablaze with Canadian Indian artist Nimisha Bhanot’s series of paintings “Badass Indian Pinups” featuring confident and sexually liberated Indian women. I personally see all of my future in “Money, Kitty Parties & Clothes Is All A Bahu Knows”.

The new MuslimGirl.com launched recently with a trendy new theme. They’ve gone a bit hashtag happy but the dialogue remains cracked wide open, and we love it! Amani, if you’re there, let’s do lunch and discuss a collab, girl!

If you’re looking for a volume of SHEzaadi stories, look no further than May You be the Mother of a Hundred Sons by Elisabeth Bumiller. Besides sounding like excruciating pain, the book interviews Indian women from various castes and creeds about their relationships with the world around them. It’s heartwarming and genuine, and tells with great sensitivity the often tragic experiences of women who bear it all with grace.

And finally, we want to give a heartfelt and sincere prayer for Lahore, Brussels, Ankara, and every other place that has been attacked in the name of a toxic and selfish idealism that parades under a name we all cherish: Islam. To pick your heart up from this ongoing destruction I want to leave you all with this video of the Jumma Khutbah (Friday sermon) from the IC NYU mosque. It’s titled “The World Inside of You” and is about not distancing yourself from realities too tragic to face but appealing to your faith and sense of humanity to pull you through it.