Hasta La Gadget!

It is difficult to roam the streets of New York City on foot without encountering a larger-than-life advertisement against your will. Images of airbrushed models aimed at exploiting the desires and insecurities of passersby are as omnipresent as traffic lights, silently nudging women and men to believe that pesky voice in the back of their heads saying you are not enough. 

Beginning June 26, however, some of the billboards around NYC will swap out their traditional promotional materials for some freshly squeezed feminist art. The summer initiative, entitled “The Future is Female,” was organized by nonprofit organization SaveArtSpace, which frequently transforms advertising spaces into impromptu sites of public art. 

SaveArtSpace, co-founded by Justin Aversano and Travis Rix, is intended to transform the city of New York into an “urban gallery experience,” inspiring the next generation of young artists in the process. Through a string of exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles and Miami, Aversano and Rix are putting some pressure on the art world’s insular walls, inviting all citizens to taste challenging and engaging art as part of their daily lives and routines. 

And this particular NYC exhibition features a full roster of women artists.

“We are buried in a consumption-focused society,” Marie Tomanova, one of five women who curated the program, told HuffPost in an email. “And my wish is to have more art than advertisements in public spaces, art that will elevate your soul, inspire you to dream and encourage you to think.”

“When selecting works for ‘The Future Is Female’ I was looking for works with immediate power, celebrating ALL women,” she continued. “Women who are fierce, loving, brave and unstoppable, tough and sometimes fragile, daring, dreaming, creating, women who are vulnerable but always embracing, women who are powerful!”

One such woman is artist Elise Peterson, whose piece “Grace Meets Matisse” injects a photographic image of Grace Jones into Henri Matisse’s 1910 “Dance,” placing her in the center of a ring of naked dancers. The image puts Jones’ black body into an image previously filled with white bodies, juxtaposing the flesh of the painted figures with the three-dimensional glow of Jones’ self-actualized body, mid-performance. 

In another piece, titled “Boudoir,” photographer Lissa Rivera captures her muse and lover BJ wearing a robe and tights as he lounges, odalisque-like, on an emerald-draped cushion. A mysterious, gloved hand juts into the frame to brush his hair. In her series “Beautiful Boy” Rivera captures BJ in a variety of sensual, cinematic poses that riff off and subvert gender norms in and outside of the photographic tradition. 

Their creative partnership began before their romantic one when BJ confided in Rivera as a friend, expressing a desire to explore his femininity by dressing in women’s clothes. Rivera, who herself had ambiguous feelings about her own femininity, suggested they untangle their relationships to gender together, using photography as a space where fantasy could override reality. 

“I had been interested in the idea that popular notions of beauty are largely drawn from looking at repeated images,” Rivera said in an earlier interview with HuffPost. “The quality of the image has an incredible power to create desire, and that desire can be to inhabit the space of subject.” 

Rivera’s words are especially powerful in the context of the billboard exhibition, which replaces tired images of people as sex objects and product pushers with liberating, challenging and complex depictions, often of femininity from women’s own perspectives.

“Through ‘The Future Is Female’ we got an opportunity to show work of women who explore and narrate womanhood in many different ways, layers and angles,” Tomanova said, “and can challenge the mainstream media expectations and portrayal of women that I personally find very limiting.”

The exhibition doesn’t only provide an opportunity for an unwitting public to encounter art in their everyday spaces, it also shifts the conversation from what women do not have to what women can do. It’s a crucial message, told through radical accessibility, that will hopefully help shape the way young women view their relationship to their city and themselves. 

The billboards will pop up in various locales around New York’s Lower East Side beginning June 26. The featured artists’ work will also be featured at The Storefront Project beginning July 7. Get all the details here. 

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Courteney Cox recently cut ties with a longtime friend: her facial fillers. 

The 53-year-old told New Beauty that she is currently aging “as natural as I can be” after having all of her fillers dissolved. 

“I feel better because I look like myself,” she said. “I think that I now look more like the person that I was. I hope I do. Things are going to change. Everything’s going to drop. I was trying to make it not drop, but that made me look fake.”

Cox told the beauty website she became “layered and layered and layered” with procedures from different doctors recommended by various pals. It got to the point that she didn’t recognize herself in photos. 

Now, she said, she hasn’t had a procedure in six months.  

“You need movement in your face, especially if you have thin skin like I do,” she explained. “Those aren’t wrinkles—they’re smile lines. I’ve had to learn to embrace movement and realize that fillers are not my friend.”

We’re all about aging naturally and self-acceptance, so kudos to Cox. We just hope Ross, Chandler, Joey, Rachel and Phoebe still make the friend list.  

Head to New Beauty to read the entire interview.  

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— This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

There’s no denying that women around the world have made great strides toward equality in the past century. One hundred years ago, women in the United States still didn’t have the right to vote, and very few were allowed to pursue higher education or a meaningful career outside of their household duties.

Fast forward to today, and more than 70 percent of women between the ages of 20 and 54 are active members of the national workforce. On top of this, 2015 marked the first year when women were, on average, more likely to have a bachelor’s degree than men, and this trend is on the rise.

But despite all this newfound opportunity, the prevailing societal attitudes about what women are historically supposed to value still have a long way to go. That’s why we’ve partnered with SK-II to learn more about all of the ways women are still pressured to stick to outdated gender norms.

 “Women have won unprecedented rights thanks to the feminist movement, but as a society, we still expect women to prioritize family over career, or even over their own needs,” says Silvia Dutchevici, president and founder of the Critical Therapy Center in New York City. Dutchevici says many women feel pressure to “have it all,” meaning both a thriving career and the perfect family, but that can be very difficult to achieve.

“Most women try to balance work and family,” Dutchevici says, “but that balance is seldom equal.” In fact, she says working mothers ― even those with partners ― often find themselves essentially working two full-time jobs: keeping their career together while doing the brunt of housework, cooking and child-rearing.

This happens for a variety of reasons, but societal expectations about the roles of women and men at home are still very much to blame, says Tamra Lashchyk, a Wall Street executive, business coach and author of the book “Lose the Gum: A Survival Guide to Women on Wall Street.”

“No matter how successful she is, the burden of running a household still falls on the woman’s shoulders,” Lashchyk says. “Men get more of a pass when it comes to these duties, especially those that involve children.”

Lashchyk says much of this pressure on women to conform to a more domestic lifestyle comes from friends and family.

“In many people’s minds, a woman’s career success pales in comparison to having a family,” she says. “Especially if the woman is single, no matter how great her professional achievements, almost every single one of her conversations with her family will include questions about her romantic life or lack thereof. I could literally tell my family I’d cured cancer and the conversation would still end with, ‘But are you dating anyone?’”

While covert societal expectations might contribute to some of this inequality, workplace policies on maternity and paternity leave can hold a lot of the blame.

“Unfortunately, many workplace policies regarding taking time off to care for family do not the changing times,” Dutchevici says. “Both men and women suffer in their careers when they prioritize family, but women carry far harsher punishments. Their choice to take time off and start a family can result in lower pay, and fewer promotions in the future. The right to family leave is not a woman’s issue, it is a society’s issue, a family’s issue.”

Lashchyk agrees with this sentiment. “There should be more flexibility and benefits [in the workplace], like longer periods of time for paternity leave….If paternity leave was extended, men could share a greater responsibility in child care, and they could also spend more time bonding with their infant children, which is beneficial for the entire family.

Both men and women suffer in their careers when they prioritize family, but women carry far harsher punishments.

Another less visible way the modern workplace forces women to choose family over career has to do with the fact that women are pushing back pregnancy, says Jeni Mayorskaya, a fertility expert and CEO of Stork Club, an online community for women dedicated to fertility issues.

“Compared to our parents, our generation is having children a decade later,” Mayorskaya says. “Unfortunately, when we hit our mid-30s and we’re finally ready for that managing position or that title of a partner at a firm we fought so hard for, we have to think about putting our career on pause and becoming a mom.”

So what can women do to combat these societal pressures? Finding workplaces that offer flexible schedules, work-at-home opportunities and ample maternity and paternity leave is a good first step, but Dr. Neeta Bhushan, an emotional intelligence advocate and author, says women should also to learn to put themselves first.

“The first step is being mindful of your emotional health in your relationships with others and the relationship you have with yourself,“ Bhushan says. “When you put yourself first, you are able to make a bigger impact on your community. This is different than being selfish ― think beyond you. You want to make sure that you are being taken care of so that you can take care of others.”

SK-II brings the power of Pitera, a fermented yeast ingredient which contains amino acids, minerals and vitamins to keep skin looking refreshed, rejuvenated, soft and smooth, to all of its skincare saviours. In the 1970s, SK-II scientists saw how supple and youthful the hands of aged sake brewers were, inspiring them to use the ingredient in their products. And the rest is history. And gorgeous skin. #inpartnershipwithskii

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