More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Weekend Reading for Women’s Representation is a compilation of stories about women’s representation.
This week’s Weekend Reading includes on-the-ground updates from the 2024 Reykjavik Global Forum; the progress of women in state legislatures, particularly in New Mexico and Minnesota; the record number of female governors in the U.S.; and the ongoing global fight for women’s representation.
Male grievance, especially white male grievance, is the beating heart of Trumpist populism.
Kamala Harris ran a truly impressive campaign under extraordinarily difficult circumstances. It would be reductive and absurd to say that her campaign’s decision not to put her on The Joe Rogan Experience is why she lost. But it does point to a Democratic Party mindset that needs to change.
If Democrats want to win future presidential elections, they need to communicate more effectively with men, including blue-collar white men and young men of all ethnic and racial backgrounds, whose vote for Trump was less a vote for his policies or against those of Kamala Harris than it was the loudest and angriest statement they could make that we still matter.
Even in states where abortion is still legal, abortion is not necessarily available through college health services, leaving students to find their own care. In New York City, students at Barnard College—the historically women’s college affiliated with Columbia University just across the street—are working to help their peers access abortions. Because Barnard does not currently offer abortion, finding care is still a struggle even for students in New York—a state that’s become a haven for out-of-state abortion patients—even at a women’s college that was one of the Seven Sisters.
Throwing trans and nonbinary people under the bus is a terrible compromise to the very authoritarian ambitions that liberals say they’re stepping up to fight. We need more love and support for people who are stigmatized and under assault, not less. And we desperately need more understanding of sex, gender and sexuality.
Let’s equip ourselves with the intellectual tools that will help us understand how would-be tyrants use gender to divide us.
Feminism simply denotes believing in the political, economic and social equality of the sexes—yet Trump and his allies viciously demeaned it at every turn.
White male supremacy, which Trump ran on, continues to play an outsized role in exacerbating the divide that afflicts our nation. While not widely understood, men, too, are damaged by patriarchy; it diminishes us, undermines our humanity.
To bridge our political, cultural and gender chasm, we’ll need to recognize what the election reflected: Patriarchy’s grip and the assault on feminism are two sides of the same coin. It’s on us now to make that part of the national conversation. There’s a lot of work to do. One take-away from the Harris campaign still rings true: “We’re not going back.”
House races in many states remained uncertain for days after the election, but Republicans ultimately secured the House majority. Republicans also took control of the Senate, after flipping several key seats (West Virginia, Montana, Ohio) and holding others (Nebraska, Florida, Texas) to secure a majority—marking the first GOP trifecta since 2017.
Barely a week after Trump was reelected to the White House, for many in the U.S., access to birth control is seeming shakier than it did at the start of this month. But is it possible that young women are more dubious about birth control than past generations?
The last few years has seen a rise of social media influencers—many of them Gen Z—putting forth false and misleading claims on TikTok and YouTube about the safety and efficacy of hormonal birth control. In honor of Thanks, Birth Control Day on Nov. 14, Ms. spoke with Dr. Raegan about some of the most common social media misconceptions when it comes to birth control. Here’s what she said about separating the facts from the fiction.
In every issue of Ms., we track research on our progress in the fight for equality, catalogue can’t-miss quotes from feminist voices and keep tabs on the feminist movement’s many milestones. We’re Keeping Score online, too—in this biweekly roundup.
This week’s special post-election edition is tracking the 2024 election’s bright spots, feminist victories and a full rundown of the challenges and dangers we now face.
Project 2025 is the reassertion of an old-fashioned hegemonic masculinity vastly out of step with the American people—even among self-identified conservatives. It’s the result of decades-long organizing on the religious right, but the underpinning ideologies can be traced back to the colonization of the United States.
Following former President Donald Trump’s election victory, Google searches related to 4B—a fringe South Korean feminist movement that made a name for itself in the mid to late 2010s—surged in the United States.
It’s called “4B” because “B” is a shorthand for the word “no” in Korean—and a series of “nos” is what the movement calls for: No sex. No dating. No marrying men. No children.
“Young men expect sex, but they also want us to not be able to have access to abortion. … They can’t have both.”