More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Imagine a 4-year-old boy scraping his knee and starting to cry. What if his caregiver scolded, “Big boys don’t cry.” It still happens.
We must intervene before boys get the message to toughen up and harden their hearts.
Cornell fraternity men were once 4 years old. What were they taught about expressing their feelings, about bullies, about respecting girls—and themselves?
We spend billions responding to men’s violence and almost nothing studying where it starts.
Hallie Shoffner grew up in the Arkansas Delta, left to earn a bachelor’s degree at Vanderbilt, then came home to become a farmer. She followed her parents into a business that had been in the family for 150 years.
In 2025, she was forced to close the farm.
Now Shoffner, 38, is the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, mounting a long-shot bid to unseat two-term Republican Tom Cotton. Her experience in agriculture is central to a campaign focused on rural economic distress and on her argument that federal policy is failing families like hers.
For too long, midlife symptoms of women have been minimized; our concerns dismissed, our suffering normalized and our voices overlooked. We reject the notion that hormonal decline is simply something to endure.
Everyone has the right to connection, support, shared knowledge, honest conversation free from shame and community in search of quality of life.
To ask questions.
To demand answers.
To require equal research.
To expect better healthcare.
To defy patriarchal control.
To hormonally radicalize the world.
A candidate for the U.S. House in Florida and the hosts of an antiabortion podcast recently debated whether abortion bans should include exceptions for rape and incest. The candidate said he hoped people in those circumstances would choose “to have the baby” and allow God to take a crime and make “something incredible” out of it.
Voters have the right to know their candidates’ beliefs on abortion and reproductive healthcare access. Would they protect access to abortion when a pregnancy threatens a patient’s life? What about a pregnancy resulting from rape? Would they support federal restrictions or protect access to care?
Guides.vote produces nonpartisan voter guides with the help of experienced editors, researchers and veteran journalists. The guides provide information about candidates’ positions on issues and are designed to help voters compare candidates before casting their ballots. They also link to sources, so readers can learn more about the statements and records behind the comparisons.
A dam has broken for women, stemming from the case of the Cornell student who was allegedly gang-raped at a fraternity in 2024.
In the 1980s, Ms. published the first national study of sexual assault on college campuses. What our researchers found was, at the time, shocking—at least, to the college administrators: Over half of women surveyed had experienced “some form of sexual victimization,” and one in eight women had been victims of rape—though of those women, nearly three-quarters didn’t identify their experience as rape.
“The details of what happened to Jane Doe are horrifying, but at least they are now being reported and considered credible. This has not always been the case,” wrote Ellen Sweet, former Ms. magazine editor and coordinator of the Ms. Magazine Campus Project on Sexual Assault in a recent New York Times letter to the editor. “Now there is a public outcry for transparency and accountability that can’t be ignored. Let’s hope colleges and law enforcement finally learn their lesson.”
We know that in this moment, young women are fed up and deeply, deeply angry. The midterms offer an opportunity to channel that anger into tangible, meaningful change.
Weekend Reading on Women’s Representation is a compilation of stories about women’s representation in politics, on boards, in sports and entertainment, in judicial offices and in the private sector in the U.S. and around the world—with a little gardening and goodwill mixed in for refreshment!
—Friday, Oct. 9, marked 115 years since the men of California went to the polls to decide whether the women they lived alongside would be permitted to join them there.
—Bernadette Greene-Placentia, the Democratic nominee in Arizona’s 8th Congressional District with a real chance to upset her opponent, was reportedly raped while fixing one of her yard signs. “She chose to share her story because she knows many survivors struggle in silence, and she hopes that by speaking about her experience, others will know they are not alone,” said a campaign spokesperson.
—Pew Charitable Trust reports that 37 percent of Americans now believe a woman will not be elected president in their lifetime. I urge women like AOC to seriously consider a presidential bid in 2028.
—The poet, essayist and translator Anne Carson was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature for her genre-defying work. Since 1901, the Nobel Prize in literature has been awarded 122 times to 104 men and just 18 women.
… and more.
Across the U.S., teen pregnancy rates have fallen to historic lows—the result of decades of investment in evidence-based prevention, improved access to information and sustained support for young people.
Yet the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recently terminated 53 of the nation’s 67 teen pregnancy prevention grants, abruptly cutting off support for programs serving thousands of young people across the country. There was no wind-down or warning.
These programs are often described as efforts to prevent teen pregnancy, but that description understates what young people actually receive from them. They teach healthy relationships, consent, communication and decision-making. They help young people recognize abusive situations and connect with medically accurate information and trusted adults.
The grant terminations aren’t simply a funding cut—they represent a decision to walk away from proven strategies that improve young people’s health and well-being.
Two months after HHS’ cut to these programs, there is now a glimmer of accountability.
Last summer, our Girls Learn International chapter set out with a mission to support girls in finding their own voices to lead their communities on issues they cared about. We organized an international public speaking webinar with Sierra Leone Rising, which helped us reach 40 girls in villages in Sierra Leone.
Even with nonprofit backing, internet barriers strained our capacity to communicate regularly, blurring the vision that had seemed so “doable” in writing. As students in well-resourced suburban towns, we had taken reliable internet access for granted.
Our surprise turned to anger: How could something so basic, so essential to daily life in the modern world, remain out of reach for so many school-aged children around the globe? In what world could a student in a small, remote village be promised equal opportunity without access to the digital tools other students take for granted?
Tools of the Patriarchy is a column on the tools that establish men’s dominance in society, or, in other words, uphold the patriarchy. Whether or not these tools are used intentionally, they contribute to a world in which women are not equal to men.
The books disappearing from shelves are not random. Censorship campaigns continue to sweep up stories about women’s sexuality, sexual violence, reproductive autonomy and girls coming of age, alongside books about LGBTQ+ people and people of color.
Stories are also one of the places girls first encounter women who leave, resist, desire, survive, refuse motherhood, question authority or name the harm done to them.
Another gendered aspect of the censorship story: the people expected to absorb the backlash. Librarians are trusted to help children find books and create welcoming spaces … until their professional judgment includes a book about queer identity, reproductive autonomy or sexual violence. Then the helpful librarian can quickly become an “activist.”
For Louisiana librarian Amanda Jones, speaking against censorship at a public library board meeting turned her into a target. She was accused online of promoting pornography to children and subjected to harassment and threats. Her experience shows how quickly a librarian defending access to books can be recast as the danger herself—especially when a woman in a feminized profession refuses to quietly enforce someone else’s definition of what is “appropriate.”
[The final installment of The Pipeline to Predators, a four-part Ms. investigation into the modeling industry’s connections to Jeffrey Epstein and survivors’ fight for accountability.]
From July to August 2025, senior White House and Justice Department officials, including Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal lawyer and then deputy attorney general, met repeatedly in the White House Situation Room to strategize about the political fallout—treating the Epstein files not as a legal, accountability or transparency crisis, but rather as a messaging crisis to be managed.
Every survivor we spoke with agrees on the first and most important step toward real accountability: the full release of the Epstein files.
New Mexico is one prototype for meaningful investigation. There, the state legislature unanimously created a bipartisan “Truth Commission” to examine alleged criminal activity connected to Epstein’s Zorro Ranch. The commission has issued roughly 24 subpoenas thus far to law enforcement agencies, financial institutions, state agencies and multiple U.S. attorneys’ offices.
Virginia Giuffre remains a touchstone for many, who say they are finding healing by coming together and honoring her fight.