More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Gift-giving may seem small, a holiday ritual, a birthday moment, a simple gesture. But it lays a cultural and societal foundation. Children need stories that build possibilities, not break them into stereotypes. They need toys that expand their sense of self, not shrink it.
Another year of feminist struggles, another year of feminist triumphs. Our pop culture pushed back and provided many glimpses into feminist resistance throughout the culture.
This year’s top feminist moments reveal how artists, storytellers and creators confronted regressive politics with imagination, joy, righteous anger and expansive visions of humanity.
At the age of 15, Charlotte Isenberg took to social media to process complicated feelings about a miscarriage after alleged sexual abuse. That was what first brought her to the attention of antiabortion groups.
“Almost immediately, anti-abortion actors threaded a narrative for me between my grief, my miscarriage and anti-abortion sentiment. I clung to it with desperation,” Isenberg wrote.
Feeling isolated from peers due to both her traumatic experiences and the COVID-19 pandemic, Isenberg found a sense of belonging in these online spaces.
But in May 2024, at age 20, Isenberg says her birth control failed, and she became pregnant for the second time. The timing was devastating: She was unemployed, without stable housing or transportation, and preparing to relocate for college—the first in her family to access higher education.
When she couldn’t find adequate support for her unplanned pregnancy, Isenberg scheduled an appointment at her local Planned Parenthood for an abortion consultation, unsure of what she would ultimately decide. Another prominent antiabortion activist, one of Isenberg’s best friends in the movement, found out about her appointment; she and other members of the group intervened aggressively.
Despite this pressure, Isenberg was able to make the decision that was best for her and her body. Since her own abortion, she’s become a reproductive freedom activist, educating others about extremist antiabortion tactics and promoting systemic protections for people navigating reproductive healthcare.
The scandal that has preoccupied much of mainstream U.S. politics has, been, at one level, delightful: We have seen extremist Republicans—Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Thomas Massie and Nancy Mace—break with their party and its president in an effort to force into light the U.S. Department of Justice files on convicted sex trafficker and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
The story is almost irresistible for critics of the current national administration, feminists among them: Will we finally get to items from Epstein like the CD labeled “girl pics nude book 4”? What might these materials reveal? And whose misbehavior might they reveal?
Fire the starting gun on analyses from every liberal, left, critical corner. Claims abound of shifting coalitions, changing tides, pages turned, a president’s authority shredded.
But there are still as many questions stirring in the Epstein pot as there are answers. Why did these particular Republicans break from the pack? Is this a contemporary Republican version of feminism?
And beneath them all: What good does it actually do us—or Epstein’s particular victims, or the scads of other victims of sexual coercion, trafficking and other mistreatment—to raise the heat so high on this particular scandal?
The grassroots abortion-stigma-busting juggernaut Shout Your Abortion has released two new powerful public service announcements urging people across the U.S. to order abortion pills in advance to have on hand, in case they have an unwanted pregnancy.
Made by Detroit-based filmmaker Na Forest Lim, the short films follow two women—a teenager named Dani and a single mother in her 30s named Poppy—who find out they are pregnant and use abortion pills at home, supported by friends and family.
Both of the main characters have easy access to abortion pills: Dani’s friend arrives with pills in her backpack, and Poppy keeps a pack tucked away in her top dresser drawer.
Building on that vision of easy access, the Dani PSA shows what it looks like when abortion pills are already part of teenagers’ lives and a pregnancy never has the chance to become a crisis.
Rigid norms of manhood—based in manly confidence and toughness, emotional stoicism, disdain for femininity and dog-eat-dog banter—are influential among boys and young men.
Between one quarter and one half of boys and young men endorse these norms. Over half feel pressure from others to live up to them, believing most people expect them always to be confident, strong and tough.
These are some of the findings from a new Australian survey of adolescents aged 14-18 years, conducted by The Men’s Project at Jesuit Social Services.
In a climate of heightened concern about boys and young men and violent masculinity, this study provides invaluable data on boys’ and young men’s own views. This includes the pressures they feel to live up to stereotypical masculine norms and the profound impact of those beliefs.
Truth Is is a pro-choice novel in every sense of the phrase. Truth’s choice to move forward with an abortion is made early on in the novel and the majority of the book focuses on her life and her choices after her decision.
I hope that years from now, a student picks up this book and reads about the challenges that the book’s main character Truth faces and goes, “Is that really how it was back then?”
For adults who engage with Truth’s story, I want us to consider the limitations we sometimes unknowingly put on young people. I want us to consider the heights young people could reach if they were granted opportunities and community support, the way Truth ultimately does in the novel.
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.
Child marriage is a persistent, evolving, global problem, and the United States is far from immune: Between 2000 and 2018, nearly 300,000 children were married in America—most of them girls wed to adult men.
Lack of a strong legal framework to prevent child marriage in the U.S. contributes to its prevalence. Banning child marriage is still in the best interest of America’s children and teens.
You may know—and love—Dr. Jennifer Lincoln already. If you are unfamiliar, she’s a board-certified OB-GYN and a famous content creator with 2.8 million followers on TikTok and large platforms on Instagram and YouTube. Dr. Lincoln is also a practicing OB-hospitalist who works in labor and delivery, night and day.
She makes content to dispel medical misinformation, a frequent tool of the patriarchy. As ‘MAHA’ influencers decry everything from birth control to Tylenol, at the expense of women, she’s pushing back with evidence-based information.
Like most Americans, I felt uninformed about sexual reproductive health, even after my in-school health classes. In high school, I searched YouTube for information about reproductive health, where I found my way to Dr. Lincoln, who not only provided the health class I never had, but also ignited my interest in reproductive justice. Without her influence, I likely would not have become a feminist writer at Ms.
Over Zoom, I had the privilege of chatting with Dr. Lincoln about her journey from OB-GYN to viral educator, how the post-Dobbs landscape has reshaped her work, and why she believes accurate, inclusive sex education is one of the most powerful tools we have for liberation. Our conversation spanned everything from social media strategy to Christian nationalism—and what it really means to fight misinformation with empathy.