You may know Karlie Kloss as a supermodel and super babe. Well, while that may still be true, we think Kloss’ new gig is more interesting.

Bust recently reported that Kloss has partnered with the “Flatiron School to establish the Kode with Karlie scholarship.” The school will provide an intensive two-week training course where young women will learn to code.

Watch a video about the course below.

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The post Supermodel Karlie Kloss is Hot Because She’s Inspiring Women to Code [Video] appeared first on EcoSalon.

Women at work are awesome. Women at home are awesome. Basically, women are just awesome. (Duh.) But there are some women – women who don’t help other women — who are downright toxic to the rest of us gals who just want to learn and bond.

Women who don’t help other women are everywhere and we’re sure you’ve encountered a few of these ladies in your lifetime. These women work with you and sit next to you in your college courses. Although these ladies do get on my nerves, I don’t hate these women. Why? Well, because as Laurie Ruettimann points out, every woman is that woman at least once in her lifetime. While this is a pretty sobering statement, it’s true.

Don’t believe me? Well, let’s examine a few of the “woman who doesn’t help other women’s” characteristics:

She’s kinda negative all the time: She makes sure everyone around her knows how hard she works and is very vocal about every sacrifice she makes. (I hate to admit that I used to be this person at the beginning of my freelance career. I had that “too busy” chip on my shoulder to prove to everyone around me that even though I didn’t work a “9-to-5 job,” I still worked my ass off.)

She will undermine women who are older and younger than her: Do you have ovaries? If so, this woman views you as competition. Unfortunately, men and women at work tend to compare a female’s productivity to the women around her. So, teamwork can seem a bit threatening. (While I’ve never undermined another woman, I sure as heck had issues with teamwork when I was around 25 years old — I blame all those failed “team projects” in college for this former attitude.)

Now, I know that most women don’t actively choose to hate on other women at work, or elsewhere. I sure as heck know I don’t. But I know that sometimes when I feel like I’m getting snubbed at work, or that I’m getting ignored, I tend to seclude myself and don’t seek help from anyone.

Over the past few years, I’ve learned to shut-up and listen to my co-workers and the older friends I have. I also have actively sought out women who have been around the block more than a few times to learn from their experiences. Being around and learning from such experienced women has helped me become more helpful to other women around me.

While powerful women may intimidate us all from time to time, let’s all acknowledge that these feelings aren’t helpful. Women can only become successful by helping each other. So, let’s put our egos aside and actively try and connect with women who can help us. Building these friendships is incredibly beneficial to you and to all women.

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Resources

The Woman Who Doesn’t Help Other Women

CNN piece on women help women

The Real Reason Women Don’t Help Other Women at Work

Image: Seattle Municipal Archives

The post Why Don’t Women Help Other Women at Work? appeared first on EcoSalon.

Few words irk me more than “slut.” It’s incredibly rude (and totally lazy) to use a crud word to police what a person does with her body. Sadly, though, slut shaming has already crept its way into America, and it’s being used to describe nearly everything a woman, or girl, does, says, or wears.

Unfortunately, grown ladies, such as myself, have probably experienced a few instances of slut shaming through our lives. Just recently, I was told that I looked “a little slutty” because I chose to wear platform sandals and a tank top on a late-spring night out. The horror!

Now, while I can take the comments and the sneering because I’m A) sadly, used to it, and B) an adult with a pretty decent self image, it troubles me that young women are having to deal with being called sluts more, and more often.

In the past few months, there have been more than a few instances where high schools have shamed young women into not wearing certain types of clothing because the young women’s attire could, potentially, distract young men. Come on.

Here are just a few examples of some of the weird lengths some schools have gone to, to censor female students’ attire:

• It was recently reported that administrators at Wasatch High School in Utah decided to Photoshop some female students’ bare shoulders in the yearbook. According to XOJane, the school claimed that the students were dressed inappropriately.
• According to ThinkProgress and Bust, a Minnesota high school’s principal sent an email to parents in which he asked moms and dads to discourage their daughters from wearing clothing, such as leggings, yoga pants and tight pants, that could be “highly distracting” to other students.

While schools are allowed to monitor what students’ wear, this obsessive form of body and clothing policing isn’t helpful to anyone, and it puts all the blame on the girl.

While the above examples may seem a bit trivial, they are not. This type of policing plays into a culture that teaches students that it’s a woman’s fault if she gets harassed. It’s that whole, she-was-asking-for-it, rape-culture problem that has reared its ugly head in American culture in recent years.

So, I beg of everyone – can we stop with the slut shaming already? Let’s just respect everyone’s bodies and get on with it.

Follow Abbie on Twitter or Instagram, or read more about her on ginchy.

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Resources

“25 Everyday Examples of Rape Culture,” EverydayFeminism

Image: David Shankbone

The post Stop the Slut Shaming Already! appeared first on EcoSalon.

I dare you to watch this heartwarming video and not cry. Sarah and Paige are both missing parts of their arms, and their moms brought them together via the International Child Amputee Network (just thinking that such an organization even exists breaks my heart). Over the last 8 years, the two girls have formed an intense bond, using Internet video chat service Skype (full disclosure: the video is actually an ad for Skype). Though separated by many miles (hometowns are in New Zealand and Indiana in the US), they are clearly best friends. Watch to see the terrific surprise and enjoy the beauty of friendship!  

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This teenager will break your heart with her truth about being a woman (video) 

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The post Get Your Tissues Ready: Amputee Teenage Best Friends Are Pure Joy (Video) appeared first on EcoSalon.

Most of us know that life for women—and girls—in many countries is extremely restricted, whether because of their society’s culture, poverty, or both. But it’s one thing to know that in the abstract, and another to see exactly how those things directly and irrevocably affect young women and girls.

The video below shows how some girls (12 and even younger) in Yemen are treated like cash-money for their indebted parents—sold off to much older men as wives for their dowry, which is used by their families to pay off debts. The psychological and physical ramifications (really interesting detail here about how these girls’ bodies are at risk during pregnancy) are felt for the rest of these child bride’s lives.

Want to do something about the issue of child marriage? Check out Human Rights Watch’s page on the subject and sign their petition encouraging the Yemeni government to pass laws for 18 to be the minimum age of marriage. 

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Geena Davis is a Total Badass: Proof that Women Over 50 Are Awesome (video)

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The post “I Married Both My Daughters Off to Pay My Debts”: A Simple, Shocking Reason for Child Marriage (Video) appeared first on EcoSalon.

Chastity belts arrived just after the religious wars and are still going strong.

Even though most of us think of chastity belts as bizarre medieval anti-sex devices, there are more of them now available than at any other time before in Planet Earth’s history.

After all, there are plenty of websites out there selling modern day ‘chastity belts’ for the BDSM crowd, some of them pricier than others. For each of these sites, there is a pile of these belts in boxes waiting to be shipped out the door. That means thousands of them, in all sorts of shapes and sizes, made from various materials and combinations of materials, for both men and women. Of course, chastity belts weren’t originally meant for sex play (at least not according to the Wikipedia page on the subject), they were to keep women safe from rape (and temptation) during the Crusades.

Except for the fact that this isn’t true.

The first evidence of the belts weren’t found until 100 years after the religious wars. But they were worn by men and women during the Renaissance – or at least there are devices that exist that date from that time. Evidence is hard to come by, but there is this chilling tale: “In 1889, a leather-and-iron belt was found by Anton Pachinger, a German collector of antiquities in Linz, Austria in a grave on a skeleton of a young woman. The woman was reportedly buried sometime in the 16th century. Pachinger, however, could not find any record of the woman’s burial in the town archives.”

But looking through the wide variety, not to mention the close similarities between the post-medieval devices and modern ones, I got to thinking about what chastity belts were ultimately supposed to do, which is to create a physical barrier between a person getting their sex on, usually with another person. While some of the men’s belts are meant to prevent erections altogether, and therefore masturbation (they were actually used in the 1930’s to keep kids and teens from onanism), the majority of them are to keep women from having sex.

These days of course, the whole thing is more about playing with power roles in sexual relationships, and chastity belts are the way that some people enact those parts. But it got me to thinking: In 2011, what does chastity mean, anyway? In these days of psuedo-virginity and born-again virgins, teens being encouraged to masturbate (as parents are realizing that it’s safer than sex), vaginal “rejuvenation” surgery, and an ever-growing acceptance of sexual nonconformity and openness (drugstores are selling dildos, swingers’ clubs are as suburban as Chevy Suburbans), does anyone really care about chastity anymore?

Image: Arcadius

The post What Does Chastity Mean? And Does Anyone Need a Belt for It? appeared first on EcoSalon.