New Year, New Faces... Great things to come!

Hey everybody!

Hope you all had a great summer and are ready for a fantastic school year! We are planning to put on some awesome events this year and can't wait to see our favorite feminists!

As you know, orientation for first-year and transfer students started on Saturday, August 28th, and ends today. As a multicultural club (as of this semester, woohoo!), Mari and I were invited to represent Fem Is at two multicultural events during orientation. It was great! These students are so enthusiastic, and a good amount of students approached us, expressing interest in joining. There were even 3-4 students who said that they heard about our group prior to orientation and wanted to join before meeting us! Exciting, right? It looks we are going to have some great additions to our group this year!

So, with school starting tomorrow, I just want to give you all a quick update:

September 13th: Involvement Fair in Kingsmen Park 10 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.

September 15th: First Fem Is meeting at 7 p.m. in the Center for Equality and Justice
- We will be talking about some of our plans and goals for the year and getting to know one another. It will be a fun meeting and there will be snacks, maybe even a surprise....

September 29th: Campus Organizers from the Feminist Majority Foundation will be on campus!
- They will be making classroom announcements, tabling and hosting an informational meeting from 4 p.m. until 5 p.m. in Swenson 103. Feel free to stop by for a few minutes if you can't stay for the whole meeting.

Looking forward to seeing everyone!

-Sara

FMF Interns won't let Ms. magazines go to waste.

As many of you know, I am interning with the Feminist Majority Foundation in Beverly Hills this summer. The other interns and I were shocked when we were asked to help Ms. interns and the FMF/Ms. receptionist throw away thousands of copies of Ms. Magazine!

Appalled by this task, two other interns and I began loading boxes of Ms. into our cars. There was no way we were going to let so many copies be thrown away even if it meant dumpster diving and sweating outside in the summer sun when we are supposed to be sitting in front of our computers in a nice air conditioned office.

Personally, I think that throwing away Ms. is worse than throwing away magazines like US Weekly or Cosmopolitan because Ms. is made with non-profit dollars! Can't we do some kind of sweepstakes or competition to decrease the number of magazines we have stored?

Unfortunately, we couldn't save them all... Actually, I don't think we even saved half of them. I even had about 300 pounds worth of magazines in the trunk of my car! On a positive note, I will be bringing 5 boxes [of the 10 boxes I shared with the intern I carpooled with and who helped move the magazines] to campus this fall!

Store Promotes Eating Disorder

Urban Outfitters has come out with a t-shirt that reads"Eat Less" on the front. How dare them promote anorexia? They should be ashamed for marketting this distasteful t-shirt.

Eating disorders are a serious problem among young girls and women in the US today. According to The National Institute of Mental Health five to ten percent of girls and women (5 to 10 million) suffer from eating disorders such as anorexia, bulimia, and binge eating. Eating disorders can lead to serious health problems including but not limited to malnutrition, paralysis, cancer of the throat (bulimia), kidney infection and failure, osteoporosis, liver failure, depression (which can lead to suicide), digestive difficulties, and death.

If their argument is they are just "anti-obesity" then I ask myself why did they choose those words? Why couldn't they say "eat healthy" or "eat less junk"? And why are they only targeting women? There is no "eat less" t-shirt for men. What does this tell you? How does this make you feel?