More Than A Magazine, A Movement
The birth control blaze was set to take place in July, but there is no evidence it has happened yet. Reports indicate that there is another warehouse of USAID-purchased contraceptives in the United Arab Emirates, which is why I am writing this today; and why we need to get loud and stay loud.
In the fourth episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward, advocates and experts name the sociopolitical factors that fuel gender-based violence, and outline what it will take—in the courts, legislatures and our communities—to finally break the cycle.
At least 27 women have accused President Donald Trump of sexual misconduct, with allegations ranging from harassment to sexual assault and rape. Trump has denied every charge, often dismissing the accusing women by claiming he’d never met them—or suggesting they weren’t attractive enough for him to assault.
In 2019, during Trump’s first term, author, journalist and longtime Elle magazine advice columnist E. Jean Carroll came forward with the allegation that Trump sexually assaulted her in a Bergdorf department store’s dressing room in New York City in the mid 1990s. As usual, Trump denied the allegations, prompting Carroll to sue him for defamation as well as battery under New York’s Adult Survivors Act.
But the jury believed Carroll. In 2023, she won the lawsuit.
Misinformation about contraception is deadly.
Just ask Evaline Chepkemol, a mother of three in Kenya’s rural Narok County—a place with one of the country’s highest maternal death rates. Chepkemol has encountered many women in her community who are fearful of contraceptives.
“They have the belief that if you insert the family planning [device], you either lose the children or will never give birth again,” she told UNFPA, the United Nations sexual and reproductive health agency. “They were saying that when you put in family planning, you will never give birth to any child because the children will disappear,” she explained.
In July, American Eagle released a jeans campaign with Euphoria actor Sydney Sweeney, and there’s a lot to unpack. The ad is her clad in a Canadian tuxedo, whilst her gestures and mannerisms indicate a level of seduction.
When marketing to the male gaze sex sells, and it is used as a persuasive attempt to influence consumerism, but it does not stop there. Her blonde hair and blue eyes being the selling point and the center of this advertisement with the punchline, “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans.” This (not so) subtle play on words becomes explicit when she describes how genes are passed down by “offspring,” affecting things like eye color that make her “jeans blue.”
Reserve forces of the U.S. Army, 800 National Guardsmen, and for some reason, 120 FBI agents, are being newly assigned by El Presidente to patrol our national capital—citing crime as his motive, though it’s dropped by a third in recent (Biden) years. He’s already done this in Los Angeles for the last 60 days and predicts other cities are on his list: Baltimore, Chicago, Oakland, New York City—all places that just happen to vote blue.
Early on, the Pentagon testified it would spend about $134 million for the LA deployment, which sounds like a low-ball figure to anyone who’s recently shopped for groceries to feed 5,000 hungry young men three meals a day. And now, California’s governor is asking for the total cost to taxpayers of this “unlawful” deployment—because whether it’s political theater or not, we’re the ones footing the bill.
Articles on tariffs, the labor market, and economic growth or decline often neglect to report how these policies are affecting real people’s ability to keep a roof over their head or put food on the table for their families each night.
When U.S. companies face higher costs for importing goods, those costs get passed directly to consumers, which means everyday goods—from diapers to carrots—become more expensive. Women, in particular, shoulder the brunt of these increased costs.
When we make sure moms and babies have what they need to thrive, we’re not just addressing today’s crises … we’re building tomorrow’s prosperity.
Once a fringe warning, the threat to women’s right to vote is now out in the open—and in the halls of power.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reposted a video on Aug. 7 with the endorsement “All of Christ for All of Life,” in which a far-right conservative pastor, Doug Wilson, co-founder of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), argued that women should not have the right to vote.
As Wilson told the Associated Press, “He was, in effect, reposting it and saying, ‘Amen,’ at some level.”
But a deeper dive into CREC reveals troubling gender politics where women cannot hold church leadership positions and married women are expected to submit to their husbands.
The Trump administration has pulled the rug out from under America’s safety net: In mid-July, the Departments of Health and Human Services, Justice, Labor, Education and Agriculture issued notices barring many legal immigrants, as well as those without legal status, from using numerous public services funded with federal dollars. Should these policies go into effect—reversing 30 years of law—critical programs including Head Start, community mental health services, suicide hotlines and emergency housing assistance could be shuttered, and millions, including U.S. citizens, could be denied help when they need it most.
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called the policies necessary to end the diversion of “hardworking Americans’ tax dollars to incentivize illegal immigration.” A coalition of state attorneys general has called the revision an unmitigated crisis in public health and safety, bringing suit to block the changes, which are temporarily on hold until mid-September.
The new rules mark a dangerous and seismic shift in interpretation of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996, legislation born of a broader agenda to vilify the poor and others accused of gaming the system.
At its core, this is an extension of the administration’s relentless desire to close the border—a tool to sow discord and consolidate power.
The experts and Ms. contributors assessed the state of the U.S. care crisis and women’s economic inequality in the latest episode of the Ms. podcast Looking Back, Moving Forward—and broke down why investing in women and care workers is good policy.
Rakeen Mabud: “We’re at a really pivotal moment and a really complicated moment. We have conservative, pronatalist voices, with more institutional power than they have ever had, at least in modern times. They are advancing an agenda of deep progressive patriarchy, whiteness—and wealth, frankly, is the third prong of that. And they are co-opting progressive policy ideas to do it.”
Lenore Palladino: “There are schools, and there are childcare centers, and there are hospitals being shut down right now. Investing in those would be a really important way to move this whole conversation forward. … Within economic policy, there’s such bifurcation. There’s tax policy over here. There’s care over here. It’s still a women’s issue.”
“Economics is still seen as a man’s game. Women actually make most financial decisions in households, but men are the ones who are seen as the experts, and our financial system is shaped around their life cycles.”
Listen to the latest episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward, “Women Can’t Afford to Wait for a Feminist Economic Future (with Premilla Nadasen, Rakeen Mabud and Lenore Palladino, Aisha Nyandoro, Gaylynn Burroughs, and Dolores Huerta)” on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.