Introducing BuzzFeed Shift: It’s For Women! (And Dudes! Kind Of!)

So. Who else is sick of the word LADY?

A shift is a dress. It’s also a computer key, and a verb and a noun. And now it’s the newest part of BuzzFeed — mostly intended for women, but if you’re a man, feel free to stay a while. Because the questions we plan to answer over the very many forthcoming posts you will find here are important to everyone.

Such as: How can women bridge the gap between our income and our male counterparts’? How can we attain the power we need to make decisions about our own bodies? How can we be taken seriously as we work toward those things while indulging in a little mindless feminine fun, like shopping, reading Us Weekly, or tweeting about how Nicole Kidman looked like a big Vajazzle at the Golden Globes?

Sharing posts like this one (ahem!) is a good place to start. Through this shared content — and cat videos — in our Facebook and Twitter feeds we come together around cute stuff and big ideas that are not just about dissatisfaction with the status quo, but more important, shifting it in a new direction. One that allows us to be upset without being “crazy,” sexy without being “slutty,” assertive without being “bitchy,” and eventually, equal in the world — which, after all, is a place where women face terrifying challenges to access to reproductive health care and the termination of unwanted pregnancies; where only around 20 women are CEOS of Fortune 500 companies; where the troubling ideal of beauty is super-thin, surgically enhanced, devoid of age, and puzzlingly scantily clad. It’s also a place where Kim Kardashian makes $10,000 by tweeting about some website called ShoeDazzle, and you can spend $75 to have a day’s worth of juice delivered to your home to consume, not as a liquid diet, but a cleanse.

Leading BuzzFeed Shift along with me are Anna North and Hillary Reinsberg. Anna comes to us from Jezebel, where she wrote about science, education, sports, and everyone’s favorite sexist Italian, Silvio Berlusconi. Hillary Reinsberg joins us from Abrams Media, where she chronicled powerful women in business. And I come from New York magazine, where I wrote about fashion and all the silly things people in the industry do — and the most fashionable clothes-wearing cats, of course.

So, enjoy this space. And would you please follow us on Twitter? Or send us email? Don’t hold back! Because if we can promise you anything, it’s that we most definitely won’t.

XOXO
Amy “No Apostrophe” Odell