Tag: women

How Caley Rose Uses Her Music as a Form of Empowerment

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By Nicole Mitchell

Caley Rose is a female empowerment pop singer of four years—and she’s just getting started. So far, her music has been in commercials, she’s been streaming her music creation, her single “GAME OVER” is on the Billboard charts, and, coming up soon, Rose will be performing at an event this Saturday in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

While Rose has been booked and busy regarding her music career recently, it wasn’t always that way. “I was always a singer,” she said. “But I got lost along the way and took some detours.” Her original end goal was to join Broadway as a performer. “However, if I was honest with myself, I really just wanted to do pop music.”

It took Rose a while into her music career to make the switch to pop. “I was working with different producers, and I wasn’t a songwriter,” she said. At the time, Rose followed the lead of what her songwriters wanted her music to sound like. “It wasn’t until four years ago that I started songwriting,” she explained. “Once I realized myself as a writer, I saw myself as a singer.”

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Here’s the Deal with Mansplaining and Why it Needs to Stop

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By Sophie Oswald
Illustrations by Matthew Vargas

“Men explain things to me, still. And no man has ever apologized for explaining, wrongly, things that I know and they don’t,” Rebecca Solnit remarked in her essay Men Explain Things to Me. While Solnit didn’t specifically use the word “mansplain” in her popular essay, she was one of the first to discuss this phenomenon. Conversations surrounding her essay shortly resulted in the term appearing in a comment section online.

Most women, maybe even all women, have been there. Men have been explaining things in patronizing ways for centuries. 

Generally, mansplaining involves a conversation between a man and a woman, but sometimes it can happen between two men or with a man and a non-binary person.

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How Photographer Jada Hester started her photography business

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By Nicole Mitchell

Jada Hester is a photographer and small business co-owner of Film and Jpegs Studio located in Olathe, Kansas. Starting early on in photography, she has had plenty of time to create a style of art that is recognizable as hers—colorful, fun, and human-centered

Hester first got into photography when she was a child, following in her dad’s footsteps. “He had a cool camera when I was kid that I would play with,” she said. But it wasn’t until high school that she really considered photography as a potential career path. After graduating high school, she went to a local community college and took her first photography class. “It was fun to be around other photographers, but the class wasn’t 100% needed,” Hester said. “I thought, ‘Why didn’t I just teach myself all of this?’”

During the beginning of the pandemic, Hester and her boyfriend talked about creating a studio out of a shed in the backyard of her boyfriend’s parents’ house. With this, the two started a small business together (her boyfriend’s idea), offering Hester’s photography as a side job. “He’s more on the business side, and I’m on the art side,” she said. “Working together has been tough—as it would be in any relationship where they work together—but I’m really proud of it.” She shares that getting the shed started and creating their business together is what she’s most proud of in regards to her art.

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Cassie Taylor joins the music scene after years away from the spotlight

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By Nicole Mitchell

Cassie Taylor has been a musician for all of her life—touring as a bassist with her father, Otis Taylor, from when she was 16. Stepping away from the spotlight in 2015 after the birth of her child, Taylor spent her time creating in other ways. She’s currently a full-time photographer and creative in Kansas City. But this weekend, March 5 and 6, she’ll be stepping on the stage once again.

Taylor has been working on new music for the past few years. Compared to her older music—such as her 2013 album Out Of My Mind—her music now is quite different. “When I produced my album in 2012, it was a product of the industry at the time,” she said. “The way that you made albums was to tour them. I really stripped them down and focused on the core. Production-wise it’s a lot different.” 

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Women Are Burnt Out—What Can We Do About It?

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By Nicole Mitchell

I’m tired. In fact, I’ve been tired for years, and I’m not alone. When I ask my friends how they’re doing, most of them say they’re exhausted. How could we not be? We’re 20-somethings who work multiple jobs, lack a set sleep schedule, are in school, and more.

While fatigue can be a sign of physical illnesses, including thyroid issues or anemia, it could also be a sign of burnout. According to CNBC, 53% of women in the U.S. are burnt out and experiencing fatigue, brain fog, and chronic stress, since the pandemic hit.

One of the root causes of burnout is lack of fairness—something women are far too familiar with. Mothers typically take over most of the childcare and housework, working women have to work harder for their voices to be heard in the workplace, and high school girls are being discriminated against by their school’s handbook policies, to name a few. Being a woman is unfair in itself.

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