The Aretha Journal

Picture this, you’re with your friends, maybe out for drinks, everyone's joking, the mood is light. Suddenly one of your friends makes a joke that is marginally offensive to women, and you pause. You think about correcting him or calling him out, but the rest of your friends are laughing and you don’t want to be picked on for taking things too seriously. Now you're stuck in a mental dilemma, do you correct them and risk being shut out or do you laugh along with your friends and pretend everything's okay?  Finally, you reach a decision and break into a smile along with your other friends. You can support the feminist cause another time, right now your just trying to some fun. Your friend didn’t mean anything bad by the joke, plus it was pretty funny. So many of us experience this indecision so many times in our lives. I'll confess, I'm guilty too! Making excuses for things that shouldn’t be excusable is something so many of us face. It doesn’t have to aro

      As promised, today is all for the book lovers. I've read a lot of amazing books in my life, some that made me cry, some funny ones, some were outright amazing, while some made me really bored. All in all, I have never found a book that I hated before. So, it was really hard to try and narrow it down to only 15! But, I tried my best. As we all know, fiction covers a range of genres including humor, horror, mystery, psychological thrillers, to even historical fiction. As I am not one to prefer one genre over the other, I tried to pick at least one favorite from each genre. I couldn’t get everything in, but if there's any book you think I missed, either a novel or short story, tell me in the comments and I will read up on it and see if I can add it to my list.  Remember, these are my top fifteen fiction book picks of all time so they may be a little biased as they represent my views. If you disagree with my choices, you can recommend some books you feel are bette

     People are always asking why Feminism is important, don’t women already have rights? What more do we want? When I hear questions like this, like most people, I am stuck between a mental dilemma; do I get angry and leave? Do I argue with the person and try to prove my point? Or do I just keep silent and ignore? If your answer is number one or number three, then chances are you’ve not made much impact in the feminist society, but if you go number two, you're not all that perfect either.       Before I start, I would like to point out that because this is my first blog, I had to pick only one topic. But this is not a solely feminist blog. I will also be discussing on occasion my other passion which is writing; this ranges from writing tips,to book suggestions, freelance writing and how to establish your self as a niched freelancer. I will still discuss how my blog will be managed at the end of this post. Thanks, you can read on.       The world lives by one principle, ‘no