Good afternoon,

This week’s Fem Friday is framed around the indie band Lush, because nothing says “thought leadership” louder than references to a band whose first LP came out in 1989 and whose most recent in 1996. Anyway, it was the 90s and they sang some things about being women, and they were quite fun so here is your newsletter.

Here we have “Single Girl”, which is a song about finding out that being single is actually quite nice:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RndzuSESF8Y

Related to enjoying being in a demographic, I really enjoyed this article about the ways in which the concept of “empowerment” is packaged and sold. It’s a nice view of the motives behind “inspiring” ads, and what they miss:

“Empowerment” wasn’t always so trivialized, or so corporate, or even so clamorously attached to women. Four decades ago, the word had much more in common with Latin American liberation theology than it did with “Lean In.” In 1968, the Brazilian academic Paulo Freire coined the word “conscientization,” empowerment’s precursor, as the process by which an oppressed person perceives the structural conditions of his oppression and is subsequently able to take action against his oppressors.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/magazine/how-empowerment-became-something-for-women-to-buy.html

Back to Lush, here is “Ladykillers” which – in barely an elaboration of “Single Girl”’s theme – is about how awful dating can be:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iedz_x6Hlhw

On which note, in case you missed this American woman Tindering her way through London, Berlin and Stockholm. This is not a use case I would have thought of for Tinder! Sounds like she has intermittent fun though:

Unfortunately, Paul was “working late,” and asked me to come over to his flat to “smoke some weed and cuddle,” because obviously, I’d boarded a transatlantic flight to entertain the same lukewarm offers I did back in Brooklyn.

http://www.travelandleisure.com/articles/tinder-while-you-travel

Enjoy your weekend! Hope you’re doing something fun,

Alex.