About Us

This is a zine about women’s traveling experiences. An experiential publication for the traveling woman. Ladies with their thumbs out. Females in transit. Femmes faring forward. Aargh. Trying to come up with an explanatory catch phrase for something so deceptively simple to a diverse lot of women as well as men can become increasingly complex the more a gal tries. As though this weren’t strenuous enough, articulating the reasons that Ms. Guided came into existence in the first place is a whole other novella of perplexity.

Why have a travel zine devoted to women in particular? The only accurate response that we can come up with in answer to this question is that women travel with something that men don’t. Vaginas. Cunts. Twats. Pussies. Hair-pies. Bird nests. Shlongvelopes. Shall we continue?

We hope that our readers and contributors understand and reflect this in their art on the subject: women--people, are different. There is no single, unifying characteristic or experience that every woman can claim as her own. Nonetheless, it is virtually undeniable that women experience traveling (and indeed, many things) differently simply because they are female. Why? Well, indeed, because they are penetrable. It’s as simple as that. And for those who were not or are not biologically female but identify as women anyhow, the implication is still there: you don’t have to have one—you just have to come off as having one. Either way really, if others decide that you’ve got one, there’s no getting around it: it doesn’t matter if your box is purely metaphorical--you’re going to be treated as a woman.

What is crucial to comprehend here is that being treated as such can mean being taken care of, looked after, and provided for, or it can mean being attacked. It can be the difference between standing out all night with your thumb out in the pouring rain and getting a ride and a warm, dry place to stay. It can be the difference between sleeping peacefully on a starry beach, and being warned that it’s really not safe. It can be as subtle or as blatant as a tone of voice or a stare.

What Ms. Guided aims to capture is this very specific multiplicity: that such a wide variety of experiences may share a common cause is essentially paradoxical and essentially universal. The explorations of this paradox found in this, our inaugural issue, loosely themed “taking off,” take many forms. Some tackle gender and travel issues directly, others skirt artfully around the crux, enticing the reader to understand, and still others only refer indirectly to the source of reasoning that brought this publication into power. Whatever decision that contributors have chosen to make, we hope that you will recognize some semblance of truth in the multiplicity, veracity in the practice.