It's up to us to take pop culture back and to express quality and dignity for both boys and girls.

Ruby in Paradise and the intensity and quality that I was able to experience on Smoke were equally as important to me as working on this movie every day for three-and-a-half months.

The Conversation about women’s bodies exists largely outside of us, while it is also directed at and marketed to us, and used to define and control us. The Conversation about women happens everywhere, publicly and privately. We are described and detailed, our faces and bodies analyzed and picked apart, our worth ascertained and ascribed based on the reduction of personhood to simple physical objectification. Our voices, our personhood, our potential, and our accomplishments are regularly minimized and muted.

A wonderful pastor I know once told me, "Perfectionism is the highest order of self-abuse." So now I try to remind myself that if I engage in perfectionism, I am abusing myself. Period.

For Native Americans, the most shameful and powerful corrective gesture is to literally and physically turn one's back upon a person who has transgressed, and then after they've been banished for a while, they come back into the circle and the members of the tribe say every good thing that person has ever done, because they have to be welcomed back.

No, I don't tolerate pressure from anyone about anything.

The insanity has to stop...It affects each and every one of us, in multiple and nefarious ways: our self-image, how we show up in our relationships and at work, our sense of our worth, value, and potential as human beings. Join in-and help change-the Conversation.