Author: Emma Cieslik

Emma Cieslik (she/her) is a queer, disabled and neurodivergent public historian and museum worker based in the Washington, D.C., area. She explores the histories at the intersection of gender, sexuality, religion and systems of power and oppression.

‘Obsession’ and the Rise of Incel Horror: When Men’s Entitlement Becomes the Monster

When I first watched Curry Barker’s Obsession, I assumed the horror was obvious. Not the supernatural curse at the center of the film but the decision that sets it in motion: a man deciding he is entitled to a woman’s love, to a woman’s body, regardless of her consent. 

Online, women have begun calling this kind of story “incel horror.” Particularly on TikTok, women for the first time are naming a terrifying and longstanding element in horror films often left unsaid. The real nightmare being the expectation that men depicted as the hero or the victim believe they are owed the bodies of the women in the story. As one TikToker shares, women’s reinterpretation of past films and casting a new light on modern films like Obsession (2026) through a feminist lens is going to change the future of cinema. 

In Barker’s film, it wasn’t the occult magic in the “One Wish Willow” toy that caused Bear to “control” Nikki—it was Bear’s belief that it was okay for him to make this wish in the first place. Barker places the central threat within Nikki who becomes obsessed with Bear and kills several of their friends. Conversely, feminists recognize that it’s Bear’s expectation that he is owed her affection and that he is right to use a supernatural entity to gain it, as the true horror.

Conservative Justices Resurrect the Comstock Act, Threatening Abortion Access Nationwide

On May 1, the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals blocked the mailing of mifepristone, one of the most widely used abortion medications in the country, threatening access for patients already facing a shrinking number of clinics nationwide. Although the Supreme Court temporarily stayed the ruling earlier this month, Justice Clarence Thomas’ dissent revealed something even more alarming: a renewed effort to resurrect the Comstock Act, a 19th-century anti-obscenity law once used to criminalize the mailing of abortion- and contraception-related materials.

The Comstock Act’s history is deeply tied to censorship, moral policing and attacks on marginalized communities. Under its broad and subjective definition of “obscenity,” authorities targeted contraception, abortion information, sexual health materials, queer literature and even works of classical art. Its reproductive restrictions disproportionately harmed poor and working-class women, who were often cut off from the safest and most affordable forms of care.

Today, antiabortion activists are once again looking to Comstock as a tool to restrict abortion nationwide—this time through the courts. Thomas’ explicit invocation of the law in the mifepristone fight signals how far-right legal movements are attempting to revive long-discredited morality laws to roll back reproductive freedom and other established rights.

Motherhood as Patriotic Duty: The Dangerous Politics Behind Trump’s New Messaging

Moms.gov may present itself as a resource for “new and expecting mothers,” but its deeper message is unmistakable: motherhood as patriotic obligation, reproductive autonomy as suspect, and declining birth rates as a national crisis. The site promotes crisis pregnancy centers, fertility treatments and anti-contraception talking points while echoing a long history of pronatalist politics that frames women’s bodies as tools of the state rather than sites of personal choice.

History offers chilling parallels. Governments facing demographic anxiety—from Nazi Germany to the modern U.S. right—have elevated childbirth through propaganda, financial incentives and attacks on reproductive healthcare. Nazi officials restricted access to contraception and abortion information while glorifying motherhood through state medals and nationalist media campaigns; today, conservative lawmakers and influencers similarly cast hormonal birth control and medication abortion as dangerous while promoting “natural” fertility and larger families as social imperatives.

The result is not simply antiabortion policy, but a broader attempt to reshape gender roles and define which families are valued.

Moms.gov fits into a growing body-politics movement that ties reproduction to nationalism, morality and demographic control—using government-backed messaging to pressure women toward motherhood while undermining reproductive freedom.

These Fathers of Trans Children in the U.S. Are Deconstructing Their Own Masculinity to Become Better Parents

The Dads, a new feature-length documentary, follows the fathers of trans, nonbinary and gender-expansive children as they weather the rapid escalation of anti-trans legislation in the United States over the past two years. Directed and produced by Luchina Fisher, the film debuted last month at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival.

The film bears witness to parents’ struggle with whether to stay in the United States or move abroad in face of bans on restrooms, sports and gender-affirming care for trans youth.

In the end, The Dads is about faith—faith in the experiment of the United States, faith in dads to know who their children are and how best to protect them, and faith in all dads to grow and learn who they are. 

Netflix Documentary ‘Inside the Manosphere’ Exposes a Digital Pipeline to Misogyny

On March 11, Netflix released Inside the Manosphere, a new documentary by Louis Theroux that hit the No. 1 spot on Netflix. It is an uncomfortable but necessary examination of how the manoverse—a loose conglomeration of men’s rights and red pill influencers, podcasters and politicians—exploits and harms young boys and teenagers.

At the heart of the documentary is a profound inequity in the influencer space between the experiences and expectations of men and women. While the male content creators are eager to proclaim traditional values, they exalt “one-sided monogamy,” where they expect women to remain loyal to them (“my wife doesn’t talk to any men”) while they have multiple partners. While they shame women who do sex work on OnlyFans, one of the influencers, Harrison Sullivan, funds an OnlyFans creator house. His excuses—that it’s just business, that he would never allow his own daughter to do OnlyFans—attempts to create distance and deniability between him and his commercial choices and consequences. 

A majority of the influencers Theroux speaks to seem to be aware of the harm they cause. Sullivan even warns Theroux that young teenage boys should not be watching their content, and blames the parents that would allow their children to consume this content. Several seconds later, we see the influencer taking photos with young fans.

What’s worse is witnessing how damaging the manosphere rhetoric is to men.

When content creator Justin Waller meets up with two of his fans on the street, one of them shares, “He’s one of my greatest role models,” and when asked what he has learned from Waller and others’ content says, “Life as a man, you’re born without value. We have to build that value.” Waller jumps in and says that women are born with value because of their beauty but “nobody’s gonna invite him on a trip to Miami. … He has to be valuable to other men.”

How devastating that these men are raised not just to accept, but to thank, influencers and content creators that tell them they are born without inherent value. 

Trump’s Silence on World AIDS Day Revives a New Lavender Scare

Last month, the State Department warned employees not to commemorate World AIDS Day through official work accounts, including social media, nor should they use government funds to mark Tuesday, Dec. 2, as World AIDS Day. The day came and went in a quiet, cold Washington, D.C., without the president marking what it represented—the more than 700,000 Americans who died from HIV/AIDS-related causes in the United States since 1981. 

If his intentions were unclear, Trump’s budget proposed ending all CDC HIV prevention programs this past June, and Congress continues to negotiate next year’s budget, proposing massive cuts to HIV programs. 

For many young people who never lost friends or family, there may be the misconception that the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s was localized and small, but nearly 300,000 men who have sex with men have died from AIDS-related complications, with over 6,000 deaths in 2019 alone. To put this in perspective, this would be as if over half of Wyoming’s population disappeared, or if everyone in Pittsburgh, Penn., vanished overnight. 

Even Madonna criticized Trump’s move, posting on Instagram, “It’s one thing to order federal agents to refrain from commemorating this day, but to ask the general public to pretend it never happened is ridiculous, it’s absurd, it’s unthinkable. I bet he’s never watched his best friend die of AIDS, held their hand, and watched the blood drain from their face as they took their last breath at the age of 23.” 

A Century After the Eugenics Movement, the U.S. Is Again Barring Disabled Immigrants

This month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio instructed visa officers to consider obesity and other chronic health conditions, such as heart disease, cancer and diabetes, as justification to deny people visas to the United States.

Many were outraged and shocked, observing the Trump administration’s new expansion of the “public charge” rule—directing visa officers to deny entry to people with disabilities, chronic illnesses or age-related conditions—as a modern revival of eugenic immigration policy designed to exclude, control and institutionalize disabled and marginalized people.

When Trump first took office in 2016, the Trump administration broadened the definition of public charge to include people who receive SNAP benefits, medicaid, housing assistance, childcare subsidies and more. This new rule was published in 2019 and went into effect in 2020 and early 2021; President Biden ended the use of this public charge rule definition in March 2021, returning it to the older but still restrictive version. Following Trump’s new rule, visa denials based on the “public charge” rule exploded during Trump’s first residency, rising from just over 1,000 denials in 2016 to over 20,000 in 2019, and it had disastrous effects.

As the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) found, broadening this public charge rule led many people to reduce or stop using benefits or services for themselves.

The Return of the Tradwife Gospel

When Erika Kirk took the stage at her husband’s memorial, dressed in white and preaching about virtue, guardianship and motherhood as women’s highest calling, it was not just a moment of personal grief. It was also a sermon drawn directly from the playbook of the 19th-century Cult of Domesticity, which elevated piety, purity, domesticity and submission as the cornerstones of “true womanhood.” While Kirk framed these ideals as a source of women’s strength, history shows that they have long functioned as tools of confinement and control.

The irony, of course, is that Kirk is now CEO of Turning Point USA—a position she could never hold without the very feminist progress she disavows. Tradwife rhetoric may promise dignity and purpose, but as the Cult of Domesticity and later social purity movements revealed, these ideals have always come at women’s expense. They strip away autonomy, enshrine patriarchal power and ultimately sacrifice women—even those who embrace the gospel themselves.

A Trump Cabinet Member Endorsed a Pastor Who Wants the 19th Amendment Repealed, and the Danger Is Growing

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.