Close your eyes. Wait... open them back up. I need you to read this. Okay, metaphorically close your eyes and picture this. George Clooney breaks up with his girlfriend. He is on the cover of Star Magazine looking sad and despondent. The headline announces "Abandoned again! Will George ever find...

My toddler's repertoire of emotional mood swings is one of the hardest parts of parenthood thus far. Managing her feelings requires more effort than giving myself an enema. She and I will be having a great time in the bath when suddenly, she turns into an emotional terrorist because I...

The years with your children may be short, but the days and nights are long. Toddlerhood is a challenging stage. My daughter has the newfound ability to express her wants, needs and excessively irrational, endless, countless, infinite demands with words, yet lacks the decency to keep it to herself. When...

The concept of "Mother" evokes ideas of responsibility, nurturing, unconditional love, patience, and altruism. Wow. That is a lot of pressure. Sure, those are all great values to embody, but being a mom would be a lot easier if the expectations of her identity were: wearing pants with elastic waist...

When asked the hypothetical question "What would you do if you only had 24 hours left to live?" most of us would fantasize about joyful activities we have always wanted to do but never had the chance. We would list exciting ideas like skydiving or snorkeling in the Great Barrier...

In the face of these tragic events in Boston it is hard not to be consumed with anger. Rage and blame comfort suffering, or at least serve as a distraction from devastation. As much as everyone craves answers regarding the events in Boston, there is much to learn from this...

When I first heard of Rick Ross's now famous line about slipping a girl some "Molly" and having sex with her when she "doesn't even know it," in the song "U.O.E.N.E.O.," I thought it was distasteful. But I also remember feeling the same way when as an 18-year...

I live in New Hampshire, where we live free or die. Seriously. It says that on my license plate. We are not screwing around here. People are really into their guns in this red-neck of the woods, and don't want the government taking them away. They are as attached to...

If I click on an animal video online, you better believe I want it to be adorable kittens, not one documenting animal abuse. I prefer never having those horrifying visuals seared onto my eyeballs. Yet there are activists who spend their lives doing undercover work at large industrial...

Keeping our children from harm in today's chemically-saturated world is one of the great challenges of modern parenting. The more I read the news, the more I want to look for toddler-sized quarantine suits on Etsy, but the most proactive way I can protect my daughter is to keep myself...

Feminists are notoriously severe critics of porn, and historically, porn was never created with feminists as a target audience. Although porn attracts millions of consumers, the expected spectators are men. The majority of today's porn caters to the commercialized idea of the male fantasy, and as a result, alienates much...

Sometimes, a movie is just a movie, but what happens when a movie becomes a movement? Our relationship to media is so complex because it not only serves as pure entertainment, but can also affect our behavior. If media were not influential, then companies wouldn't spend millions of dollars each...

According to plastic surgeons all over the world, my vagina is an unholy mess and needs to be fixed with plastic surgery. I had no idea! I always thought a warm, gooey hole to put a penis in was sufficient -- but au contraire. Forget the fact that my clam...

Since the beginning of the world, people have predicted the end of the world. Every group has their apocalyptic visions: Christians, Jews, Jehovah's witnesses, Muslims, Mormons -- even the nerds had Y2K. But for the average non-extremist, you never had to take any of these doomsday theories seriously. That is,...

A lot of things can make a woman feel sexy: lace tights, a sideways glance at just the right moment, Ryan Gosling. But you know what doesn't make a woman feel like an erotic minx of sensuality? Cleaning vomit out of her hair, making spaghetti that gets thrown on the...

When I was a child and first learned of the atrocities humans inflict upon each other I felt traumatized. I grew up in the 80s and 90s in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with intellectual parents, so tolerance and acceptance had always been a part of my conditioning. I was also raised Catholic,...

Raising a human will lead to some embarrassing and awkward moments. The thing about kids is that their brains are all funky, and yes, that is a scientific term. You can read a variety of studies about the development of the frontal lobe in children and how they...

In case you have been too busy reading the news about world events, the election, weather catastrophes, you might have missed that Kristen Stewart cheated on Robert Pattinson! I know, I know, important stuff here. Let me fill you in on the details. A 22-year-old girl cheated on...

Memoirs written by women are a complex genre. Oftentimes female authors are overly self-deprecating in order to appear humble. It is as if being self-confident or unapologetic would make them less appealing, less readable. When you don't like the character the author creates of themselves, that feeling extends to the...

The BlogHer annual conference is the largest event centered around bloggers in the country. The original conference was actually the catalyst to creating the popular website eight years ago, since there seemed to be such an obvious need for this type of community gathering both online...