Amy Poehler's Smart Girls is an organization and website aimed at helping young women with life's problems in a funny but informative way. [1] [2] It was founded by actress Amy Poehler, Executive Director Meredith Walker, who was the former senior producer for Nick News and the head of talent for Saturday Night Live , and recording artist Amy Miles, who is involved in the musical content on the site. [3] Smart Girls was purchased by Legendary Entertainment in 2014. [4]
Amy Poehler's Smart Girls was originally Smart Girls at the Party, a YouTube channel dedicated to encouraging women and men to express themselves. Smart Girls at the Party started around 2007 by Poehler and Walker and their first video was posted on YouTube in 2008. [5]
Amy Poehler was quoted on Feminist.com talking about how she and her co founders came up with the idea for Smart Girls.
"The idea came out of us wishing we had a time machine so we could go back to the younger versions of ourselves and let them know it was gonna be ok. We wanted to do a show that we would have wanted to watch at that age. And we knew we wanted to have a dance party at the end. We basically started with the dance party and worked backwards." [6]
The YouTube channel has since been changed to "Amy Poehler's Smart Girls" YouTube channel.
Smart Girls was started through YouTube and continues there today. Currently they have over 135,000 subscribers and over 8,475,000 views. The earliest video on their YouTube channel today is labeled The Feminist: Smart Girls W/ Amy Poehler, was posted in 2012 and features a young girl named Ruby explaining what feminism is. Smart Girls has grown especially in the last 3 years, they post several new videos through several different segments at least once a month. [5] [7] Every Smart Girls YouTube video ends in a dance party, showing you can be informed and still have fun doing it.
In the 7 years since Smart Girls at the party was created it has developed from a YouTube channel and Tumblr page to an educational website. The site features articles and interviews with smart women from all walks of life. The site also has a less serious, fun side with how-to programs, mini-docs, Modern Manners, a featured show that teaches the everyday girl how to do things for an everyday life, and many other segments. [8]
Christina Marie Hoff Sommers is an American author and philosopher. Specializing in ethics, she is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Sommers is known for her critique of contemporary feminism. Her work includes the books Who Stole Feminism? (1994) and The War Against Boys (2000). She also hosts a video blog called The Factual Feminist.
Third-wave feminism is an iteration of the feminist movement. It began in the United States in the early 1990s and continued until the rise of the fourth wave in the 2010s. Born in the 1960s and 1970s as members of Generation X and grounded in the civil-rights advances of the second wave, third-wave feminists embraced individualism in women and diversity and sought to redefine what it meant to be a feminist. The third wave saw the emergence of new feminist currents and theories, such as intersectionality, sex positivity, vegetarian ecofeminism, transfeminism, and postmodern feminism. According to feminist scholar Elizabeth Evans, the "confusion surrounding what constitutes third-wave feminism is in some respects its defining feature."
Womanism is a social theory based on the history and everyday experiences of black women. It seeks, according to womanist scholar Layli Maparyan (Phillips), to "restore the balance between people and the environment/nature and reconcil[e] human life with the spiritual dimension". Writer Alice Walker coined the term "womanist" in a short story, "Coming Apart", in 1979. Since Walker's initial use, the term has evolved to envelop varied, and often opposing, interpretations of concepts such as feminism, men, and blackness.
Amy Poehler is an American actress, comedian, writer, producer, and director. After studying improv at Chicago's Second City and ImprovOlympic in the early 1990s, she co-founded the improvisational-comedy troupe Upright Citizens Brigade. The group moved to New York City in 1996 where their act became a half-hour sketch-comedy series on Comedy Central in 1998. Along with other members of the comedy group, Poehler is a founder of the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre.
Jennifer Baumgardner is a writer, activist, filmmaker, and lecturer whose work explores abortion, sex, bisexuality, rape, single parenthood, and women's power. From 2013 to 2017, she served as the Executive Director/Publisher at The Feminist Press at the City University of New York (CUNY), a feminist institution founded by Florence Howe in 1970.
The sketch comedy television show Saturday Night Live aired several critically acclaimed sketches parodying then Alaskan Governor and vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin in the lead-up to the 2008 United States presidential election. The sketches featured former cast member Tina Fey, who returned as a guest star to portray Palin. Fey won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series for her impersonation of Palin.
Riot grrrl is an underground feminist punk movement that began during the early 1990s within the United States in Olympia, Washington and the greater Pacific Northwest and has expanded to at least 26 other countries. Riot grrrl is a subcultural movement that combines feminism, punk music and politics. It is often associated with third-wave feminism, which is sometimes seen as having grown out of the riot grrrl movement and has recently been seen in fourth-wave feminist punk music that rose in the 2010s. The genre has also been described as coming out of indie rock, with the punk scene serving as an inspiration for a movement in which women could express themselves the same way men have been doing all along. To quote Liz Naylor, who would become the manager of riot grrrl band Huggy Bear:
There was a lot of anger and self-mutilation. In a symbolic sense, women were cutting and destroying the established image of femininity, aggressively tearing it down.
Vsauce is a YouTube brand created by internet celebrity Michael Stevens. The channels feature videos on scientific, psychological, mathematical, and philosophical topics, as well as gaming, technology, popular culture, and other general interest subjects.
Networked feminism is a phenomenon that can be described as the online mobilization and coordination of feminists in response to perceived sexist, misogynistic, racist, and other discriminatory acts against minority groups. This phenomenon covers all possible definitions of what feminist movements may entail, as there have been multiple waves of feminist movements and there is no central authority to control what the term "feminism" claims to be. While one may hold a different opinion from another on the definition of "feminism", all those who believe in these movements and ideologies share the same goal of dismantling the current patriarchal social structure, where men hold primary power and higher social privileges above all others. Networked feminism is not spearheaded by one singular women's group. Rather, it is the manifestation of feminists' ability to leverage the internet to make traditionally unrepresented voices and viewpoints heard. Networked feminism occurs when social network sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr are used as a catalyst in the promotion of feminist equality and in response to sexism. Users of these social media websites promote the advancement of feminism using tools such as viral Facebook groups and hashtags. These tools are used to push gender equality and call attention to those promoting anything otherwise. Online feminist work is becoming a new engine of contemporary feminism. With the possibility of connecting and communicating all around the world through the Internet, no other form of activism in history has brought together and empowered so many people to take action on a singular issue.
Women's pornography, sometimes referred to as sex-positive pornography, is pornography often produced by women and aimed specifically at the female market – rejecting the view that pornography is only for men.
"Flawless" is a song recorded by American singer Beyoncé from her self-titled fifth studio album (2013). Knowles wrote the track with Rashad Muhammad, Terius Nash, Chauncey Hollis and Raymond DeAndre Martin, with production handled by Hollis, Knowles, Martin, Muhammad, and Boots. An early version of the song, titled "Bow Down / I Been On", was released onto the Internet by Beyoncé in March 2013.
Laci Green is an American YouTuber. Her content focuses on sex education; Green also hosted Braless, the first MTV YouTube channel, as part of a 12-week deal with MTV. The first episode aired November 4, 2014. In 2016, Time named her one of the 30 most influential people on the Internet. In 2017, she celebrated her tenth anniversary on YouTube.
Big Girls Don't Cry: The Election that Changed Everything for American Women is a 2010 non-fiction book written by the American journalist Rebecca Traister and published by Free Press. The book focuses on women's contributions to and experiences of the 2008 United States presidential election. Traister places particular focus on four main political figures—Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin, Michelle Obama, and Elizabeth Edwards—as well as women in the media, including the journalists Katie Couric and Rachel Maddow, and the comedians Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, who portrayed Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton on Saturday Night Live, respectively. Traister also describes her personal experience of the electoral campaign and her shift from supporting John Edwards to Hillary Clinton.
Feminist children's literature is the writing of children's literature through a feminist lens. Children's literature and women's literature have many similarities. Both often deal with being seen as weak and placed towards the bottom of a hierarchy. In this way feminist ideas are regularly found in the structure of children's literature. Feminist criticism of children's literature is therefore expected, since it is a type of feminist literature. Feminist children's literature has played a critical role for the feminist movement, especially in the past half century. In her book Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, bell hooks states her belief that all types of media, including writing and children's books, need to promote feminist ideals. She argues "Children's literature is one of the most crucial sites for feminist education for critical consciousness precisely because beliefs and identities are still being formed". The cover of hooks' book, drawn by Laura DeSantis, depicts children alongside adults, showing the importance of the youth. The presence of feminism in children's literature has evolved over the years, but the overall message and goals have remained consistent.
Feminist activism in hip hop is a feminist movement based by hip hop artists. The activism movement involves doing work in graffiti, break dancing, and hip hop music. Hip hop has a history of being a genre that sexually objectifies and disrespects women ranging from the usage of video vixens to explicit rap lyrics. Within the subcultures of graffiti and breakdancing, sexism is more evident through the lack of representation of women participants. In a genre notorious for its sexualization of women, feminist groups and individual artists who identify as feminists have sought to change the perception and commodification of women in hip hop. This is also rooted in cultural implications of misogyny in rap music.
Kat Blaque is an American YouTuber and activist.
Jennifer Cook is an American author and speaker. She is known for her six Asperkids books, which have been translated into six languages and include the winner of the Autism Society of America's Book of the Year Award. Her memoir Autism in Heels: The Untold Story of a Female Life on the Spectrum is a Wall Street Journal Bestseller, a "Best Book" title winner by Publishers Weekly, and named one of both the "Best Autism Books of All Time" and "Best-Selling Autism Books of All Time" by BookAuthority.
Sasha Matthews is a cartoonist, activist, and 11th grader living in New York City, who is the daughter of the New York Times journalist Amy Harmon.
Ruby Karp is an American writer and comedian.
Moxie, stylized as MOXiE! is a 2021 American comedy-drama film directed by Amy Poehler. Tamara Chestna and Dylan Meyer adapted the screenplay from the 2015 novel of the same name by Jennifer Mathieu. It stars Hadley Robinson, Alycia Pascual-Peña, Lauren Tsai, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Nico Hiraga, Sydney Park, Josephine Langford, Clark Gregg, Ike Barinholtz, Poehler, and Marcia Gay Harden. The film was released on March 3, 2021 by Netflix and received mixed-to-positive reviews from critics.