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Discussion: Bey & Malala Top 20 Best Moments For Women In 2014
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Bey & Malala Top 20 Best Moments For Women In 2014
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1) Malala Yousafzai Wins the Nobel Peace Prize Malala, a young woman so famous she's widely referred to by just one name (kind of like Madonna or Bono), became the youngest-ever winner of the Nobel Peace Prize this year, for her work fighting for girls' education around the world. She shared the prize with Kailash Satyarthi, an Indian children's rights activist. Malala was a proponent of literacy and education in her home country of Pakistan, and a member of the Taliban shot her in the face in retaliation for her efforts. She recovered, gave a speech to the UN on her 16th birthday calling for universal girls' education, started the Malala Fund for girls' education, released a memoir, and won a litany of prizes, including an International Children's Peace Prize, an honorary Master of Arts degree from the University of Edinburgh, an Anne Frank Award for Moral Courage, and was shortlisted for TIME magazine's Person of the Year in 2012. At 17, she's a Nobel Prize winner, a human rights icon, and a living reminder that you have done very, very little with your life.
2) Beyoncé Gave a Feminist VMA Performance This year was Queen B's year. She dropped her album Beyoncé without warning just before the close of 2013, and everyone went wild. She opened the 2014 Grammy Awards with an incredibly sexy performance of "Drunk in Love," spent much of the year on her sold-out "On the Run" tour with her husband, Jay Z, paused to attend her sister Solange's gorgeous wedding (Wedding jumpsuit! Wedding cape!), and topped TIME magazine's list of the 100 Most Influential People (and had her profile penned by Sheryl Sandberg, no less). But Bey's biggest moment in 2014 was no doubt her 16-minute, 14-track medley performance at MTV's Video Music Awards, where she stood silhouetted in front of a giant lit-up sign reading "FEMINIST." Even better: She performed part of her track "***Flawless" with the voice of famous Nigerian feminist author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reading the definition of the word ("feminist: a person who believes in the social, political and economic equality of the sexes") and bringing feminism into more than 13 million American households. At the end of her performance, Jay Z and daughter Blue Ivy came onstage to present her with the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award. Yoncé may not be advocating for every feminist issue, but she's normalizing feminism and making gender equality a top priority — as it should be. And 2014 was the perfect encapsulation of Beyoncé Feminism: a woman killing it in her career who unapologetically calls herself a boss and who also has a talented, hardworking partner who seems to be her equal in work and at home; a baby they both unabashedly adore; a tight-knit family; and a team of close, lifelong girlfriends. Queen B's kingdom seems like a pretty nice place to live.
20) The Fight Against Campus Sexual Assault Goes National Women's rights activists have been battling sexual violence on campus for decades, and the federal government has made intermittent attempts to deal with it. But 2014 brought the most progress in years, with the Obama administration convening a White House Task Force on Sexual Assault, which released a comprehensive report outlining the direness of the situation and proposing remarkably feminist solutions. Among them: Bystander intervention programs to encourage onlookers to step in before an assault happens, and efforts to engage men in ending sexual violence. The White House also launched NotAlone.gov, a comprehensive website laying out national and local options for sexual assault survivors, survivors' rights on college campuses, and research on sexual and gender-based violence. They also started the "It's On Us" campaign to change the culture that enables and abets rape and sexual assault. And the victories extend beyond D.C.: This year, California became the first state to enact a "yes means yes" standard of affirmative consent for sex on campus, something feminists have been pushing for years. And exposés of campuses badly mishandling sexual assault claims have made headlines in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, and dozens of other publications. Not only are campus assaults coming out of the shadows, but the most powerful people in the country are finally taking them seriously.
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Member Since: 1/1/2014
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18) Celebrities Take Up the Feminist Mantle Girls don't quite run the world yet, but more of them are calling themselves feminists. In 2014, Taylor Swift took up the title, telling British Cosmopolitan, "My girlfriends and I talk a lot about feminism and the inequality between the way men and women are talked about. The kind of things we say are: 'Why is it mischievous, fun and sexy if a guy has a string of lovers that he's cast aside, loved and left? Yet if a woman dates three or four people in an eight-year period she is a serial dater and it gives some 12-year-old the idea to call her a **** on the Internet?' It's not the same for boys, it just isn't and that's a fact." Other out-and-proud celebrity feminists of 2014 include Beyoncé, Ellen Page, Lena Dunham, Emma Watson, and Amy Poehler, who told ELLE magazine that she doesn't understand people who back away from the feminist label: "That's like someone being like, 'I don't really believe in cars, but I drive one every day and I love that it gets me places and makes life so much easier and faster and I don't know what I would do without it,'" Poehler said. And it wasn't just celebrity women embracing the term: Joseph Gordon-Levitt said he "absolutely" calls himself a feminist, adding, "There's a long, long history of women suffering abuse, injustice, and not having the same opportunities as men, and I think that's been very detrimental to the human race as a whole." And Aziz Ansari told David Letterman, "If you believe that men and women have equal rights, if someone asks if you're a feminist, you have to say yes. Because that is how words work."
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You go Tay  & yass @ Malala
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ATRL Contributor
Member Since: 8/19/2013
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Queens
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Member Since: 1/25/2012
Posts: 44,884
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Beyonce does deserve a top spot, but for her VMA performance..? 
Even in the explanation, they barely wrote about it.
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Member Since: 6/7/2011
Posts: 10,608
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Beyonce really was the leader for feminism! I made a thread after the VMAs, and people didnt believe me, but this Beyonce photo will be ICONIC!
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Member Since: 8/19/2013
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Queen
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Member Since: 8/21/2011
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Beyoncé is overrated. 
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Member Since: 8/13/2012
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Member Since: 6/7/2011
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Originally posted by BabyCantYouSee
Beyonce does deserve a top spot, but for her VMA performance..?
Even in the explanation, they barely wrote about it.
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That picture represents the boldness that Beyonce promoted feminism with through 2014. It felt like it just captured the spirit of her year.
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Member Since: 1/3/2014
Posts: 6,966
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