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As an alumna of the Running Start program, an organization that gives girls and young women a “running start” in politics, I was invited to the Women to Watch awards in DC last Wednesday, and asked to make a short speech. I decided to pack a dress my mother sewed about twenty years ago, and was excited to wear it out for the first time—my mom had passed it down to me, but I’d never had the occasion to wear it.

It turns out some clothes really shouldn’t be worn out passed the twenty-year mark.

About a half hour before the event was due to start, I tugged the skirt of my dress down and heard the unmistakable sound of fabric ripping. At first I thought it was nothing, until I felt the hem of the dress very low around my calves in the back, and a nice chilly breeze around my lower back and butt. The skirt of the dress had ripped away from the top, revealing a large portion of my back, underpants, and upper leg.

After the initial shock of realizing my underpants were on display for all the guests (making me a Woman to Watch for an altogether other reason), and deciding that the look was a bit too revealing for the occasion, I snapped into problem-solving mode. I’d seen a Filene’s Basement in the lower part of the building where the event was being held, so I dashed out of the room and headed toward the elevator, skirt trailing behind me like some sort of female Captain Underpants.

For those of you who don’t know, Filene’s Basement is basically a gigantic store that sells marked-down designer items. In the past, I’ve found shopping at Filene’s Basement very hit or miss, because sometimes the items are obviously marked down for a reason (like for instance, the item is a XL, big-bird-yellow romper). Because I knew shopping at Filene’s can often take all day, I decided my strategy would be to grab everything I saw that remotely resembled business-evening wear. At first all I could find was a red wrap dress (which on the hanger seemed nice but looked like it could end up looking like “exotic dancer goes to Washington” once put on), but I quickly stumbled upon an entire section of somewhat appropriate dresses.

As I ran through the store (and I mean ran), I contemplated the ridiculousness of my situation. Here I was, twenty minutes until the event, dashing through a giant store in a city I don’t live in, with my underwear showing, all so that I could hope to look presentable for a lot of people I might never see again.

I ended up bringing about twenty dresses into the changing room (which the woman working there really appreciated) and took the first one that looked remotely good. Interestingly enough, I ended up really loving my new dress and actually got a lot of compliments on it. There’s nothing like calmly strutting into an event, being complimented on your dress, and just saying “Oh, this? Thank you,” when ten minutes earlier you were frantically streaking through Filene’s Basement in your underwear.

But I guess this is what women leaders have to go through. Every day, in between winning awards, attending events, and making major policy decisions, women in power deal with the complications of being a woman in our society. They rip their stockings (or their twenty-year-old dresses), have a bad hair day, or have to run to Rite Aid to buy tampons in the middle of an important meeting. Our society doesn’t make it easy to be a woman, and it sure doesn’t make it easy to be a woman in power. I guess it just isn’t as easy as it looks.

Fiona Lowenstein is a high school junior, weekly guest blogger and Girls Leadership Institute alumna. Read more of her work here.

Anyone noticing a pattern here?

In writing about the box office juggernaut — a film that is smashing records left and right, beating Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings in online advance sales, among other “firsts” — headline writers are using the language of teen girls.

Cute? I don’t think so. There’s something that stinks to me here. Using this kind of language to cover such stunning box office success feels like an attempt to both mock girl culture and detract from the very butch success of this women and girl-driven phenomenon.

I wonder if it makes people uncomfortable that, as the blogger Melissa Silverstein wrote, “A franchise fueled by girls and women has the potential of beating the machines for the box office record. This movie could potentially be ‘guy proof’ meaning they won’t need guys to see it for it to kick some box office butt. Whereas the other franchises NEED women to make their numbers.”

After all, the headlines we’re used to are that women can’t get real parts in Hollywood, and that women don’t support female-centered movies. And as we saw in a recent New York Times profile of Kristen Stewart, the Twilight Saga allows her to pursue a dark, authentic role for a young woman – albeit a disturbing one — opportnities that are clearly in short supply for young women even a few years older, like Megan Fox (profiled by the New York times on the same day in part about her struggle to be taken seriously).

“The question is,” writes Kate Harding at Salon Broadsheet, “will the powers that be recognize young women as a robust market that’s been largely ignored and condescended to, or will they write it off as a limited phenomenon?” If you know me, you know that I love the language of teen girls…so much so that I haven’t quite grown out of it myself. And I write this less as an expression of outrage than an observation. All I’m saying is that I’m pretty sure the words to describe what’s happening this week at box offices around the world aren’t “OMG” and “like, totally.” They’re “millions,” “record-breaking” and “87 percent of advance ticket holders are female.”