Meet The Feminist Responsible For Beyonce’s “Flawless” Track

In case you haven’t heard Beyonce‘s feminist masterpiece ‘Flawless’ from her self-titled album released December 18, 2013, it is a track which features part of a TED Talk speech by feminist, New York Times best-selling author, and speaker Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. She is 36, hails from Nigeria and has influenced Beyonce in a huge way in regards to her ideas about femininity in the 21st century.

Elle Magazine interviewed Chimamanda about her books and on that TED Talk which influenced one of the world’s biggest pop stars. This is the excerpt that Queen Bey used in her track of Adichie’s speech:

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 will 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 each other as competitors not for jobs or for 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: the person who believes in the social political, and economic equality of the sexes.

Chimamanda’s brand of feminist is something we definitely want to aspire to, because it is not extreme and it acknowledges the various types of feminist. One of those being someone who loves fashion. We often think that because the fashion industry is largely responsible for creating an image of an insecure “not good enough” woman, that anyone who likes clothing must be superficial but that shouldn’t be the case. In fact, we need MORE feminists in the fashion world to be agents of change!

“Women who [want] to be taken seriously [are] supposed to substantiate their seriousness with a studied indifference to appearance,” she says to Elle.