More Than A Magazine, A Movement
In the rap battle between Kendrick Lamar and Drake, serious accusations of violence against women and girls were repeatedly reduced to punchlines in these diss tracks.
We don’t deserve to see our experiences, especially our most painful ones, turned into punchlines.
The Texas Supreme Court is considering whether to take up a case that could have Alabama-esque impacts on in vitro fertilization in Texas.
What began as a Denton divorce has grown into a larger battle over whether a frozen embryo can be defined as a person. The court has not yet said whether it will take up the case, which centers on three frozen embryos created by Caroline and Gaby Antoun.
Earlier this year, the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos qualify as people under the state’s wrongful death statute, leading fertility clinics to halt their work until the legislature stepped in and granted temporary protections. While the details are different, legal experts and fertility doctors say the results of this Texas case could be similar.
Rowena Chiu began working for Harvey Weinstein in 1998, assisting in the London office with his European film productions. Later that year, at the Venice Film Festival, she found herself at a late-night meeting with the producer. There, she recalls, Weinstein told her “he’d never had a Chinese girl” before attempting to rape her.
After signing a nondisclosure agreement, Chiu spent nearly two decades in what she describes as “constant fear”—“fear of Harvey’s abuse, control and power; that the story would come back to haunt me; that I would inadvertently slip up on my promise to never speak of this.” She was finally inspired to speak out by the powerful testimony of Christine Blasey Ford, whose decision to “speak up” about Brett Kavanaugh in September 2018 made a lasting impression.
“I can briefly glory in the relief that I am no longer sitting on a sickening secret,” she wrote.
Because of women, care has become a top concern among voters and a unifier across gender, race and party identification. And care issues are most powerful as a motivator for civic engagement when linked with other top priorities for voters—including reproductive rights, tax equity and kitchen table economics.
It is no coincidence that at the same moment U.S. democracy is facing existential threats, we are also witnessing profound assaults not only on the body politic but on our bodily autonomy.
One of the biggest threats to the consolidation of power is an empowered and engaged populace—particularly women, the LGBTQ community and people of color. Which is why anti-democratic leaders are doing all they can to limit and curtail the power of these communities. This moment requires progressive and pro-democracy funders to understand the attacks to reproductive freedom, LGBTQ liberation, and racial justice not as distinct or disparate—but as central to the attacks to our democracy itself, and to fund accordingly.
When people consider what it means to be a democracy on the decline, plot points of the recent film Civil War come to mind: a U.S. president who disregards the Constitution to nab a third term. Crackdowns on dissent and the media. Leaders using the military to break up public demonstrations.
While that is, of course, representative of growing authoritarianism, recent history suggests that rollbacks on bodily autonomy and reproductive freedoms are also flashing red lights for would-be regimes.
In her memoir, Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk (Ecco), Hanna shares her journey from a challenging childhood through college and her first shows to love, Lyme disease and Le Tigre. Intimate and candid, Hanna graciously explores it all, including the duplicity of the punk scene with its caring collectivity and underlying exclusivity, racism and misogyny.
I was lucky enough to chat with Kathleen Hanna about her book, the writing process and how her feminism has changed over time.
Mexico is on the precipice of electing its first woman president this June. What are the priorities of feminist movements in Mexico and how do they relate to the next presidency?
“Here in Mexico, we focus on women who have been the victims of femicide.”
In the latest study on gender and perfectionism by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the majority of women in the surveyed group were perfectionists. And Harvard economics professor Claudia Goldin conducted a study that found female students responded more negatively to imperfect grades than male students.
“It seems like the strongest social pressure affecting college-educated, professional women today isn’t that they’re afraid to succeed; it’s that they’re afraid not to,” wrote Amanda Hess, critic and regular contributor to
The New York Times.
From the boardrooms of philanthropy to the halls of government, democracy and gender are often treated as separate issues.
I’ve been working to sound the alarm. Because while our side has been slow to connect the dots, the authoritarian right has been acting on these connections for decades. The consequences are deadly—and mounting.
