Watch: 5 must-see TED Talks on modern feminism

These essential TED Talks delve into the intricacies of feminism and examine everyday realities in the pursuit of equality.

WE SHOULD ALL BE FEMINISTS

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TEDxEuston talk detailing her journey to feminism as a Nigerian woman was so bloody iconic, Beyonce put it in a song, it’s a published book and it’s got nearly 4 million views on YouTube. If you have not seen it yet, dear reader, put the kettle on and get ready for your whole world to be shook.

MAKE LOVE NOT PORN

In a TED 2009 talk that went viral, Cindy Gallop talks about the personal experiences that led her to launch MakeLoveNotPorn.com. Cindy dates men in their twenties, and has personally encountered the real ramifications of hardcore pornography in our culture, and how porn has by default become the sex education of today. MakeLoveNotPorn is not an anti-porn site. In Cindy’s own words, the ethos of her site is “pro-sex, pro-porn, pro-knowing the difference”. She wants the site to encourage healthy, honest and open conversation about sex and porn, to socialize it and make #realworldsex socially acceptable and as shareable as anything else we see on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.

Did I mention she is also hilarious?

EVERYDAY SEXISM

Laura Bates is the founder of the award-winning Everyday Sexism Project. In this TED Talk, Laura discusses her initiative and the series of events that inspired her to start it. Every woman she met had experienced the same events, the same gender imbalance and had cast it off as an annoying but everyday occurrence. Now an award-winning site with a collection of more than 80,000 women’s daily experiences of gender inequality, stories come in from women of all ages, races and sexual orientations, disabled and non-disabled, employed and unemployed, religious and non-religious.

BAD FEMINIST

Roxane Gay dubbed herself a “bad feminist,” as a joke. She wrote an essay as a bad feminist, then she wrote a book, Bad Feminist. In this talk, she challenges the stereotype of a feminist and asks you to embrace all flavours of feminism and to make small, feminist choices that might help to lead to change and gender equality.

STILL FIGURING IT OUT

Tavi Gevison is a writer, actor and editor-in-chief of the online magazine Rookie. Tavi Gevinson had a hard time finding strong female, teenage role models at fifteen years old, so she built a space where they could find each other and make real friendships. Her web magazine is for and by teen girls, is an independently run online magazine and is putting a new face on modern feminism.

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