What Boys Learn When Powerful Men Face No Consequences

PUBLISHED 11/21/2025 by

For decades, Donald Trump has modeled a version of masculinity rooted in entitlement, impunity and the casual degradation of women—and he has done so from one of the most visible platforms on Earth. That visibility matters. When the most powerful man in the country repeatedly evades consequences for misogynous acts, it sends a potent cultural message to boys and young men about what manhood looks like and what women’s lives are worth.

This is why the stakes of the Epstein files extend far beyond Trump’s personal exposure. His ability—or inability—to finally face accountability is inseparable from the broader crisis of male socialization and the normalization of men’s violence against women.

At the same time, focusing solely on Trump risks missing the larger system that made Jeffrey Epstein’s predation possible. As feminists have long argued, these abuses were not aberrations but expressions of a patriarchal network that exploited girls and women with impunity. The Epstein saga is not simply a story of individual bad actors; it is an indictment of the cultural, financial and political institutions that protected them. Whether the public and political leaders confront that reality—or once again look away—will reveal as much about our collective values as it does about the men at the center of this scandal.

The Resistance Is Everywhere

PUBLISHED 11/21/2025 by

These past 10 months have been tough. Every day a fresh outrage, more trampling of the Constitution and a new attack on common decency. Taking a page from Hollywood, Trump and his administration seem to have embraced a strategy of “everything, everywhere all at once.” 

But, unfortunately for them: The resistance has also been everywhere all at once, too.

There is no doubt that when historians look back on this sordid moment in history, they will conclude that it was women, and feminists, who led the way out of it.

Trump’s War on Women Journalists Reveals His Fear of Truth

PUBLISHED 11/21/2025 by

There is a cold wind that blows every time Donald Trump opens his mouth to belittle a woman who dares to ask him a question. Last week, that wind swept through Air Force One when Bloomberg reporter Catherine Lucey pressed him on the Epstein files. A reasonable question in a democracy: If there’s nothing incriminating, why fight so hard to keep the documents sealed? Trump wheeled toward her, finger stabbing the air, and snarled, “Quiet! Quiet, piggy.”

Lucey returned two days later—undaunted. Her courage was met with more schoolyard taunts: “You are the worst … I don’t know why they even have you.”

That is the tell of a man losing control: a loud desperation masquerading as swagger. The sound of someone terrified that truth might be closing in.

And we will keep telling the truth about Trump, about Epstein, about the women and children harmed, exploited, dismissed, erased. We owe it to the victims who never got to ask their own questions.

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

PUBLISHED 11/20/2025 by

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.

Virginia Giuffre’s Posthumous Memoir Is an Indictment of the Men—and Institutions—That Enabled Her Abuse

PUBLISHED 11/20/2025 by

I thought I was mentally prepared to read Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s posthumous book, Nobody’s Girl. I was wrong. If reading the book was gut-wrenching, I can’t imagine what it was like for her and other girls and women who experience the horrors of being trafficked.

In the final paragraph of the book, and perhaps in some of the final sentences she ever wrote, Giuffre tells that she will have achieved her goal with Nobody’s Girl if “just one person” is moved to create “a world in which predators are punished, not protected; victims are treated with compassion, not shamed; and powerful people face the same consequences as everybody else.”

Although she never lived to see this day, her book, her courage and her rage compel us to fight for this goal in the name of all victims and survivors of sex trafficking. 

Actually It’s Good That Fewer High Schoolers Want to Get Married

PUBLISHED 11/20/2025 by

High schoolers, and especially high school girls, are less likely than ever to say that they want to get married someday, according to new research from Pew Research Center. While boys have stayed fairly stable in how many of them say they want to marry, girls have gone from overwhelmingly wanting marriage to being even less likely than boys to want to wed.

Conservative groups and writers have met this new survey with some panic. If 12th graders don’t want to get married, I guess the logic goes, then they won’t get married, and America’s declining rates of marriage and childbearing will continue and will eventually destroy society. To them, this new survey indicates a broader social shift away from marriage and childbearing, which is bad, because in their view, the nuclear family is the good and necessary backbone of any moral and functional culture. 

But actually, it’s great that far fewer high school girls are even thinking about marriage.

The teenage girls who are thinking about their weekends instead of their weddings? They’re doing something right. 

Feminists vs. Authoritarians: Honoring Leaders Holding the Line

PUBLISHED 11/19/2025 by

Greetings from Los Angeles—on the heels of a very special evening to celebrate the heart and soul of the democracy movement. On Tuesday night, Ms. paid tribute at the Global Women’s Rights Awards to bold leaders operating at the intersection of media, the law and storytelling—recognizing these as the essential trifecta for toppling authoritarianism. And, importantly, for fueling a feminist future.

Dobbs Has Triggered Widespread Discrimination in Non-Reproductive Healthcare

PUBLISHED 11/18/2025 by

In the years since Roe was overturned, physicians across a wide range of medical specialties have described how abortion bans are undermining their ability to follow evidence-based standards of care. Dermatologists, oncologists, neurologists, cardiologists and others told Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) that they are regularly forced to alter treatment plans, delay urgent care or avoid prescribing the most effective medications simply because those treatments could harm a pregnancy. These constraints are creating a chilling effect that reaches far beyond reproductive health and into the everyday practice of medicine.

As PHR’s Michele Heisler and Payal Shah explained, abortion bans are also fueling discriminatory care. Reproductive-age women are routinely denied the best available treatments, while men with the same conditions face no such barriers. Even within the group of reproductive-age women, clinicians are making decisions based on subjective judgments about a patient’s “contraceptive reliability”—a practice that opens the door to bias and disproportionately harms marginalized patients.

This two-tiered system of care is not hypothetical: It is already shaping medical decision-making in ban states, with dangerous consequences for patients’ health and lives.

Her Pregnancy Wasn’t Viable. Wisconsin’s Laws Still Made Her Fight for an Abortion.

PUBLISHED 11/18/2025 by

Abortion may be legal in Wisconsin, but the hurdles still involved forced mom Gracie Ladd, 33, to flee the state anyway.

“He recommended terminating the pregnancy because I was so low on amniotic fluid that Connor would most likely pass away before birth, which would put me at serious risk for infection. … I was aware Wisconsin had an abortion ban, but I was shocked to learn only two hospitals would do D&Es for someone 20 weeks pregnant.

“There was so much nonsense just for a woman to get essential care. …

“I received a huge amount of support from many people, even those I didn’t expect. That opened a door for me to use this experience to help other moms. … When Roe v. Wade fell, I wondered, ‘How do I help?’ But I felt insignificant, like my voice wouldn’t matter. But after this happened with Connor, it gave me a way to get involved and a reason to speak out about how abortion is healthcare.”