Girl Scouts/Guides are badass

Sorry for the constant copy pasting but I thought this article was brilliant and made me feel all warm inside for being a girl guide for so many years! It truly is a wonderful, empowering organisation for young girls and I can't wait to make my kids join and become girl scouts one fine day!

 

•  From Why I Will Always Be A Girl Scout (Even Though I Never Was One)
•   The founder, Juliette Gordon Lowe, believed so much in the Scouts that she sold her jewelry to finance the first troop. This was in Savannah – one of the coolest cities in the world as far as I’m concerned – but well before women could even vote, and certainly not a mecca for any kind of Women’s Lib.
• The Girl Scouts were one of the first organizations to include the disabled within their ranks, doing so in the first decade of their institution.
• At first, the badges were admittedly a little twee – Child Nurse, for example. But by the 1920s, girls could earn their Economics badge and Interpreter badges. Today, the badges reflect not only self empowerment but social activism. For example, a girl could earn the Inside Government badge, The Entertainment Technology badge, the It’s Your Business, Run it! badge or the Social Butterfly badge, which teaches girls how to navigate friendships in real life and online.
• In a time when girls were supposed to sit around and do needle point while praying for a husband, the Girl Scouts encouraged young women to get outside, be active and learn survival skills in the wild.
• The Scouts are encouraged to reach out beyond their immediate social circle. Leaders include girls whose moms are in jail or who are in the Foster Care system.
• Martin Luther King gave the Scouts props for pushing desegregation on a national level. The first black Troupe was founded in 1917 and the first Native American Troupe in 1921. While ridiculously, laws did not allow these groups to mix with the white girls, the Scouts found a way by holding summer camps all over the country that integrated the Troupes and encouraged inter racial friendships.
• When a 7-year-old transgendered girl was initially denied entry into her local GS Troupe, the national headquarters started the conversation about what it meant to be a girl. Not long after, they pronounced that anyone who identified themselves as a girl was welcome to join the Girl Scouts, and the little girl did join her local Troupe.
• In 1992, girls were allowed to replace the Under God part of the girl scout pledge with any Deity they chose, including, for the atheists, Humanity.
• Famous alumni? Check: Hillary Clinton, Madeline Albright, Gloria Steinham, Sandra Day O’Connor, Martha Stewart (of course), Barbara Walters and Taylor Swift (like, last year?).
• Crazy right wing conspiracy people hate the Girl Scouts… Why, you ask? They think they are pushing a feminist liberal agenda and brainwashing young girls. One church in Virginia even banned them from having meetings in their basement because they actually said they were giving out Jr. Abortion badges (do I really need to say they weren’t?). Even if they were in cahoots with Planned Parenthood (which they are not), I love the fact that a gathering of girls who are looking to empower themselves and reach out to all members of their community is threatening to these whack jobs.

Need I say more? Such badassness! 

The Naked Mara

Never has the irate personality and the very public comodification of insanity and the catatonic de rigueur that dwells within madness been articulated in a more terrifyingly blunt, brutally visceral, scathingly wrenching, hauntingly isolated and privately agonizing manner as in my personal favourite Francisco Goya’s 'Saturn Devouring His Son', 'Witches' Sabbath (The Great He-Goat)' from the Black Paintings, ‘Witches’ Flight’ and in the 'Yard with Lunatics' (in the order of presentation below), all painted from the interior while in a frenzied fever dream of a very private purgatory. 

Saturn Devouring His Son

Note the limpid, gaping and bulging orifices of an agitated and exuberant Saturn, engulfed in the piety of an almost necrotic darkness which poses his pitiful plight with a somnolent aura, as he holds his son’s vertebrae in a vice like grip almost like breaking bread in half in this cannibalistic painting (first in the present order) done on a wall, while the second painting also done on a wall, with Satan and a coven of witches in a disarrayed pentagram exuding a sense of disorientation is in actuality the artist’s liberal tendencies railing against the conventions of then Spain with parallels that can be seen later echoed in Salem and in McCarthyism. 

Witches' Sabbath (The Great He-Goat)

Witches’ Flight

Yard with Lunatics

The final painting, well it is the wracking sweat of a nightmare, with the calisthenics of despair in a visual mutiny of a very acute and palpable spasm of fear. In our darkest hour.

- Ruwan Jayakody