THE TIME IS RIPE

BY MADELINE VEGA

SO MUCH OF WHAT I WANT TO SAY would never fit in a single issue of ADW. For like eight years I’ve collected screenshots and stuck them in a folder labeled “feminism.” The time never seemed right.

No one hates white women except white women, so, while all of the problems are real, they seem kind of petty compared to other injustices in the world. This March brought a bunch of headlines to discuss. The CEO of Bumble became a billionaire, ringing the bell at the New York Stock Exchange while holding her baby—an unrealistic expectation. Stop Asian Hate trended after eight people were murdered by a man allegedly trying to tame his sexual addiction. Exoticism was a problem long before that. And the NCAA didn’t seem to be treating women’s basketball in an equitable manner. This Women’s History Month felt like time to take that folder and boil it down to a theme issue. I could go on editing this for another eight years, so instead I’ll say it’s an introduction to begin learning more.

Women to Kow

What started as a fun way to fit more information into this issue became an all-consuming attempt to complete more than 30 illustrations on deadline. Are they too masculine? Is their skin the right shade? The source might look like a goddess, but the final... not so much. Oh well. No regrets.

Juliana Rotich - TECHNOLOGIST, ENTREPRENEUR She developed web tools to crowdsource crisis information to make Kenya safer. Now her BRCK can bring internet access with a battery modem.

Madeline Vega

Tu Youyou - PHARMACEUTICAL CHEMIST After discovering artemisinin and dihydroartemisinin, a breakthrough in malaria treatments, she became the fi rst Chinese woman to win a Nobel Prize.

Madeline Vega

Dr. Hyat Sindi - SCIENTIST AND INNOVATOR After creating low-cost devices for use in developing countries to help diagnose diseases, she was named the ninth most infl uential Arab woman.

Madeline Vega

WHEN I STARTED COLLECTING screenshots, my feed was full of posts from Esquire and Miss Representation. Their takes were almost always opposites. They both celebrated when Thor became a woman, but one cheered Carl’s Jr.’s nude Super Bowl ad while the other promoted a hashtag to stop sexist Super Bowl ads.

I had two little boys and was seeing a lot of posts about rape culture. There weren’t a lot of posts for how to do a better job of raising boys, and one was going to Catholic preschool where high school boys traveled for anti-abortion rallies. So I took screenshots like, I’ll deal with all this later.

IS THAT OFFENSIVE?

One time I changed my credit from “Ms. Madeline Vega” to “Dinosaur Girly Productions” on a brochure I designed. In my head, freelancing for women ministries would support women more than retouching models’ labias for RSVLTS.com. But the woman who hired me pleaded “girly” in 6-point type undermined what women ministers had achieved. Did she know MadelineVega.com was pictures of women in their underwear? A photographer I follow paired inspirational quotes with lingerie shoots pre-pandemic. The juxtaposition was clever. You need to be empowered to book a boudoir shoot.