Her sample of the speech reflects many of the things Beyoncé explores in this album: love, sexuality, empowerment, and marriage.

“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.”

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

That Time Beyonce's Album Invalidated Every Criticism of Feminism EVER

Early Friday morning, Beyonce gave us all a heart attack when she released her self-titled visual masterpiece, Beyonce.

And really, whose edges didn’t Beyonce snatch? She’s sexy, fun, talented. She’s a visionary — the videos are not only aesthetically pleasing, they are stories built from images. Her voice, as always, is perfection. She proves, once again, that she is the greatest of her time in overall entertainment. But there was something else about this album that caught our attention — something that wasn’t there in 2003′s Crazy in Love or critically acclaimed 4.

It was a womanhood I hadn’t seen before. It was Beyonce’s emancipation from social chains, from criticism, from the lines media drew that illustrate her as something manufactured or “polished” in comparison to the alternative, her sister Solange. These are boxes, they are inaccurate and Beyonce crushed them, quite literally, in this new album.



And if you aren’t woke, as Erykah Badu would say, then you probably missed the message. Yes, the album is about sex. Yes, it’s about love. Yes, it’s even about Baby Blue. But Beyonce is really an ode to womanism, feminism or whatever euphemism you might use to describe the empowerment of women, but especially women of color.


Read more at ONTD: http://ohnotheydidnt.livejournal.com/84190074.html#ixzz2nZkdg6LX