Freedom means being able to chose how to celebrate the 4th of July. Flags, beer, hot dogs, fireworks, stay home and sleep….whatever you want. It also means being able to chose whom you want to marry. Happy Fourth of July everyone! Read a slightly longer post here, on my Forbes Column.
Today is International Women’s Day around the world. It is a day to celebrate and join together with others to help women across the globe. I wrote a piece for Forbes which I would love you to read. Let me know what you think. It sort of went viral yesterday when I posted it!
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKdvdNU7AmU
Two weeks ago, I was fortunate to speak at a TEDx in the Bay Area of California, called TEDxBayAreaWomen (TEDxBAW). The conference was a day long gathering of men and women who spoke about the International Entrepreneurship of women, and I learned a lot about business and micro-finance and global trade. It was fascinating. I chose to speak about something that all women have in common: our bodies. As a cartoonist, I deal in bodies, and my thinking was that no one else at the conference would speak about this in the way I chose to. My talk begins humorously, personally, but then I take the audience into the more serious subject of freedom for women’s bodies. We may be doing amazing things around the world–and women are–but many of us are not able to truly be ourselves or truly succeed because of restrictions on our physical presence. I discuss the appropriation of our bodies by culture, but also the violence against our bodies. I hope you enjoy.
The devastation in Japan, continuing turmoil in Libya, Bahrain and Egypt– these events have the world riveted and heartbroken. How is this affecting our consciousness and our way of life? How do we respond to natural disasters? What are the safety issues surrounding nuclear power? What does freedom mean, and what are we willing to do for it?
How do we allocate and how much do we allocate of ourselves for these things? There is a need to express ourselves and give to the world, but then what do we have left for our own loved ones? Plenty.
Cartooning for Peace, and a journalist from the Italian newspaper Republicca, invited me to contribute a drawing about freedom of the press. I learned that in Italy recently, the issue is in hot debate. The government passed a law prohibiting the publication of wire tap transcripts, and many in the country are up in arms. Here below is the drawing, and here is a link to the online newspaper (if you want to see my drawing, scroll through the slideshow. It is on the homepage at the moment).
