Dear Todd Akin,

I am writing to you tonight about rape. It is 2 AM and I am unable to sleep here in the Democratic Republic of Congo. I am in Bukavu at the City of Joy to serve and support and work with hundreds, thousands of women who...

It's 14 years since we started V-Day. We made a determination that we were going to end violence against women and girls. It was an audacious and almost absurd idea, but we committed to it. We believed we could change human consciousness and make the world a place where women...

I am over rape.

I am over rape culture, rape mentality, rape pages on Facebook.

I am over the thousands of people who signed those pages with their real names without shame.

I am over people demanding their right to rape pages, and calling it freedom of speech or justifying...

It was cold in Zuccotti Park this week for our Ambiguous Upsparkles group. Particularly late into it as the sun went down and...

This past Sunday we had our second Ambiguous UpSparkle Story group at Occupy Wall Street. This time there were hundreds of people who came to tell of what brought...

I have been watching and listening to all kinds of views and takes on Occupy Wall Street. Some say it's backed by the Democratic Party. Some say it's the emergence of a third party. Some say the protesters have no goals, no demands, no stated call. Some say it's too...

The day DSK was dismissed I sent this out via Twitter: I am so OVER women being put on trial when they get raped, leaving their houses when they get beaten, quitting jobs after they get harassed.

Within seconds, emails, tweets and Facebook responses began to pour in....

Here's what I Am Over
400 thousand women getting raped a year in the Democratic Republic of Congo
48 women getting raped an hour
1,100 raped a day

I Am Over
This being new/news. The world responding to these statistics as if it's the first time...

On this, the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day, I want to take a minute to honor grassroots women's activists across the planet -- women, like those working tirelessly in Haiti, who have inspired their communities, united their communities, and led their communities, holding them together and pushing them forward.

Vagina is the most terrifying word, the most threatening word, in any language of any country I have ever been to. Even when the vagina is worshiped in theory, as the yoni is in India, it is denigrated in practice. It is more reviled and feared than words like plutonium,...

Bukavu, Democratic Republic of Congo -- I have been back in Bukavu, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), for two weeks now meeting with leaders, activists, social workers, therapists, recent survivors, business owners, UN officials. There is good news and bad news. The bad news is that the situation on the...

I gave this speech on Tuesday, October 26 at The Women's Conference in Long Beach, CA.

It happens like this
The doctor walks towards me
His face is ashen
He says we have found something
It does not look good
There is a trap...

Some people may think that being diagnosed with uterine cancer, followed by an extensive surgery that led to a month of debilitating infections, rounded off by months of chemotherapy, might get a girl down. But, in truth, this has not been my poison. This has not been what pulses through...

The following excerpt is from the new work "I AM AN EMOTIONAL CREATURE: The Secret Life of Girls around the World", which debuted in book form (Villard/Random House) on February 9.

I AM AN EMOTIONAL CREATURE

I love being a girl.
I can feel what you're feeling
as...

Having just been in the Congo for the last month, it is evident that the more than 12-year economic war in the Democratic Republic of Congo rages on. Almost 6 million dead. Almost 500 thousand raped. Here is what I propose:

1. Please stop endlessly repeating these phrases:

• "The...

I have been in Bukavu, Democratic Republic of Congo for the month of December. Christmas at Panzi Hospital was overflowing with raped and tortured women. Many young girls, several under 14, carrying babies. Every day at least 13 new women arrive seeking care to repair the damage done to their...

I have just returned from Pakistan where I was invited to support the efforts of women on the ground who are refusing to be terrified and silenced in the face of recent bombings and attacks. This was my fifth trip to Pakistan over the last fifteen years. I was there...

When I saw the petition protesting the recent arrest of Roman Polanski in Switzerland was signed by some of my most cherished artists -- the likes of Pedro Almodovar, Ariel Dorfman, Costa Gavras, Jonathan Demme, Sam Mendes -- men who I believed to be champions of women's and human rights,...

What governor - once an actor, then a Terminator, married to a major women's leader - has the chutzpah to wipe out 100 percent of the domestic violence budget of California, the biggest state in the country, with a single grope of his veto pen?

What same...

In 1996, I was sitting with twenty thousand grieving women in a stadium in Tuzla, Bosnia. The women were holding photographs of husbands, fathers, brothers, sons and boyfriends who had been disappeared a year earlier in a place called Srebrenica, a UN enclave where Bosnian refugees had turned over their...