More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Currently premiering at Sundance, Calendar Girls is a documentary about a Florida dance troop made up of women aged 50-plus. Embracing whimsy in unicorn-themed headbands one minute and then discussing heavy subjects like death and assisted suicide the next, the Calendar Girls offer their perspectives on what it means to grow older while exploring the power of friendships, leisure, work and learning new things even later in life.
TikTok, a platform with over 1 billion monthly users, is taking new steps to protect LGBTQ and women users from harassment and hate speech. The most recent update of its Community Guidelines bans any content found to contain misogyny, as well as the misgendering and deadnaming of transgender creators. Released Tuesday, the new guidelines also clarified any content promoting or supporting so-called conversion therapy would also be a violation of the rules, along with content that promotes disordered eating.
Virtually hidden in last week’s job numbers hype was some terrible news for women: 27 times more men than women joined the labor force last month.
As the pandemic (hopefully) continues to wane and jobs come back, we need to look deeper and think long-term about fixes for women that won’t disappear when the next superbug comes along—systemic fixes like establishing a robust care infrastructure, raising the minimum wage, and strengthening workplace protections.
Tubman was the fifth of nine children born enslaved to Harriet “Rit” Green and Benjamin “Ben” Ross in Dorchester County, Md. She rescued her parents and some of her siblings, in-laws, nieces and nephews from the clutches of chattel slavery. Their descendants thus have a special connection to “Aunt Harriet.”
“We are witnessing slavery in many forms throughout the world. My advice: Don’t own anybody and don’t let anybody own you. Seek your own freedom, set yourself free, and when you do, take somebody else with you.”
Winner of the Audience Award in the World Cinema: Dramatic category, Girl Picture manages to be a rare pleasure: an introspective film chronicling the tumultuous emotions, bewildering betrayals, and passions of young adult friendships and romance without devolving into unrealistic melodrama or saccharine platitudes.
As 2022 begins, there are reasons to salute recent advancements women have made globally in the arts. But women are still underrepresented and underacknowledged in music and the arts.
I joined the activist movement nearly 30 years ago. The first year, I worked alone with no funding in a room the size of a closet. Approximately 700 women reached out for support.
Today, one in three women worldwide will suffer from domestic violence. A coalition of grassroots women’s rights activists, including myself, along with medical experts and human rights attorneys from all corners of the world are advocating for a solution: a new global agreement to end violence against women and girls.
Nina Menkes’s documentary Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power is based on a lecture Menkes, a filmmaker herself, began giving about the representation of women in film. Brainwashed has a clear thesis: The visual language of film (and its “male gaze”) objectifies women characters, a phenomenon that is further linked to employment discrimination and sexual harassment in Hollywood and beyond. (Of course, media studies and gender studies programs have been actively attempting to challenge these long-held patriarchal structures for decades.)
Calls for a cultural shift in figure skating have led to small changes in terminology and costume rules and larger changes that have created a more accepting culture for women and LGBTQ+ skaters.
Since the first biographical details about Harriet Tubman were published in Boston’s Commonwealth newspaper in July 1863, her life story has been rewritten, distorted and reimagined time and time again.
Instead of repeating inaccurate depictions of Tubman’s achievements, let’s reclaim her story, the one rooted in her own words and well documented deeds. Let’s demand deeply researched, purposeful and respectful interpretation, not “gilded haze,” to reveal the true story of this remarkable woman. If we do not challenge the myths, we lose opportunities to fully comprehend our nation’s past and the complicated histories that shape today’s cultural, racial and political discussions.