We women are going to bring change. We are speaking up for girls' rights, but we must not behave like men, like they have done in the past.
I'm an actress. In this sense, my profession is less complex than that of a model. True, they're into beauty in Hollywood, and it is age-related, but you can't put a girl with hot lips and no wrinkles and say: 'That's the mother of a 14-year-old.'
I wanted to put all my family stories down for my girls, and I remember everything so vividly. I just wanted to put everything down while I still can remember it all.
When I moved to Seattle in fourth grade, I joined the Seattle Girls' Choir. It's a world-class choir, and we competed, toured Europe, and went and sang at the Vatican, so it was a really awesome experience to have that young.
My girls and I regularly go through their rooms to find clothes and toys to donate to charities. I firmly believe that children who have been given so much need to experience the joy that comes from giving.
I don't think there's going to be a day when I don't think about food or my body, but I'm living with it, and I wish I could tell young girls to find their safe place and stay with it.
Honestly, I just assume that whatever is going to happen to me is going to happen. There it goes: someone is there, someone isn't there. This girl is here. This food is here. I think the clever people are the ones who do a little as possible.
I was a girl in a land where rifles are fired in celebration of a son, while daughters are hidden away behind a curtain, their role in life simply to prepare food and give birth to children.
I noticed that no matter where I went in the country, there was this group of questions that got asked. I would track them and keep them in categories. Like body image, school, family, friendship, you name it, the emotional life of a teenage girl.
Every second, every day, every year, we fail to address demand for reproductive health and family planning services. Lives are lost, and girls' opportunities to thrive and contribute to their country's development shrink. These are real people.
I was kind of ashamed of my bourgeois family as a teenager, I guess - I had dreadlocks, shopped in thrift stores and pretended I had no money. At that time, I would have spat on a girl who was buying Yves Saint Laurent.
We didn't have much money. My whole extended family used to help us, and buy us books and food. It was hard, and there were things I didn't want to talk about. But at the end I was a happy girl.
My family comes from New Zealand, but I'm a London girl. I was born and raised in London, but I've got the blood of a New Zealander, so I always kind of felt like I didn't belong - in a good way.
My dad had this philosophy that if you tell children they're beautiful and wonderful then they believe it, and they will be. So I never thought I was unattractive. But I was never one of the girls at school who had lots of boyfriends.
My mother always called me an ugly weed, so I never was aware of anything until I was older. Plain girls should have someone telling them they are beautiful. Sometimes this works miracles.
To look almost pretty is an acquisition of higher delight to a girl who has been looking plain for the first fifteen years of her life than a beauty from her cradle can ever receive.
When I was 11, I had an Ugly Sister birthday party. All my idea. Most girls want to be a fairy or a princess, but there I am with beauty spots and fur and fluorescent pink kiss-curls.
I have drawn my whole life. My parents were in the tapestry restoration business, and as a young girl, I would draw in the missing parts of the tapestry that needed to be rewoven.
I learned the business in about two months, and then made as much as the others, and was consequently doing quite well when the factory burned down, destroying all our machines - 150 of them. This was very hard on the girls who had paid for their mac...
When I was 16 the first girl I had a crush on wasn't interested at all. I liked her from afar for ages, and when I eventually got the courage and told her, and she wasn't into me.
I don't know if I was a poseur - I really did love metal, always - but I gave a lot of other things a chance. I wanted to meet, um, girls, so I would check out 'Depeche Mode.'
