Flawless: We Should All Be Feminist

Last night Beyonce unexpectedly released her album. The album which is titled, Beyonce is actually a visual album that included 14 songs and 17 videos. I love the album and the videos but as soon as I started listening to I thought to myself that some feminist are going to have problems with it, probably calling it anti-feminist or something again.

However in the middle of her song Flawless, Beyonce features a sample of a speech from Nigerian author Chimamamda Ngozi Adichie. Adichie wrote the novels Americanah and Half of a Yellow Sky (great book btw). The sample comes from a TED speech Adichie did earlier this year called We Should All Be Feminist.

I thought this was a great speech for Beyonce to feature in her song, especially because of all the critiques she gets from feminist and about being a feminist. The speech also sums up all the things that Beyonce sings about in her new album. I personally do think we do need to look to famous people to be feminist in order for feminism to be valid but its always nice to find out that people you like are feminist.

Here's the portion of the speech that Beyonce featured in her song.

“We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls, you can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful. Otherwise, you would threaten the man. Because I am female, I am expected to aspire to marriage. I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. Now marriage can be a source of joy and love and mutual support but why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we don’t teach boys the same? We raise girls to see each other as competitors not for jobs or accomplishments, which I think can be a good thing, but for the attention of men. We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are.”

“Feminist: a person who believes in the social, political, economic equality of the sexes.”

Entire Speech:

Source: http://www.buzzfeed.com/hnigatu/powerful-feminist-speech-beyonce-new-album