Stranger Things is a show about ordinary people doing extraordinary things. Aside from Eleven, the heroes of the show are a ragtag troop of tweens, teens and parents from the Midwest fighting off supernatural monsters. Amongst them are the mums, who, in my humble opinion, really deserve a special shout-out. Because not only are they taking on 9-foot-tall demogorgons, they’re also fighting battles on other fronts, too: they’re juggling hormonal teens, useless husbands (or ex-husbands) and a heavy dose of good old-fashioned 1980s small town America misogyny.
Courtesy of Netflix
Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder) is the most obvious example of a badass mum. Mother to Will and Jonathan, her life is already hard enough before the Upside Down starts leaking into Hawkins. She’s a single mum working long hours at a local store to provide for her sons. The boys’ father is decidedly useless – especially when Will goes missing and his only interest is the potential payout. Joyce becomes convinced that Will is speaking to her through the lights in their home and begins raging around her quaint little town demanding answers and help. She is, of course, dismissed as the slightly nutty single mum who failed. It’s a stereotype that the people of Hawkins are all too ready and willing to embrace.
Courtesy of Netflix
Watching Joyce fight not only the supernatural forces threatening her family, but also the ignorance and judgement of her humdrum neighbours makes you want to throw a fist in the air and cheer her on. In season 1, she doggedly sets up Christmas lights and finds her son. Throughout the rest of the show, she’s continued to bring this steadfast, bulldog energy. She’s tiny, clumsy, and looks wholly unprepared for any battle. But, of course, as a mum, she throws herself in front of her boys without a second thought.
Karen Wheeler (Cara Buono) is, in many ways, Joyce’s foil. The mother of Nancy, Mike and Holly, Karen is, in many ways, a stereotypical suburban housewife, complete with lazy, clued out husband, a million plates to juggle and a bit of an afternoon wine problem. She spends her blissful free time, of which there is not that much, soaking in a bubble bath with a dirty book or ogling the hot teen lifeguard at the local pool.
The man I loved didn’t fit the stereotype of an incel. He wasn’t some bitter, jobless guy raging on Reddit from his parents’ spare room. He was smart, sociable, gainfully employed — neat suit, good salary, praised by his boss. On paper, he looked like the kind of man any woman might be proud to date. But behind his polite smile was a festering resentment.
Even though he’d had relationships, he was still an incel — because his resentment never left. He wasn’t unwanted; he was just angry that the women he wanted didn’t want him back. As a younger man, he’d struggled on the dating market, only finding confidence once he had money and status. Every rejection hardened into a belief that women were shallow or “corrupted by feminism.” To him, dating wasn’t mutual — it was a hierarchy he thought he deserved to win. When things didn’t go his way, he blamed women collectively. That’s the real incel mindset: not celibacy, but entitlement.
I grew up in London — Asian, neurodiverse, the daughter of two academics. He was my opposite: white, working-class, raised in a northern village where almost everyone looked the same. His dad was a policeman, his mum a dental nurse. Their home was full of Union Jacks, their politics firmly pro-Brexit, their social feeds littered with far-right talking points and sympathy for Tommy Robinson. That was his normal.
To most people, he was the picture of “lad culture”: football, pubs, cheap flights, cage-fighting clips with his mates. But beneath the laughter was anger. He admired Trump, Farage, and Andrew Tate. He distrusted refugees. He mocked diversity initiatives. He once told me he wanted to study history through the Open University — then spent hours talking about the Third Reich as if it were a masterclass in order, not a warning of horror. His intelligence made his obsession feel deliberate, and chilling.
At work, though, he played a different role. He was confident, helpful, always volunteering to “rescue” me. His boss adored him. His colleagues saw him as dependable. And I, exhausted from masking my autism in a corporate world built for neurotypicals, let him. Gratitude became my survival tool — thank you for the help, thank you for the advice — while he quietly took control. It wasn’t kindness; it was power dressed as protection.
He’d tried similar tactics with other women in the team, but they brushed him off. I didn’t. I was the only non-white person in my cohort, already under scrutiny, and his “help” gave me breathing room. What looked like support became dependence — and dependence became control.
Outside work, he was worse. His friends were openly anti-immigrant, casually sharing memes about “remigration.” His family mirrored those views: Brexit flags, jokes about “wokeness,” complaints that Britain had “gone soft.” He wasn’t an outlier; he was part of an ecosystem where grievance passed as common sense.
That contradiction never stopped haunting me. Here was a man with every social advantage — white, male, employed, respected — and yet he saw himself as a victim. He’d built a story where he was the one betrayed by progress, by feminism, by diversity. His father’s temper, his parents’ messy split during COVID — all of it fed his sense of grievance and decline.
My feelings changed in stages: first confusion, then fear, then pity. Pity that his intelligence had been wasted on resentment. Pity that his masculinity had shrunk into dominance. Pity that he couldn’t imagine a Britain where he wasn’t on top. But pity doesn’t neutralise danger. His politics bled into everything — how he treated women, how he talked about race, how he saw the world.
If Andrews was using “women in the workplace” as a route to talk about wokeness, Sargeant was using it to talk about abortion and reproduction.
I really liked Andrews’s explanation of what makes wokeness feminized: When Douthat asks her about the “essential nature” of wokeness, she says, “Let’s pick one flavor,” and then complains about how #MeToo brought about the “mandatory” belief of women.
Nothing more feminized than believing women!
Wisdom Iheanyichukwu
I feel like the question itself is a sort of violence, but also it just reveals this obsession with denouncing wokeness and placing blame on women for men facing the consequences of the wrong things they do that get written off as manly vices. A desire for the workplace to be copacetic for all parties involved is now seen as woke. Woke is bad. Women are bad. Woke ruins the workplace. Women cause woke, so women ruin the workplace.
Have women ruined the workplace? Have people ruined the Chicken Dance? A lot of inconsequential questions that don’t really need to be asked.
It’s interesting to focus on whether women ruin the workplace when women are many a time existing within the constraints of male-dominated spaces where men are acting out, which suggests an issue lies within the men, and not the women, of that space.
A multitude of the examples of how women ruin the workplace are just traits misattributed to femininity, while in reality they are not exclusively that, as women and men can behave in similar manners and fail at the same things. If the idea is that women are unfit to be in the workplace because it is “unnatural” for them, then I raise, it’s also unnatural for men. Women are not the only ones who find fault with the systems in place at work, but why are they the only ones being asked to divorce themselves from the workplace? Being restrained to a workplace for the majority of one’s week, being forced to prioritize work over one’s self and needs, is unnatural for humans in general. What we see is people being placed into situations and institutions where different levels of power are stripped from them, and these people then act out, or they don’t always behave in a manner conducive to everyone’s well-being. And so, rather than asking if women are ruining the workplace, we should be asking if the workplace is ruining the people. The workplace is unnatural; it is not a foundational aspect of human nature, so regardless of whoever dominated the space first or dominates it presently, we should be focusing on creating spaces that everyone can exist within in a copacetic manner.
With his overwhelming victory in the New York Mayoral race, Zohran Mamdani has proven that childcare is a key election-winning issue.
A very simple reality helped the new Mayor beat his billionaire-backed rival, Andrew Cuomo: it’s obscenely expensive to exist in New York City. And in America’s most expensive city, who can possibly afford to have children?
The staggering cost of childcare in particular (upwards of $26,000 a year in NYC) is literally driving families out of the city where they live, work and pay taxes. And if they’re not leaving the city altogether, parents, mainly mothers, are being forced to give up work to do unpaid childcare.
On this side of the pond, the cost of living, including the spiralling cost of housing, has also led to families fleeing cities, depleting schools of children and forcing them to close. Parts of London are being described as a ‘child desert’, and I have seen valued primary schools having to shut their doors in Brighton, my constituency, as costs for families continue to outstrip wages.
That is one reason why Mamdani’s pledge to deliver universal free childcare is a policy I’ve already been shouting about in my work as a Green MP. His view of childcare as an essential social service is precisely the approach I am taking, working with the fantastic Mandu Reid, the former leader of the Women’s Equality Party, who has an unwavering passion for how this policy could transform every sector of our society.
Mandu is a parent with direct experience of the pressures of finding affordable childcare, and I am not, but together we both recognise that everyone in society benefits when parents (and often grandparents, who often pick up the slack) are supported in bringing up the next generation. This is about free as in freedom, as well as free of cost.
In July, Mandu and I published a manifesto for a Universal Early Years Future. We listened to parents, childcare workers, service providers and children to expose the gaps in the current system that puts the burden on parents to claim the limited allowances and hunt out the scarce providers who can cover the hours they need. Meanwhile, the sector is loudly calling out the rates paid to them under the government’s policies and raising the alarm about their inability to keep a valued workforce on the job.
That is why our call is for readily available childcare, free at the point of use, based on the values and principles that our NHS is built on.
Not just in New York City, but across the UK, we need to start investing in childcare the same way we do in hospitals and railways, and regard it as essential national infrastructure. With this approach, we too can build a system that improves developmental and educational outcomes, supports early years workers, and relieves parents of undue financial and organisational burdens.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre arrives for a news conference in 2024. Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
The girlboss is dead, or so I thought. She belonged to a brief moment in a longer struggle over women and our suitability for life outside the home. Now the home might swallow us up: The right wing dreads “the longhouse,” ruled by women and their “weepy moralism,” or “the great feminization” of society. The girlboss had begun to look quaint by the time I picked up Karine Jean-Pierre’s new book, Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines. She is best known as Joe Biden’s former White House press secretary, the first Black and openly LGBTQ+ person in the role, and she earned some attention earlier this year when she announced she was leaving the Democratic Party to become — don’t hold your breath — an independent. The memoir is short, which is a mercy. Reading it made me wonder if I’d consumed a life-altering quantity of Benadryl and hallucinated a trip back in time. She writes as if the year is still 2014 and a woman’s professional accomplishments outweigh moral considerations. The girlboss lives after all.
A review in the Washington Post called Jean-Pierre an “artifact of an age that looks recent on paper but feels prehistoric in practice,” defined by “the word ‘empowerment,’ the musical ‘Hamilton,’ the cheap therapeutic entreaties to ‘work on yourself’ and ‘lean in’ to various corporate abysses.” Indeed, the phrase self-care appears in the book, though not in jest. There’s little independence on display, either, as she devotes page after page to the magnanimity and sharp instincts of Biden. The girlboss might lean in, self-advocate, [insert cliché here], but she works within the system, not outside it. The same goes for Jean-Pierre, whatever her subtitle suggests. Instead, she’s still doing the job that Biden once paid her to do — and poorly. The Biden we all saw during his catastrophic debate with Donald Trump did not exist. She says he simply had a cold. She believed in him, though I’m still not sure why. She writes, incessantly, of her own feelings and comfort, or the lack thereof. During the Democratic National Convention, Jean-Pierre turned off the TV “and nestled against the cushions of my living room couch.” (Must have been nice.) The White House press corps was too mean to Biden — but not nearly as mean as it was to Jean-Pierre, who berates reporters for publishing “jabs” and “thoughtless gossip” about the quality of her work.
Sometimes she looks away from her mirror to consider the rest of the world. This produces a few trenchant observations, like “It was during Covid, a bizarre as well as historic moment,” and “In this political moment, we need to find ways to maintain our individuality even as we build coalitions.” Good talk, thanks. Elsewhere, she recalls the uprisings of 2020, which followed the police murder of George Floyd and launched “a vigorous conversation about being antiracist” with books like “White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo gaining in popularity.” Dinosaurs walk the earth, but how dangerous are they? Biden is no longer in power, and neither is Jean-Pierre. Independent is more of an audition to co-host The View than a serious analysis of the Democratic Party and its troubles, and it fails on both counts. Still, it’s hard to dismiss Jean-Pierre, if only for what she represents. The girlboss has always been more than an empty pantsuit.
When Sheryl Sandberg published Lean In in 2013, she sought “to redefine what revolution means,” the ex–Facebook employee Kate Losse wrote in Dissent magazine. If feminist goals were once understood as the end point of a collective struggle to restructure society itself, Sandberg offered something else. In Lean In, revolution was “a battle to restructure the self,” Losse argued. Sandberg is hardly the sole — or even the most important — architect of our present woes, but she is a useful study. The writer Susan Faludi observed “little tangible cross-class solidarity” from Sandberg and her ilk, who preferred instead to contemplate themselves or, more rarely, women of similar status. When Margaret Thatcher died — and left a trail of misery behind her corpse — the official Lean In Facebook page asked followers to post their warmest memories of her career, Faludi wrote. Thatcher had clawed her way to the top, and that mattered more than anything else she’d done. In Independent, Jean-Pierre credits Thatcher for wielding “power with such force that she was dubbed the ‘Iron Lady’” and honors her alongside Golda Meir, the former prime minister of Israel, who expanded illegal settlements and said that Palestinians “did not exist” at the founding of her nation.
If strong female leadership is valuable in its own right, individual success takes precedence over the public good. Independent has something in common with PragerU’s Women of Valor, a children’s book that celebrates the history-making achievements of Thatcher’s and Meir’s, whether Jean-Pierre intends this or not. The girlboss has priorities, but they are centered on herself; her compass always points inward. Jean-Pierre was the voice of the U.S. government, a responsibility she demotes to a form of self-actualization. She exempts herself from introspection and regret. Did Biden, the hero, get anything wrong? Did she? Israeli forces killed thousands of Palestinians with arms that Biden sold them, but Jean-Pierre never questions him or admits her complicity. The genocide in Gaza is some “terrible conflict.” Biden announced a temporary cease-fire toward the end of his presidency. End scene. “It was a whirlwind, leaving me little time to reflect about endings or beginnings, whether they were Biden’s or my own,” she writes.
I then recalled a BuzzFeed News listicle that still haunts me. Midway through the first Trump term, an illustrator in Brooklyn created a series of prints that depict “impactful women through history having their period,” as BuzzFeed put it. Sacagawea’s naked rear hovered over a shrub. Joan of Arc sat on a wooden board with a hole in it. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was perched on a toilet, still in her robes. The point, allegedly, was to celebrate #MightyMenstruation and the power of women, who get shit done while bleeding once a month. We could have it all, a legal career and a regular cycle, the dreams of our foremothers realized at last. The message was a little archaic even in 2018. The age of the girlboss was already synonymous with surrender, and a menacing era for American women had gotten underway. Ginsburg bore some of the blame. Two years after that listicle, she died on the bench and gave Trump a prized opportunity to replace her with Amy Coney Barrett. Roe v. Wade did not last much longer.
The girlboss was cringe — and dangerous, too. Underneath the kitsch, she’s a mercenary, and she persists because of powerful incentives for her behavior. Jean-Pierre is right: The Democratic Party is broken. But she’d have to look beyond herself in order to tell us why. “Being independent means refusing to silence your voice just so you can belong,” she concludes. Our voices carry further when we have something of substance to say. Otherwise, we’re just making noise.
Glamour’s Women of the Year Awards are officially back for 2025, and this year, it’s all about sisterhood. We’re gathering an array of Hollywood stars, musicians, activists, and communities to celebrate the trail-blazing women who have shaped the culture this year with their passion, creativity, and bravery.
Taking place on Thursday, 30th October at 180 The Strand, the Glamour Women of the Year Awards will shine a light on the importance of celebrating sisterhood and solidarity during a particularly fraught year for women’s rights.
Speaking about her first Glamour Women of the Year Awards as Head of Editorial Content, Kemi Alemoru said: “This year, WOTY is all about sisterhood. It’s a year of firsts: the first time we’ve had a theme for the event, our first as a globalised brand, and also my first curation as the new Head of Editorial Content at the magazine. I’m so excited to invite you all to witness the new vision we’re shaping together — one that is unapologetic in championing collectives, making space for collaborators who have been integral to each other’s incredible journeys, passing the megaphone to marginalised voices, and, above all, creating a space of hope, unity, and community in a divisive landscape.”
Vick Hope, the legendary TV and radio presenter, journalist, and author, will be hosting the illustrious awards ceremony in central London. And for the first time we have Ayamé Ponder as our Simple red carpet host and Deba Hekmat as our roving reporter sparking connections with our guests in the party for Tinder. Yep, this is gonna be good.
Kemi continues: “From music powered by our chart-topping honourees and music and nightlife curators – including the women-led radio station Foundation FM and Pxssy Palace, who soundtrack festivals and dancefloors across the UK – to a new award customised by rising muralist Zoe Power, it’s an honour to create a space that exhibits the work of such passionate, talented, camp, and multifaceted women from different walks of life who make Britain so interesting.”
None of this would be possible without our Supporting Partners, Simple and Tinder, as well as Nobu Portman Square as our Official Hotels Partner, Cupra as our Official Car Partner, and Parfums de Marly who we are thrilled to welcome into the Glamour WOTY family.
Last year’s winners included the likes of Bridgerton star Simone Ashley, who used her acceptance speech to call out everyday sexism; The Little Mermaid actor Chloë Bailey, who spoke about the importance of uplifting the next generation of women; and Hollywood royalty Pamela Anderson, who powerfully said in her Glamour interview, “It’s important, no matter where you are in your beauty journey, to accept yourself as you are.”
You can follow all the action from Glamour‘s Women of the Year Awards, including all the looks from the red carpet and – of course – the big winners from the night, here and on Glamour‘s social channels on Thursday, 30th October:
The Wages for Housework campaign demanded economic power the average housewife otherwise lacked. Photo: Bettye Lane/Schlesinger Library
For a little while, American women had more rights than their foremothers. That’s no longer true after Dobbs, which accelerated a much older assault on legal abortion, and the law is only half the story. The day of the girlboss is over, and with her goes the valorization of individual choice. We once heard that our place was in the White House but that if we wanted to stay in the kitchen, that was all right too. Choice feminism was a political fiction; it presumed autonomy, which we had not yet won. Liberalism has no answer for the vengeful anti-feminist backlash that is taking its place. Women are entering a new era of struggle.
Although we still have choices, they are limited and under renewed threat. To Vice-President J.D. Vance, “childless cat ladies” threaten an essential American project; by withholding children, they withhold the most meaningful social contribution they can make. President Trump once proposed a vague “tax credit” for family caregiving, which is largely performed by women, but never released a formal plan and is silent on the matter now. Secular pronatalists say they want to create mothers, not housewives, but in prizing fertility rates above reproductive liberty, they offer women a familiar fate. The most extreme Christian nationalists are so keen to keep us down that they would deny us the vote. If they are correct, and a woman is wired by God or biology to stay in the kitchen, then she deludes herself by desiring anything else. “It’s in our nature,” the influencer Alex Clark said recently. Women who prioritize career over family life are “more medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome than women need to be,” Scott Yenor of Boise State University said at the National Conservatism conference in 2021.
The problem with the kitchen is not the kitchen itself but who’s in it and how she got there. If women are so suited to domestic labor, perhaps we’d be happier — but in Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Social Safety Net, the sociologist Jessica Calarco depicts an immiserated generation. To Calarco, policy works alongside social conditioning to keep women in place. Pronatalism did not begin yesterday, or even with Dobbs. Instead, most women hear early in their lives that motherhood is a unique source of personal fulfillment, if not a religious or cultural obligation. But motherhood is not just a biological relationship; it is a social role with political implications, and without a functional safety net, it can also become a weight around a woman’s neck.
Through policymaking and social conditioning, women are still the nation’s caregivers, often at the expense of our own wellbeing. We thus have one leg in a trap the Wages for Housework movement sought to blow open decades ago. As the historian Emily Callaci recounts in her new book, Wages for Housework: The Feminist Fight Against Unpaid Labor, a global and multiracial coalition of women in the 1970s demanded recognition for the work they did at home and more. Economic power would be a step toward a new and liberatory world. That world is still possible, decades later, no matter how distant it may appear.
To write Holding It Together, Calarco carried out a series of sweeping research surveys, beginning in 2018, and reached thousands of participants. Her subjects are ideologically, geographically, and racially diverse, an overdue departure from the usual narratives about women and work. Stack up the books and the hot takes about who’s opting out and why, and the principle characters will be white-collar women of means. Calarco takes a broader view, and her analysis is richer for it. The women she interviews offer complex and sometimes unexpected conclusions about the decisions they make and the labor they perform. Their experiences, while distinct, complete a portrait of thwarted ambition and desire. A woman who dreams of children and a large family can still long for autonomy and resent its absence. Unless she has wealth of her own, her choices are often restricted by the decisions of others: her spouse, his employer, and policymakers.
Calacro speaks with Audrey, who wanted her toddler daughter to have a sibling. Then she lost her retail job in 2020, the first year of the pandemic. Unemployment was difficult for her. The job “had been the thing that helped most in overcoming” her postpartum depression, Calarco writes, and Audrey wanted to delay her next child. Though she couldn’t tolerate hormonal birth control, her husband, Colby, wouldn’t wear condoms, and one day he didn’t pull out, either. “It’s very clear that it wasn’t something I was okay with,” she tells Calarco later. “It wasn’t something that I consented to.” Although she believes sexual assault is an “appropriate” term for Colby’s abuse, she says that many in her life disagree. She relies on their Evangelical church friends for emotional support and practical help with meals and child care, and they disapprove of abortion and divorce. Audrey fears she can’t afford to leave Colby, either. She’d need paid work again, which means she’d also need to pay for child care on top of her credit-card payments, medical debt, and car loans, “which totaled more than $40,000,” Calarco writes.
Even if a woman’s partner or co-parent tries to be involved and supportive, structural inequalities make it difficult for her to exercise whatever freedom she has on paper. In 2019, Sierra, a young Black woman who lived in Indiana with her toddler son, worked as many hours as her fast-food job would allow. She earned less than $1,000 a month, which qualified her for WIC, welfare, and Medicaid, but the benefits weren’t enough to lift her out of poverty. Her child’s father, Derek, moved to Alabama to work in poultry processing, and Sierra followed him so their son would grow up with both parents nearby. When the pandemic struck, Derek managed to hold on to his job, but they struggled to pay for necessities until the federal government mailed their first stimulus checks. That money gave them breathing room, which paid work had not delivered, and Sierra got to spend more time with her son. “We do finger painting, and we color,” Sierra tells Calarco. What more could any mother want?
As Calarco observes, a woman’s wants matter less to policymakers than the unpaid work she performs. Put another way, America needs women, but it doesn’t need women to be people. A woman is too often defined by what she can do for others and not by her innate dignity and worth. Someone has to change a baby’s diapers. Someone has to supervise a grandparent with dementia. Either Supermom does it herself, or she pays another, more precariously situated woman for her labor. Calarco writes that our “DIY society” depends on “the magic of women.” But it’s not magic — it’s work. There are no miracles here.
Who should a woman blame for her condition? There are many villains in our lives, and sometimes they are male. Although American men do more household work than ever before, a discrepancy persists, and women make up the difference. Still, most of us don’t live in a sitcom, even if we’re heterosexual. If women are human beings, so are men, and we all make decisions within certain constraints. I can count on one hand the number of times my father ever played with me, or cooked dinner, or scrubbed a toilet. When I’m searching for an explanation, I can refer to our Evangelical convictions, or to my father himself, but if that’s where I stop, I’ll never get the full truth. We needed my father’s income, such as it was, and our economic reality bracketed a hoary old hierarchy. My father won the bread, and my mother, naturally, did everything else.
In 1975, the Italian scholar Silvia Federici wrote of a distinct problem with housework. Unlike waged work, housework was not only “imposed on women” but “transformed into a natural attribute of our female physique and personality, an internal need, an aspiration, supposedly coming from the depth of our female character,” she wrote in Wages Against Housework, perhaps her most famous essay. A wage is a form of recognition, even leverage, that the archetypal housewife lacks. Though a woman might liberate herself in a limited way through wealth or education, she is not free as long as housework remains “a feminine attribute,” Federici wrote. A half-century later, the right is proving her point in the crudest terms possible. “Having children is more important than having a good career,” the late Charlie Kirk told women. America’s “DIY society” is built on similar sentiments, as Calarco writes. It’s capitalism by another name.
Illustration: Jacquie Ursula Caldwell/Library of Congress
To Federici and her comrades in the Wages for Housework movement, the housewife was trapped in the same web as her husband, even if she occupied a different and less advantageous location within it. In Emily Callaci’s new book on the movement, she describes it as a “critique not only of women’s oppression, but of global capitalism in its entirety.” Some members demanded a literal sum for the domestic work of women; others did not. As Callaci observes in her introduction, the movement could be somewhat controversial, even in the world of second-wave feminism, but the basic analysis is difficult to refute. A woman can’t escape capitalism by vanishing into her home. Once she is there, love — for her children and, maybe, their father — becomes one more restriction on her life.
Callaci writes that for Mariarosa Dalla Costa, another prominent Italian scholar, autonomy is a “central” notion. Influenced by operaismo, which considered “work the means to a paycheck” and not “a source of identity,” Dalla Costa does not think of autonomy as a form of isolation but rather the opposite. In Dalla Costa’s postcapitalist vision, a woman is no longer stuck in the kitchen, alone with her children. Once she is free to share the work with others, in communal laundries and nurseries and elder-care homes, her identity becomes hers to define. To campaigners, liberation was a material goal, not a mere slogan. Before Wilmette Brown co-founded Black Women for Wages for Housework, she joined the Black Panthers in Berkeley, California, during the late 1960s. There, Callaci writes, “she would have participated in discussions about Black self-determination and autonomy,” and she was “drawn” to the work of Frantz Fanon, who sought “reparations, rather than charity, for formerly colonized peoples.” Brown, a lesbian, was not living a traditional life, but as she wrote later, the perspective of Wages for Housework “made it possible” for her “to connect with other Black women in whatever situation, because we are all struggling against housework, against heterosexual discipline, heterosexual work discipline, and for money — to be independent.”
In the most pedantic reading of history, Wages for Housework might seem like a failure. Whether we call it housework or care work, most women around the world still perform it without much recognition, let alone pay. A future without capitalism feels especially distant in the U.S. But Callaci is too skilled a historian to lapse into easy literalism. A radical vision may defy a simple translation into policy and retain all of its value. Ideas can have unpredictable afterlives, as Callaci shows. Although the campaign has faded, Callaci’s subjects apply their energy and their principles to other, linked struggles: the decriminalization of sex work, an end to war, and the preservation of our environment. In the early aughts, the late scholar and activist Andaiye launched a Wages for Housework campaign in her native Guyana, protesting the austerity measures imposed by the IMF and the World Bank on countries like hers. Others, like the writer and activist Selma James, still want cash for caregiving. “Once we have it, it is very hard for them to take it away,” she said at an event that Callaci attended.
Cash helps. A woman can buy some mobility with it, but freedom is more elusive. In Women Talking, the novel by Miriam Toews, a group of Mennonite men have drugged and raped women and girls in their community. (The novel is based on a real crime.) When the women gather in secret to discuss their response, one cautions, “When we have liberated ourselves, we will have to ask ourselves who we are.” It is the same question we all face, no matter what’s in our pockets.
No policymaker ordered Calarco’s subjects home, or forced a career woman to do most of the housework, but no one had to. Housework still codesfeminine, and so does caregiving itself. We are circling the kitchen, warily, wondering if the door will shut on us and who might lock us in. Everyone is explaining our desires to us, our nature, through polling numbers and white papers and the almighty discourse, and there is no room for women to be people.
Consider The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto, a new book by the Catholic writer Leah Libresco Sargeant. In Sargeant’s view, autonomy is impossible, and that is especially true for women. Because most of us can give birth, we are “shaped by dependance” in ways that men are not, and we cannot free ourselves by denying our essence. If “the freedom we enjoy is imagined to be the freedom to ‘control … one’s destiny’ rather than to shape it within natural constraints,” she writes, “then the whole outside world becomes women’s enemy because it does not bow to our will.” The Wages for Housework campaign is still relevant, she adds later, if only because it named the value of unwaged domestic labor, but that is where she leaves it. Women “can’t live fully within the lie of autonomy,” she writes. She proposes “caregiver credits” as partial compensation for work that mostly falls on women, and in her role at the right-leaning Niskanen Center, she once called for a one-time “baby bonus” payment to new parents. To some, that’s enough: She spoke at the Abundance Conference this year.
Others concede that women might pursue their interests, if only within those “natural constraints.” Earlier this year, Scott Yenor wrote a piece for the right-wing Institute for Family Studies where he set out a taxonomy of “tradwives.” The “side-hustle wife” is an “ambitious, intelligent woman” who does a bit of “extra work” to help the family finances, he explained. She finds meaning in her paid work, but not too much; she believes her husband should be the provider. To her, motherhood is “worth the sacrifice,” and it is “the most important thing” in her life. Some conservatives are more explicit about what they’re asking women to surrender. In an interview with Albert Mohler of the Southern Baptist Convention, podcaster and author Allie Beth Stuckey attacks the abortion-rights movement for telling women they have “a desire that needs to be fulfilled, and that is to be autonomous,” a political sensibility that lacks “the constraint of the sacrifice of motherhood.” A woman should give up her body, her time, and even her mind.
If a woman must choose between dependence on a husband and his employer or dependence on her own wage, the latter is preferable to the former. Some choices are indeed better than others. And yet a woman with a salary makes sacrifices too. Whether she likes her job, or tolerates it, or actively loathes it, she surrenders most of her time and cognitive effort to an employer who might not think she’s a person, either. Her wants don’t matter on the job site. “Work has not brought us liberation, freedom, or even much joy,” the journalist Sarah Jaffe wrote in Work Won’t Love You Back. Calarco’s subject, Audrey, needs her own steady income and a more egalitarian church, but more than that, she needs a different sort of world. A baby bonus won’t get us there, and neither will a side hustle. The women of Wages for Housework “wanted to confront collectively the present systems of social production and reproduction rather than merely individually escape them,” explains the scholar Kathi Weeks, who prefers a guaranteed basic income. If that income met our “basic needs,” a person could “refuse waged work entirely,” though most would likely pursue a “supplementary wage,” Weeks adds in The Problem With Work. Autonomy is neither isolation or “interchangeability between the sexes,” as Sargeant put it, but a form of self-determination. It is the freedom to decide, for yourself, who you are and what you want.
I always knew I didn’t want my mother’s life, and as I entered my early 20s, her fate terrified me so deeply that I thought I had to define myself against her or the women around me. Some night, as I neared the end of my time at an Evangelical college, I watched three couples enter the dining hall. The men sat down. The women stayed upright and started walking away to fetch dinner for their boyfriends. Because I was young and righteous and sad, I asked them why they were doing it. They looked shocked at the question. “We want to do this,” one said. “It’s just an act of service.”
Only years later did I realize that I’d gotten it wrong, in my anger. Why did I say something to the women and not their smug men? Why didn’t I shake my fist at the religion we shared, which told us from birth that God made us subservient? I was so pleased with my own choices. I would not become my mother. And I haven’t, and still we’re not so different, my mother and I. Sometimes a woman makes a bad choice because it’s the best of her terrible options. Revolution begins there.
When I started at university in Cambridge, there was a whole new language to learn, along with making new friends, attending tutorials, and figuring out where things were in a new city. There were DOSs (director of studies), quads (short for quadrangle, a kind of internal courtyard), pigeonholes (where students’ mail is left for them) and something called swaps.
A few weeks into term, about twelve other first-year girls and I received invites in our pidges to a swap with the boys’ drinking society at our college. It turned out that a swap (also called a ‘crew date’ at Oxford University) was a dinner that usually happens between drinking societies or with their invitees. I’d heard rumours of drinking societies before I went to Cambridge – they sometimes attract the attention of the national press after all – but I hadn’t realised that pretty much every college has them, many of them very old, complete with traditions and sometimes even a specific uniform like a tie.
If I’m honest with myself, it felt exciting and a little bit special to be invited. Only a select bunch of fresher girls were chosen, looking back mostly white, thin, privately educated girls, and we got ready together, going past the Porter’s Lodge in small groups to avoid suspicion. It was only at the swap itself that I began to feel uneasy.
We went to the dingy basement of a restaurant that I would later find out was infamous for hosting swaps – a few restaurants in Oxford and Cambridge were rumoured to make good money off drinking societies, tolerating raucous, sometimes downright anti-social behaviour that other establishments wouldn’t. It was too loud to hear anyone speak, and the boys were more focused on drinking games and chants of ‘chug!’. I mostly talked to the other girls, anyway – I couldn’t help but think we’d be better off hanging out in one of our rooms.
I went on a couple more swaps with boys from other colleges, but I never felt totally comfortable, and sometimes I was scared. One time, another fresher called me uptight because I was sitting with my arms crossed. I’d later go on to find out years later that he’d been convicted of sexually assaulting another student. More run-of-the-mill was just a general embarrassment at the entitled behaviour I saw and the gross boasting of the boys (including the claim from a pair of drinking society presidents that they’d recreated David Cameron’s rumoured performing of a sex act on a dead pig’s head – something the former PM strongly denies).
So when I was invited to the equivalent girls’ drinking society at my college, it initially seemed like a welcome alternative. Perhaps even an antidote to the toxic masculinity associated with men’s drinking societies and their traditions, like Caesarean Sunday (named after Jesus College’s men’s drinking society), where students get drunk and fight on Jesus Green.
When there’s a huge problem with sexual assault and harassment on British campuses, a group of young women supporting each other and not adhering to sexist ideas of how young women should behave is understandably appealing. As Cora, a former drinking society member who is now in her late twenties, says, “There’s something subversive and intoxicating about women behaving badly. It’s attractive; the idea of finding a sense of community and belonging.”
Most of the members of the girls’ drinking society lived in one big house in the college grounds, where they hosted our initiations. Although a lot less extreme than the boys’ initiations, where they supposedly had to have a ‘designated driver’ to look after them because they were expected to throw up from alcohol, I still didn’t like them. One of the two presidents tried to get me to do a shot of tequila with an insect in it. I said no because I’m a vegetarian, but she made it clear she found that lame.
I stayed as part of the drinking society for most of the rest of my time at uni, but I began to feel increasingly conflicted. I wanted to hang out with my friends, but as a bi woman, I began to find the whole setup overwhelmingly heterosexual. Cora, who realised she was queer after uni, says, “There were very strict gender norms and expectations based on gender.” On swaps, it is customary to sit boy/girl/boy/girl. Although the drinking society I was in was fairly casual and sometimes non-binary people came to our pre-drinks, it still felt like a very straight space with an implicit goal of same-sex hook-ups.
Just seven days after the midnight release of Taylor Swift‘s twelfth album, The Life of a Showgirl has inexplicably become her most controversial. But are the lyrics really that offensive? Or is it the listeners who got… weird?
Look, we’re not talking about the intentional spicy lines, like Actually Romantic seemingly igniting a feud with Charli XCX, letting everyone know she might have her more controversial friends’ backs on CANCELLED!, or getting dirtier than she’s ever gotten singing about Travis Kelce‘s Wood. All that we expected. No, these are takes we could never have anticipated because, well… frankly they’re such leaps in logic they defy reason!
Tradwife Propaganda
Listeners are interpreting her desire to get married and have children as… conservative tradwife propaganda. Um… WHAT?!?
Y’all. The patriarchal tradwife thing is not about wanting a husband and kids. It’s actually the opposite! That’s about women being forced into the position of being a full-time wife and baby factory — because they’re seen as the property of men. Taylor saying she wants that stuff for herself is making a choice.
Taylor isn’t being anti-feminist here. She’s just telling everyone what she wants. Which we should all be fine with. LOVE IS LOVE, remember that? It works the other way, too!
Also, let’s not forget, even if Tay retired right now she’d remain one of the most successful humans in their chosen field OF ALL TIME. That’s not what a tradwife is. Tradwives are basically teenagers drafted into marriage like chattel. Taylor looks great, but let’s not forget she’s 35 years old! And richer than her husband-to-be by A LOT. This ain’t that.
Oh, and Tay herself said she’s NOT retiring just because she got married. And in fact she finds that assumption “shockingly offensive” by the way.
Also from WI$H LI$T? Some “fans” somehow pulled the idea Taylor wants to propagate the white race like she’s Elon Musk. Why? Because she sang about wanting to:
“Have a couple kids, got the whole block looking like you”
See, Trav is a white man, so she clearly is saying she only wants everyone on the block to be white. And voila, the song about not being into modern materialistic desires is actually… promoting eugenics.
You can see a lot more about that theory and the Swifties blasting it HERE. (Oh, and also take a listen toKylie Kelce hilariously explaining why that’s much funnier if you know the Kelces and their frustratingly dominant genes.)
Also, here’s a response we really love from Saints tight end Juwan Johnson and his wife Chanen…
So. Cute. Too bad Juwan is clearly a white supremacist, right? Y’all see how ridiculous you sound now??
Homophobia
In her track Actually Romantic, Tay takes a new tactic on the diss track. She likens someone’s nonstop, compulsive hatred of her to, well… a romantic obsession. She’s basically saying that Charli XCX — or whoever it’s about, more than one person in all likelihood — talking about her all the time doesn’t feel dangerous, it’s harmless. It’s even flattering, like a crush.
But there’s a contingent who are just champing at the bit to call out Taylor for being homophobic, so they say it’s gay panic. They figure since she’s a woman and Charli is a woman, she’s basically calling someone gay as an insult…
Forget the fact Taylor loves the LGBTQ community, was the first pop star to cast a trans actor as a love interest in a music video, and has been vocal politically mostly about this topic.
She doesn’t speak about politics much, but she did tweet in 2021 that she had her “Fingers crossed and praying that the Senate will see trans and lgbtq rights as basic human rights.” In 2018, she also spoke out against the anti-LGBT legislation of Tennessee congresswoman Marsha Blackburn, saying:
“I believe in the fight for LGBTQ rights, and that any form of discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender is WRONG. I believe that the systemic racism we still see in this country towards people of color is terrifying, sickening and prevalent. I cannot vote for someone who will not be willing to fight for dignity for ALL Americans, no matter their skin color, gender or who they love.”
You can listen to what she’s explicitly saying about the matter… or you can infer that she secretly means whatever makes her look the worst. One of those choices respects her and gives her agency.
Racism & Misogynoir
Oof, OK, this is a big one.
There’s a theory that Taylor is not only racist but specifically obsessed with Black women — as it relates to the men she dates. Travis Kelce’s most recent longterm relationship before her was with a woman named Kayla Nicole — and critics are pairing that with some lyrics and doing a hop, skip, and a jump to… misogynoir, the hatred of Black women.
(c) MEGA/WENN/Kayla Nicole/Instagram
The pop delight Opalite is pretty clearly about Tay’s new romance with Trav. She sings about why this is relationship feels so right in comparison with past ones. That means, yes, a bit of a swipe at Kayla. Tay sings:
“You couldn’t understand it / Why you felt alone / You were in it for real / She was in her phone / And you were just a pose”
Folks have taken this to be about Kayla not just because she was Trav’s most recent ex but also because of resurfaced video of the NFL star and his then-WAG living this exact scenario.
That’s nothing wrong with a songwriter singing about their own relationship, and this is all personal stuff. We just know it because Taylor is the most scrutinized woman alive! But again, nothing about race at all.
However, at the same time, the whole song uses the metaphor of opalite, a bright, glittery man-made gemstone, to represent happiness, while the black mineral onyx is used to represent difficult times. People are interpreting this to say dating Black women was what made Trav upset, now he’s with her and all is white in the world. It is SUCH a stretch.
Darkness, night, stormy weather, all classic representations of sadness — ones which Tay also uses in the song. And sunshine and light represent safety, rescue, and hope. Why? Well, they pretty much always have throughout human history. Probably something to do with early man getting lost to predators and accidents in the scary dark, and being safer when it was brighter and everyone could see? In any case, it’s like all of culture, thousands of poems, songs, plays, films…
But when Taylor does it it’s a sign she’s been secretly racist all this time?? Come on, now! Really??
We’ll let some folks explain who have a little more expertise…
But seriously, Taylor has ALWAYS, quite consistently been against racism. She had the courage to blast the President of the United States for “stoking the fires of white supremacy and racism.” And she’s been reaping his wrath ever since.
And when white nationalists tried to embrace her as an “Aryan goddess” in 2019, she did what Trump was never willing to do when they embraced him — she very clearly and explicitly denounced them, telling The Guardian:
“There’s literally nothing worse than white supremacy. It’s repulsive. There should be no place for it.”
You can listen to what she says when she’s not being poetic, making her feelings on the matter clear! Or… You can listen to a song about finding happiness, in which she sings:
“You were dancing through the lightning strikes / Sleepless in the onyx night / But now the sky is opalite”
And assume her secret intention is to take down Black women. Sigh.
Not Political Enough??
In addition to those who think the whole album is a MAGA dog whistle, there are others complaining about Taylor not getting political. For real! We’ve seen tons of posts where people are saying Tay isn’t speaking to the political moment.
Had to block one of my favorite TikTokers (she talks about geography) cause she listened to Showgirl and complained about it not having a song about Palestine pic.twitter.com/lA5KPqJd67
And this isn’t just TikTokers either, we’ve seen actual music critics write whole think pieces about this!
We mean, at least it’s accurate? This album isn’t political. But Tay has never really made political music. It’s mostly been about her relationships, her feelings, what it’s like for a girl going through big life moments… It’s all really personal stuff. Interpretations of politics just aren’t her thing.
There are plenty of folk and classic rock and punk bands to go to for that sort of thing. Like, if Green Day put out Dookie II right now? And completely ignored the rise of fascism? After American Idiot? We could see their fans being pretty disappointed in them. But this feels like ordering pizza and complaining there isn’t enough standup comedy on it.
It’s OK to make something fun and cheerful if that’s your gift! And we’ll let this Swiftie give everyone an excellent explanation WHY!
I live in fucking warzone and Taylor’s music is one of the only things keeping me going, so leave her the fuck alone. She’s one of the only good things about your country, honestly. https://t.co/s5dkJU1Cas
— Marie❤️???? (Taylor’s Version) (@harrypurplebow) October 10, 2025
The WILDEST Takes
Stuff gets crazier. The worst faith takes are actually saying Tay’s album is somehow celebrating the genocide in Gaza… Or that Taylor comparing a hater to “a toy Chihuahua barking at me from a tiny purse” is racist against… can you guess? Asians! Yes, because apparently Chihuahua is a “slur to Asian or half Asian people” — ignoring the context that it’s a well-known dog breed, and she’s explicitly using the term in the context of the dog breed.
But one of the most insulting? We’ve seen multiple hot takes from critics saying Taylor was about to become transphobic. Not that she’s currently transphobic, not that there’s any evidence of that at all. No, they’re going full Minority Report and saying they just feel in their gut that she’s going to go full JK Rowling any second.
They’re calling Taylor a transphobe bc she doesn’t care about online losers opinions pic.twitter.com/KMSVyj9pTq
As a trans woman it’s disappointing to see how people here fetisize about the biggest celebrity in the world being a transphobe
She was the first major straight artist who cast a trans man as her love interest. Stop using trans people as your pawns in this disgusting narrative https://t.co/SZpC7uPMs6
On Monday afternoon of this week, Afghanistan once again made international headlines after a nationwide internet shutdown.
Internet access across the country was cut off at the orders of the Taliban supreme leader, with no explanation, plunging the people into total darkness.
Until just a few days ago, when someone asked me, “What is the one positive thing about Afghanistan today?” I had a clear and firm answer: that the internet had not been cut off.
At first glance, this may seem like a simple or even trivial response. But in reality, for a country living under the heavy shadow of censorship, violence, and unprecedented restrictions, this very connection to the digital world has been a small yet vital lifeline for the people of Afghanistan.
The restoration of internet access in Afghanistan brought a sense of relief and joy. At the same time, the shutdown had caused the entire country’s system to grind to a halt. Flights to Kabul were suspended, and hospitals as well as government offices could barely function.
After the collapse of the country’s system and the Taliban’s return to power, internet access still provided a window to education, information, the outside world, and even mental well-being for many young Afghans.
But this time, after issuing dozens of restrictive decrees, the Taliban leader has targeted something that has plunged Afghanistan into an unprecedented state of heavy, deafening silence. A silence that is not merely the shutdown of a technology, but rather a sign of a wider collapse in communication and social connection.
Who has the shutdown affected?
Among the first and most important victims of the internet blackout are girls above the sixth grade, who, since the Taliban’s takeover in 2021, had turned to online education. Digital learning was the only remaining path for millions of girls who had been banned from schools under the Taliban’s restrictive orders.
Over the past four years, many young Afghans relied on online courses, YouTube lessons, educational apps, and even international virtual classes, striving to keep learning alive despite political and social pressures.
The internet shutdown not only took away opportunities, but also robbed thousands of teenagers and young people of hope. Girls who, in silence and deprivation, had been learning at home through mobile phones or laptops are now trapped in a closed, dark space, with no teachers, no books, and not even a signal to connect. A young girl in Kabul sent me a message saying: “When we realised that the Taliban had blacked out the internet, I started crying, couldn’t sleep because of my online classes”
Afghanistan is a country with a young population, with over 60% of its population under the age of 25. These young people, raised in a connected world, had grown up with big dreams and hopes for a brighter future. But now, before their very eyes, that future is being shut down.
Access to social media, entertainment content, music, films, and communication with friends and relatives abroad has provided some balance to the mental well-being of youth. With the internet cut off, many of them are now struggling with depression, anxiety, and isolation.
The broader implications of the internet blackout
The internet blackout in Afghanistan does not only mean that people inside the country are cut off from the outside world, but it also means that the world can no longer hear Afghanistan’s voice.
As the initial shock began to fade, Madelaine decided to take action. “I thought, I don’t want to live in a society where this is just par for the course, where this is just what happens,” she tells GLAMOUR. “It took years to get over it, but I knew that I was going to make a change; I just didn’t know how.”
For around seven years, Madelaine turned her attention to campaigning. She participated in roundtables and interviews that informed the UK’s 2025 Pornography review, spoke out about financial discrimination against sex workers, and co-authored a piece on improving labour standards in the online sex industry. But Madelaine wanted to move quickly. “I knew I needed to do more, and I reached a point where I was exhausted by it all and thought to myself, ‘I just need a guardian angel’. I want to send that image safely. And I don’t think that’s too much to ask.” And so Image Angel was born.
Earlier this year, Madelaine attended Glamour’s parliamentary roundtable about image-based abuse. In one of the most memorable speeches of the evening, Madelaine handed out her Image Angel business cards, encouraging people to pass them around the room until one found its way back to her. She held up the business card and pointed out that, thanks to fingerprint technology, she could technically find out the name of every single person who had touched the card. Similarly, Image Angel utilises watermark technology to track who has accessed an image or video shared on a platform, serving as a powerful deterrent against image-based abuse while also respecting the victim’s autonomy.
Once Madelaine came up with the idea, she searched on LinkedIn for someone who could help make it a reality. “I emailed people at various tech companies and said, ‘Look, here’s the problem. Here are the current solutions. Please, can you help me or point me in the right direction to someone who can build this for me?’ Eventually, one person agreed. Over several months, we worked together to build this. It took so long, but it’s finally ready, it’s finally installed, and it’s finally protecting people.”
“We need more people to insist that platforms use this technology,” says Madelaine. “We need more platforms to take on the technology, and we need the law to tighten up and say that prevention is better than cure.” She reflects on her own experience of image-based sexual abuse: “If Image Angel had been installed, I could have at least found out which platform it had come from. The platform could have then banned that user. They could have helped me add that user, username, or user’s data to a hashing list, ensuring no one ever interacts with that person in an online forum again.”
While much of the rhetoric surrounding ‘sending nudes’ focuses on victim-blaming, Image Angel offers something new. “Denying people the freedom to send a picture or shaming someone because they choose to send a picture isn’t a progressive society,” says Madelaine. “We should allow people to have fun, play and flirt, but knowing that they can safely do that.
“We used to roll about in the hay, and now we send images and messages. And those life experiences build you. It’s exciting and thrilling. You get a flutter when you receive that message. So why can’t you respond in a way that feels authentic?”
I always knew that corporate allyship and the “pink pound” wouldn’t be a magic solution to changing attitudes. While beneficial for increasing visibility, they were never going to change the world on their own. Yet, even this small piece of the puzzle seems to have fallen away. The shift is palpable. Talking about being queer or trans outside of Pride Month seems discouraged. The executive order by President Trump to end “wasteful Government DEI programs” in the United States sent a ripple effect across the globe, validating organisations to roll back their inclusive efforts. Brands that once championed LGBTQIA+ causes are now ghosting collaborators, with some even stating that diversity and inclusion are not a priority. This isn’t just about my personal career; it’s a systemic problem that affects the entire community.
This year has been a stark reality check. For freelancers like me, it’s become a weekly occurrence to have promising opportunities vanish without a trace. Brands would reach out, eager to show their support, only to ghost us after multiple meetings and creative sessions. This isn’t a new phenomenon, but it’s now more widespread and brazen. The irony is not lost on me: often, these opportunities started with a desire to “do the right thing,” only for the brands to become the very problem they were trying to solve.
This isn’t just a personal grievance; it’s a movement to eliminate LGBTQIA+ inclusion. It affects everyone, regardless of their online visibility. My work as a writer and content creator is built on the premise that organisations want to openly discuss the experiences of queer people. When that support disappears, I’m left questioning my path. As trans people’s existence is being challenged globally, our allies have gone silent, creating a void where transphobic narratives can flourish louder than ever before. This silence forces queer and trans people to pivot in their careers and, more importantly, leaves our community more vulnerable than ever.
I know I’ve been fortunate to have worked in this space for so long. It’s a job rooted in fun and frivolity, and creativity – but it’s one that ultimately feels too ‘political’ to be seen as creative anymore. My existence, our existence, is no longer neutral, and my desire to tell stories and provide a fun, light-hearted resource for other people to find comfort or joy in is depleted. The time has come for me to shift my focus. I am ready for a new challenge. I could bend to the current climate and become a more “palatable queer” to secure more work, but that’s not who I am.
Instead of feeling like my online presence needs to tick boxes, each post orchestrated to achieve career progression, or even risk enmeshing my digital success and view of my professional self with my personal desirability, maybe (just maybe) I will be able to be in a place again where I can just fall in love with myself and my community online, rather than seeing it as a role I must filfill 24/7.
I am the creator of a girl empowerment business. We created curriculum kits that use the stories of notable women in history to teach girls about their worth and potential. I am the writer and researcher, and B, my business partner (and one of my favorite guy feminists), is the creative and marketing guru.
We work well together. When there is a disagreement, we listen, find common ground and solve problems together. Sometimes finding a solution feels impossible. Sometimes the solution turns out perfect.
Before the pandemic, we partnered with schools to deliver our curriculum. When the shutdown occurred, we lost those partnerships, but we found the homeschool crowd. This community accepted us wholeheartedly.
For the past three years, we’ve traveled to more than 20 homeschool conferences. Our company has a lot of supportive and excited customers. We even get return customers whom we love reconnecting with at these events.
However, there is a faction that prickles at our presence. B and I try to brush it off, but even the smallest splinter, when not addressed, can cause an infection.
A mom enters our booth in the exhibitor hall in Missouri. “OK, my daughter loves Harriet Tubman. Tell me what you got!” she says.
I explain our product, how we use historical women to teach girls about their worth and potential. The mother says: “But is it woke? I mean, I don’t want to teach my daughter about woke.”
I look around at our curriculum kits. They are all women who fought for equality. I think to myself, Hell yes, it’s woke. The irony is lost on this potential customer.
I pause and take a different approach.
In my head, I hear Inigo Montoya from “The Princess Bride”: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
I understand what she thinks she is asking. She doesn’t want anything liberal, progressive, or written by “snowflakes.” But does she know that “woke” is not a bad thing?
“What do you mean, ‘woke’?” I ask.
She opens her mouth. Half-words and phrases stumble and tumble around. A few talking points from news sources fall out. Finally, she sighs. “I don’t know. Just tell me again what you write.”
In Ohio, a mom breezes into our booth.
“Oh my goodness, I love this. I am going to have to buy this for my girl!” she tells me. “I do have one question, though ― do you teach feminism? I mean, I believe in equality, but I am not a feminist, and I don’t want to teach it to my daughter.”
I take the approach I used in Missouri.
“What do you mean?” I ask her.
“Well, do you teach that women are better than men?”
“No, I teach all genders are equal and should be treated as such.”
I am in Texas, my home state. A mom wanders in, picks up a journal, and reads about Kate Warne, the first woman detective.
“Where do you do your research?” she asks. I give her several sites. “That’s good, that’s good,” she says.
“Now then,” she begins again, “what is your slant?”
“Which way do you lean?”
“Just historical facts,” I tell her.
“OK. But listen, I need you to do something for me.”
She reaches out and takes my hand. Apparently we are best friends now.
“Write about Biblical characters,” she says. “We need that. Especially the men.”
I tilt my head to the side.
“Well, we focus on actual women from history,” I say.
“Well, I will have to think about this.”
She drops my hand. The friendship is over.
“Our company banner draws most customers into our booth,” the author writes. “Unfortunately, it also gets the most sarcastic remarks.”
Courtesy of Heather Stark
I am sitting in my booth in South Carolina. It’s been a long morning. Suddenly I feel a presence. I turn around, and slowly, into my sights, the face of an older man scrolls down. Chin, nose, glasses.
“You gonna do more?” he asks.
I hold off a grimace caused by his coffee breath.
He glances up at an illustration that highlights our historical women. I stand up and take two steps back, putting the chair between us.
“Yes, we hope to add two more women. In the fall, we will add the first Asian American woman accepted into the Army. Then we are working on a Latina in 2024.”
“Well, hopefully not Frida Kahlo,” he says.
“You never know,” I reply.
“No, she’s no good, a communist,” he tells me.
“She did a lot of good.”
“Not all women are good,” he explains.
“Not all men are good,” I respond.
He walks away and I exhale. I didn’t realize I had been holding my breath.
I’m still in South Carolina. A couple comes to the booth. They were here yesterday, and I talked to the wife. Yesterday, her husband stayed silent. Today he sees B and gets excited.
“Here’s a guy,” he says. “He is ready to answer all of my questions.”
I side-eye B while welcoming the couple back. I talk to the wife, and they wander over to look at our product.
A few minutes later, the husband walks over to B.
“My wife doesn’t know the story of Rosie the Riveter,” he says. “I’m gonna tell her, but I need you to fact-check me.”
“Actually, Heather is the one who wrote the biographies.”
“Yeah, I know, but check me,” he tells B.
No one else is in the booth, so the husband stands in the middle. Center stage. He spreads his legs wide, slightly bending his knees, and his wife preps for the show.
“OK, he and I…” he begins. With both arms, he dramatically gestures to B and himself, a platoon of two. “We are off fighting the war. You and her —” he indicates us girls — “stay home and support us by making airplanes. We —” another swing of the arms to indicate the platoon — “use the airplanes to win the war and come home.”
He looks triumphantly at B. “Is that right?”
I am baffled by this 10-second World War II reenactment. An awkward giggle escapes me. B looks at me and I shrug my shoulders. B’s on his own with this guy.
He clears his throat and says, “Well, there’s more to it than that, but yeah, I guess.”
The couple buy the curriculum and tell us they are opening a co-op school.
Back in Texas, a woman walks by. She stares at the booth and looks at me. There are tears in her eyes.
“This is amazing. Please give me one of everything,” she tells me.
She does indeed buy one of everything. She thanks me for the diversity and representation. She whispers: “You don’t see this type of curriculum at homeschool conferences. Instead, you see those types of things.”
B and I look at where she is pointing. At the next booth, a company is selling books with rhyming Bible stories. Their banner sports a cartoon version of white Jesus with six-pack abs, biceps for days, and nail holes in his hands. Around him are brown-skinned people with large, crooked noses.
We are stunned into silence. Later, B and I wonder what rhymes with Jerusalem.
Another city in Texas. A woman and her older mother walk into the booth. They pick up products and make comments, but neither acknowledges me.
One picks up a journal that tells the story of Sarah Grimké. On the cover, it says “Follow Your Heart.”
The younger woman turns to her mother and says, rather loudly: “You know what (insert daughter’s name) said to me the other day?”
“What?” her mother asks.
“She said in Sunday school she learned you can’t listen to your heart, only to the Lord, because your heart lies to you.”
The younger woman finally looks at me and says: “Even my daughter gets it. She is only 9.”
She puts the journal back, and they leave. I don’t tell her a girl’s heart is the only thing that speaks truth.
The author discussing the stories of historical women with an intrigued customer at a homeschool conference in Texas.
Courtesy of Heather Stark
We’re in Florida. I walk down an aisle and notice a red glare, a tinge that no other aisle has. It takes me a moment, and then it hits me: This whole aisle is political organizations. None of it has to do with education — just politics — and every booth has some red in it.
I pass some signs that read “Ron DeSantis World.” B says it looks like they’re mimicking the Disney font. Several booths are conducting podcast interviews. I look up the podcasts on my phone and see that each one spreads conspiracy theories.
I pass another booth where a man and a woman are talking about gun rights… at a homeschool conference. Then I pass a Moms for Liberty booth. My stomach drops.
We’re in Missouri again. We are selling a lot of product — in fact, we had our first mother and son make a purchase so he could learn about Sacagawea. It made me happy.
A voice comes on the intercom: “All boys are welcomed to the _____ booth for a push-up contest.”
Boys of all ages go to the booth and form a circle. Their heads are in the middle, feet on the outside. The contest starts. There is a lot of yelling and grunting. Girls stand around the circle watching. I wonder what they are thinking as they watch the boys. There isn’t a contest for girls.
I’m in California. It’s our last conference for the season. I threw up again from the anxiety of anticipating more offhand remarks and rude questions. This morning I am presenting to a full room. I am discussing ways to build confidence in girls. I am 20 minutes into the presentation when a woman interrupts me.
“When are you going to talk about God in all of this?” she asks.
Her rudeness throws me off. I take a breath and smile.
“God is wherever you want God to be. I can’t tell you that,” I reply.
Two other women get up and leave.
Later, one lady comes back to apologize. She admits that walking out of my presentation wasn’t very Christian-like. Sometimes I forget I am around Christians — “Do unto others” doesn’t get universally applied at these conferences.
That evening, I finally tell B that I am throwing up before the conferences. He asks if we need to stop going. I want to say yes, but I don’t.
Although throwing up is new, this conversation isn’t. One thing about B — he will follow my lead. He gets the double standard without me needing to verbalize it. Deep down, neither of us is ready to be forced out. So once more, over drinks, we hammer out reasons why we want to be in places that cause strife.
“We make a lot of money at these events,” I say. It feels dirty coming out of my mouth. B nods and orders another round.
“Your thing is changing the conversation,” he says. “Changing the conversation on beauty culture. Changing the conversation on how we raise empowered girls. How about we change the conversation about feminism at these events?”
He gets that look in his eye, the one that signifies he has a wildly genius thought.
“What if we actually start talking about feminism instead of avoiding the conversation? Maybe the workshops you give could be why feminism is good. You could be the woman that blatantly teaches about feminism… at a conservative homeschool convention. It’s brilliant!”
I laugh out loud, partly intrigued, partly because I think he is insane.
“We will get canceled,” I tell him.
“For all the right reasons,” he replies.
The bartender brings over two dirty martinis.
This piece was originally published in October 2023 and we are rerunning it now as part of HuffPost Personal’s “Best Of” series.
Heather Stark is a business owner, podcast host, public speaker and feminist writer. Grace & Grit, her girl empowerment company, helps girls discover their worth and potential through the stories of historical women. She is the author of “Her Story: A Hilarious & Heartfelt Conversation About Why Beauty Milestones Should Be Options, Not Expectations.” She lives on Padre Island, Texas, with her family.
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Thank you again for your support along the way. We’re truly grateful for readers like you! Your initial support helped get us here and bolstered our newsroom, which kept us strong during uncertain times. Now as we continue, we need your help more than ever. We hope you will join us once again.
The first time I attended Carnival was in Toronto; I was a pre-teen. And oddly enough, as young as I was, I think I needed that visual reminder of the freeness Caribbean women possess. At Carnival, bodies are governed by no one but their owner, and the confidence in the air is palpable. It’s in the encouraging smiles of women in their 50s playing Mas with their group of girlfriends, it’s in the self-assured posing when approaching them for photos, and it’s in the suggestive dancing.
Beauty standards be damned, cellulite and rounded tummies baring stretch marks from carrying new life into the world were on display for all to see.
Moving from Jamaica to Canada, America, and eventually, England is when I realised the beauty standard wasn’t a reflection of myself. As a teenager, I was always too tall, I towered over classmates, and this random growth spurt left me with stretch marks on my hips – an act I thought could only happen after childbirth (boy, was I wrong). In my late twenties, breasts far too big for my body settled in, my stomach took on a new unfamiliar roundness and every now and then, I spied the cellulite on my thighs when I crossed them.
My body was changing, curving in ways I wasn’t accustomed to; it made me uncomfortable, especially because I was slim my whole life.
Want to hear something messed up? In Jamaica, my current body type is described as slim, a body I had written off as curvy because social media told me it was. This is why Notting Hill Carnival is such an important event for me; for two days out of the year, I am surrounded by an entire spectrum of body types on women of all ages and nationalities.
More importantly, the rainbow of every shade of Black and Brown women proudly flaunting their melanin without feeling lesser is a sight comparable to no other. Carnival is a boisterous reminder to be gentle with myself, accept my body, and just live no matter what the beauty standard says.
So, here’s to the parade of gyrating bodies covered in brightly feathered, barely-there bikinis that continues to empower me and change my relationship with my body for the better.
In 2025, we’ve seen Chris Brown, convicted of assaulting Rihanna in 2009, embark on a sell-out UK tour. Over in New York, fans have gathered outside a courthouse to support Sean Combs (known as Diddy) as he faced charges of running a sex trafficking operation and trafficking his ex-partner, Cassie Ventura. [He was cleared of racketeering and sex trafficking but found guilty of two counts of transportation for prostitution]. Male headliners have dominated major festivals across the world. Female musicians have spoken out about abuse, double standards, unequal pay, and systematic underrepresentation.
Misogyny is still alive and kicking – and the music industry is overdue for a reckoning.
After years of speaking to multiple musicians, and with the backdrop of high-profile producers, artists and music empires embroiled in scandal, Eliza Hatch, AKA Cheer Up Luv, who uses photography to investigate injustices and spotlight underrepresented voices, looks into the industry’s blatant problem with misogyny.
Here, she speaks with women working across all parts of the music industry and asks what form misogyny takes for them, and, crucially, if there’s any hope for meaningful change.
The insidious nature of misogyny within music has been well chronicled. In the UK last year, the Musicians’ Census found that over 50% of women in the industry had experienced discrimination, and one third of female musicians had been sexually harassed. The ways this misogyny presents range from the quieter kind, which happens behind closed doors, to louder battles to share the stage with male acts. Across 50 festival lineups in Europe last year, men were on stage for 92% of headline performances.
Aside from outliers in the festival spaces like Glastonbury and Primavera, which are moving the dial, in the UK alone, three times as many male acts get booked at major festivals, with 63% of acts booked at major UK festivals being all-male. When interviewing professionals for this article, the resounding response was one of shock that these percentages weren’t even higher.
I caught up with Amy Love and Georgia South, AKA Nova Twins, a rock duo who were shortlisted for the 2022 Mercury Prize and received two nominations at the BRIT Awards in 2023, to find out more. Some gatekeepers, who are majority male, want to relive their nostalgic days, leaning into their particular tastes,” says Amy. “Rather than elevate newer bands, they keep perpetuating the ‘indie rock all-male band heroes.’ In the UK, it always seems to be the Oasis, Pulp, Arctic Monkeys types of bands that dominate the headline slots.
“In our genre, I can’t think of any female rock/alt headliners who are still or about to dominate those slots. I enjoy those bands, but equally, I want to see more fierce femme power headlining and dominating too.”
Kemi Badenoch has been elected as the new leader of the Conservative party, voted in by party members following a four-month race after former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s resignation. It’s a historic posting – Kemi is the first-ever Black leader of the Conservative party, winning with 53,806 votes to fellow MP Robert Jenrick’s 41,388.
“It is the most enormous honour to be elected to this role, to lead the party that I love, the party that has given me so much. I hope I will be able to repay that debt,” she said.
Kemi originally ran for Conservative leadership back in 2022, following Boris Johnson’s resignation. As the MP for North West Essex, she has also previously held the roles of Minister for Women and Equalities and Secretary of State for Business and Trade – often making headlines for her controversial comments on trans rights, race and maternity pay. As the leader of the opposition, Kemi Badenoch will choose a shadow cabinet, each of whom will challenge and question their counterparts in government.
Here, GLAMOUR breaks down Kemi’s voting history and comments on the issues that really matter to women – from reproductive healthcare to violence against women and girls (VAWG), image-based abuse and more.
Online safety and image-based abuse
Image-based abuse – a broad term covering a range of harmful actions involving nude or sexual images – is overwhelmingly committed against women and girls. Kemi has not explicitly commented on the topic of image-based abuse, but did spark headlines when she criticised an early iteration of the Online Safety Bill in 2022. She tweeted: “The bill is in no fit state to become law. If I’m elected Prime Minister I will ensure the bill doesn’t overreach. We should not be legislating for hurt feelings.”
Abortion access
Kemi Badenoch has generally voted to keep obstacles in place for those seeking access to abortions. In 2022, Kemi voted against introducing buffer zones around abortion clinics and hospitals, in order to limit harassment of women seeking to access reproductive healthcare. That law came into force under the Labour government in October 2024.
She voted against the government’s ‘pills by post’ scheme in 2022, but she did vote in favour of the Abortion (Northern Ireland) Regulations 2021 – to address gaps in abortion services in Northern Ireland.
Maternity pay
Kemi’s comments on maternity pay sparked backlash during her leadership campaign earlier this year, when she said at the Conservative party conference: “Maternity pay varies, depending on who you work for. But statutory maternity pay is a function of tax, tax comes from people who are working. We’re taking from one group of people and giving to another. This, in my view, is excessive… Businesses are closing, businesses are not starting in the UK, because they say that the burden of regulation is too high.”
She added: “We need to have more personal responsibility. There was a time when there wasn’t any maternity pay and people were having more babies.” Kemi later said that she did not think maternity pay “needs changing at all” – and that her statements were “misrepresented”.
LGBTQIA+ rights
Kemi has abstained on voting on LGBTQIA+ issues during her parliamentary career – choosing not to vote on same-sex marriage in Northern Ireland in 2019.
It’s time for a new generation of feminists to take up the torch. But where to begin? Should teens hit the ground running with The Feminine Mystique? Or maybe a fantasy novel about dismantling entrenched structures of power? Yes and yes. If you need suggestions, here are 10 feminist books for teens.
(Vintage)
We Should All Be Feminists is a long-form essay by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a New York Times best-selling author and leading light in postcolonial feminist thought. Adapted from her TEDx talk of the same name, We Should All Be Feminists is an eloquent and deeply personal piece of prose about the importance of embracing feminist thought, no matter who you are. Combining personal anecdotes with observations of society as a whole, the book is a call to action for feminist thinkers everywhere.
(Square Fish)
Children of Blood and Boneis a fantasy series inspired by West African culture. The plot centers around the young Zélie, whose people have had their magic stolen under the rule of a ruthless tyrant. To bring magic back to the surviving members of her community, Zélie teams up with a rebel princess who is hellbent on striking back against the monarchy. It’s an epic novel, the story of two young women who master themselves and their latent abilities to topple an oppressive regime. These two are everything a young feminist should aspire to be.
(Penguin Workshop)
Alok Vaid-Menon’s Beyond the Gender Binary may be a small book, but it packs some huge ideas. From the mind of one of the leading nonbinary thinkers of today, Beyond the Gender Binary is an essay about the nature of the gender binary, how society enforces gender roles, and how a person can live a life free of those roles to pursue a gender expression that is uniquely personal to them. A core component of feminist thought is the understanding of how entrenched power structures use gender to establish hierarchy and dominance. When the binary is broken, so too is that power.
(Balzer + Bray)
The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas is a novel about 16-year-old Starr Carter, who witnesses the death of her best friend in a senseless act of police violence. Thrust into the public eye as a key witness to the killing, Starr finds that the weight of a budding movement for social justice rests on her young shoulders. The Hate U Give is the story of a young girl’s stand against oppression and highlights the importance of intersectionality in the pursuit of feminist liberation.
(Harper Perennial Modern Classics)
Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar is a novel about mental illness and the myriad ways that women are punished for suffering from it. The young and brilliant poet Esther Greenwood finds her mental health to be in steep decline in her 20s, and she soon finds herself a victim of a medical system that is, on the surface, designed to help. The Bell Jar is a story about how many women find themselves pathologized in a society that refuses to understand their struggles, and that the path to mental wellness must often, sadly, be walked alone.
(Ace Books)
Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness is a critique of the gender binary masquerading as sci-fi fiction. Damn good science fiction. A human emissary lands on the planet Gethen to make contact with the dominant alien people that call the place home. He is baffled by the aliens’ androgynous physiology, as the people of Gethen only take on sexual characteristics during a brief mating period. The people of Gethen teach both the astronaut and the reader that gender as a construct is primarily one used to establish social control and dominance. Without it, the people of Gethen are nearly entirely free from humanity’s favorite pastime: war.
(Random House)
Lyra Belacqua, the heroine of His Dark Materials, is on a quest to smash the ultimate patriarch. Not the heavily gendered Edwardian society she finds herself living in. Not the oppressive religious organization that dominates the world. No, the ULTIMATE patriarch: God. On the heels of a secret that threatens to tear the fabric of reality asunder, Lyra journeys across the multiverse to discover the ultimate truth. With the help of talking polar bears, covens of witches, and a ghostly animal familiar, she’s going to topple the Kingdom of Heaven and build a Republic in its place.
(Random House Trade)
I Know Why The Caged Bird Singsis a memoir by Maya Angelou, one of the greatest minds ever to put pen to paper. Beginning with Angelou’s childhood in a bigoted Southern town and ending as she comes into her power as an adult, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings provides an answer to its titular question. The book is a timeless tale of liberation, the struggle that every human must make against the bonds that hold us back. Bigotry, patriarchy, societal pressure, the soul sings to be free of it all.
(Anchor Books)
The Handmaid’s Taleby Margaret Atwood is a parable about a world where feminism has been all but snuffed out. After the U.S. government is overtaken by a far-right extremist regime, women find themselves enslaved to male captors who dominate the new nation of Gilead. Sold into sexual slavery to a powerful government official, a woman named Offred becomes the spark of a revolutionary wildfire that will bring the nation to its knees.
(Little, Brown Books for Young Readers)
I Am Malala is the harrowing memoir of a Pakistani teen named Malala Yousafzai, who fought for the education of women and girls while her nation was under Taliban rule. At 15 years old, she was shot in the temple by Taliban assassins while riding a school bus. Did her story end there? Hell no. She survived her attack and continued her activism, becoming the youngest nominee in history for the Nobel Peace Prize. Malala is a feminist icon and a living symbol of resistance in the face of violent oppression. Her brave and selfless actions serve as an inspiration to us all.
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For survivors of IBSA, this empty announcement is a slap in the face. Many survivors, including myself, have experienced firsthand how difficult it is to get justice for these types of offences. Despite the existing laws, the criminal justice system often fails to take these cases seriously. The process is confusing, support services are lacking, and police often don’t take survivors seriously.
In response to this announcement, many survivors have voiced their frustrations, with some even writing an open letter to the Department for Science, Innovation, and Technology (DSIT). The consensus is clear: this announcement is not an improvement. It does nothing to address the systemic failures in the handling of image-based sexual abuse. It offers no additional protections, no better support services, and no new tools for survivors to pursue justice. This isn’t a meaningful change—it’s lip service.
If the government truly cared about tackling IBSA and making the internet a safer place for women and girls, it would go beyond announcing meaningless administrative changes and address the core issues that allow these abuses to continue.
First, there needs to be significant investment in survivor support. Legal aid, counselling services, and survivor advocacy are all woefully underfunded.
Second, the government should focus on prevention. Educational campaigns about consent, respect, and the consequences of IBSA should be rolled out across schools and online platforms. Media literacy programs are crucial to raising awareness and helping individuals, particularly young people, understand the harmful effects of sharing non-consensual images.
The UK government’s announcement about reclassifying IBSA as a priority offence is awful, as someone who has experienced IBSA and seen the devastating effects it has on women, I’m saddened and angry that it’s being used as lip service. It is a routine administrative procedure being spun as a significant new measure, designed to boost public perception without delivering any real change.
Survivors of image-based sexual abuse deserve far better than this. If the government truly wants to tackle online abuse, it needs to go beyond PR stunts and take meaningful action—by providing more support for survivors, and focusing on preventing these offences in the first place.
Find out more about GLAMOUR’s campaign in partnership with the End Violence Against Women Coalition (EVAW), Not Your Porn and Professor Clare McGlynn, demanding that the government introduces a dedicated, comprehensive Image-Based Abuse law to protect women and girls.
Revenge Porn Helpline provides advice, guidance and support to victims of intimate image-based abuse over the age of 18 who live in the UK. You can call them on 0345 6000 459.
That connection might be mostly harmless in and of itself, but left unchecked, it can spiral into unhealthy obsession. Mark David Chapman, the man who shot John Lennon, was himself a huge Beatles fan who was reportedly upset that Lennon declared the band to be “more popular than Jesus.” That may be an extreme example, but it illustrates that celebrity culture, at its absolute worst, encourages fans to think that they have ownership over the object of their fixation.
Within the LGBTQ+ community, garden-variety celebrity worship has been a central facet of just about every culture that fits within the acronym, from our love of Judy Garland to the unwittingly anthemic Diana Ross to Princess Diana and beyond.
Historically, most people who have been deemed “gay icons,” though, are notably not gay themselves. But as the number of out-queer celebrities multiplies — especially out-queer musicians who have made their identity a central facet of their work — it makes sense that that degree of obsession would intensify and sometimes take on a frightening edge.
Roan is the most relevant example of this at the moment, but the near-religiosity of queer fan culture has been evident for a long time, increasing in fervour over the past few years. Gen Z is the queerest generation ever, even as their mental health is suffering from a political landscape that is repeatedly ramming them over the head with the message that they are intrinsically evil and must be eliminated. Heartbreakingly, one Trevor Project study published earlier this year found that over a third of LGBTQ+ youth don’t believe that they’ll live past the age of 35.
In the face of such profound evil, people often turn to religion. When met with insurmountable opposition, what else is there to do other than appeal to a higher power? To state the incredibly obvious, however, the vast majority of queer and trans-Americans are hard-pressed to find spiritual or religious spaces that are explicitly accepting of them, though bastions of safety do exist.
Facing tremendous challenges, and struggling to find meaning in the world, it’s easy to understand why many young queer people would see openly LGBTQ+ celebrities as quasi-religious figures, instead of seeking that sort of salvation elsewhere. Looking after one’s spiritual health doesn’t have to mean participating in organized religion; there are many ways of finding purpose and fulfillment in life that are worth pursuing, and that can help fill a void in life.
I’m not the only one to notice that pop stars seem to have become near-deities. Last June, TikTok user @madisonbravenec pointed out that boygenius songs sometimes “give a little bit of Christian worship music,” and I was never able to listen to the band in the same way after that observation.
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Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker may not have intentionally tried to cultivate cool youth pastor vibes during their supergroup era, but I do think that they drew an audience inclined to see them that way.
As a film whose working title was Pussy Island, it’s to be expected that the subject matter of Blink Twice is “controversial.” That is, if one is “off-put” by the notion that women are still “bitter” about men’s behavior—even after all the supposed progress that’s occurred in the wake of #MeToo. And yes, it’s no coincidence that Zoë Kravitz first started writing the screenplay (with E.T. Feigenbaum, who also wrote an episode of the Kravitz-starring High Fidelity) the same year that the “male backlash” began. Or rather, the appropriate and long overdue response to an abuse of power so entrenched in “the system,” it took ousting many men at the top for anything to start making a difference.
Some of those men at the top were known for going to Little Saint James Island a.k.a. “Epstein Island.” Like Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew and Donald Trump. None of these men ever got quite the smackdown that Harvey Weinstein did, but there was no denying that further ignominy befell their already less than upstanding reputations when it came to being pervy sexual abusers. Something that happens to Blink Twice’s own “Jeffrey Epstein,” Slater King (Channing Tatum). A tech billionaire that someone like Frida (Naomi Ackie) can’t help but lust after and idolize—something we see as she scrolls through her phone and adoringly watches an interview he gives about how he’s a “changed man” now that he’s “taken some time” to “reassess” himself and his priorities on the remote island he currently lives on (and, needless to say, owns). It’s all very familiar-sounding, with no shortage of potential inspirations for Kravitz when it comes to similar rich douchebags from which to mine material.
As Frida watches the interview on the toilet, transfixed, her drooling is interrupted by her best friend and roommate, Jess (Alia Shawkat). When Frida admits she doesn’t have her portion of the money for the super because she’s invested it in something else for the two of them, Jess is surprisingly chill about it. Almost as if there’s nothing Frida could do that would ever make Jess turn her back. Such is the nature of a truly strong female friendship bond. By the same token, that doesn’t mean that women don’t get in their fair share of contentious spats, one of which arises between Jess and Frida when, while the two are at work (serving as cater waiters—or, for the more misogynistically-inclined, “cocktail waitresses”), Frida accuses Jess of having no self-respect because she keeps going back to the same toxic asshole every time they break up. This, of course, will turn out to be extremely ironic later on, when the biggest twist of Blink Twice comes to light, and viewers see that Frida has been doing exactly the same thing.
In any case, Frida immediately realizes how harsh she sounds and apologizes right away to Jess as they continue to prep for serving drinks at Slater’s big, fancy event (with their male boss annoyingly telling them, “Don’t forget to smile!”)—presumably something “benefit”-oriented. It doesn’t much matter to Frida, who is so unabashed in her eye-fucking of Slater from afar, that it comes as no surprise when she tells Jess that what she spent all her money on happened to be two gowns for each of them to wear so that they could infiltrate the event as guests rather than servers (though, to be honest, the gowns look more like they’re from Shein than, say, Chanel). Jess, ever the down-ass bitch, complies even though she is not even remotely affected by Slater’s looks or wealth. Eventually making a fool out of herself by tripping in the most visible way possible, Slater takes Frida under his wing at the event and, by the end, the two have such a “connection” that he decides to invite her and Jess back to his island with the entourage he’s been parading.
If it all sounds somewhat implausible, Kravitz is well-aware of that, stating during an interview with CBS News Sunday Morning, “I like playful filmmaking.” This is made apparent by her use of stark, all-white backdrops (think: Blur’s “The Universal” video, itself an homage to A Clockwork Orange) whenever the audience is in Slater’s world outside of the island, as though to emphasize that, to him, there are no gray areas. Kravitz also added, “I like when the audience has a sense of, ‘It’s a movie,’ you know what I mean? And we’re all in it together and it’s not reality.” But it is, indeed, very true to the reality of how power is so grossly abused by white men with billions (or even just millions) of dollars, finding loopholes for being as disgusting and depraved as they want to be no matter how much cancel culture continues to thrive post-#MeToo. In this case, that loophole is found through the manipulation of the five women on the island’s memory. In addition to Frida and Jess, there’s also Sarah (Adria Arjona), Camilla (Liz Caribel) and Heather (Trew Mullen), all of whom keep spraying themselves with a perfume called Desideria that’s strategically placed in their rooms, just begging them to use it. As Slater says, it’s made from a special “extract” of a flower that can only be found on the island. How convenient for him and his fellow rich white men that it also acts as a kind of super-charged Rohypnol.
It is the memory loss element of Blink Twice that most closely aligns it with Jordan Peele’s own seminal psychological thriller, Get Out. For the loss of each woman’s memories of the particularly traumatic events that happen to them during the night are what make them trapped inside a kind of “sunken place” during the day. Thus, prone to chirpily answering, almost Stepford wife-style, “I’m having a great time!” whenever Slater asks, “Are you having a good time?” Their muddled memory—almost tantamount to being lobotomized—makes it retroactively all the more cruel when they first arrive and a Polaroid is taken of the group as Vic (Christian Slater), Slater’s “right- and left-hand man,” shouts, “Everybody say, ‘Makin’ memories!’” The irony being, of course, that the women on the island will have no ability to recall what’s going on. What horrors are being wrought upon their bodies when night falls.
At one point, Slater promises a fellow rich man named, what else, Rich (Kyle MacLachlan) that he can do whatever he wants because: it’s like the more traumatic the event, the more readily they forget. And it is true—women’s minds are extremely adept at that form of self-protection, mainly because dealings with men in any sphere tend to be violating in some way or another, so “blotting out” becomes a kind of automatic coping mechanism. And in the world of rich men, violation is merely the rule, not the exception.
Of course, in these “polite” times, men like Slater feign going along with the “new world order.” For example, when the group arrives on the island and Stacy (Geena Davis, in a kind of Ghislaine Maxwell role) starts collecting everyone’s phone into a bag, Slater assures, “You don’t have to do anything that you don’t wanna do.” But, of course, the pressure to oblige him—one that is perennially ingrained within women—gets the better even of Jess. Even though it is she who is the one to be hit much more quickly with the revelation, “Did we just jet off to a billionaire’s island with a bunch of strangers?” For the number one rule learned by every millennial as a child was: don’t talk to or go anywhere with strangers. Frida insists, “He’s not a stranger. He’s Slater King.” Such is the danger of 1) parasocial relationships being intensely nurtured in a social media age and 2) the automatic carte blanche that powerful people—nay, powerful men—are given when it comes to trust. Despite all long-running evidence that suggests only inherent distrust ought to be placed in them.
It doesn’t take long for Frida and Jess to fall into the “routine” of the island. Which goes something like: wake up, get high, swim, start drinking, eat a dinner prepared by Cody (Simon Rex), another alpha male (though there are also beta males like Tom [Haley Joel Osment] and Lucas [Levon Hawke, a fellow nepo baby like Kravitz), get so trashed you “black out,” repeat. Soon enough, the days and nights all meld into one, with Frida and the others long ago losing track of what day it is or even how long they’ve been on the island. At one point, Frida asks Slater, “When are we leaving?” He shrugs, “Whenever you want.” Naturally, that’s not true, nor is it really an answer. Besides, he knows Frida will soon forget, informing her during one of their “intimate walks,” “Forgetting is a gift.”
Indeed, one would think that the female gender does have collective amnesia sometimes when considering how willing they are to “forgive” men for all their transgressions. And this, too, is another key theme of Blink Twice, which essentially posits the Carrie Bradshaw-penned question: “Can you ever really forgive, if you can’t forget?” As Slater will tell Frida during their final showdown, the answer is definitely no, resulting in an Oscar clip-type performance as he angrily repeats, “I’m sorry” to her and then demands if she forgives him yet. “No?,” he says when she doesn’t reply. Of course not.
Nor does she seem likely to ever forgive a woman like Stacy, who is not only complicit in what’s happening on the island, but also prefers the “ignorance is bliss” philosophy that Slater keeps promoting through Desideria. That Davis is involved in the film is also especially significant considering she runs the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, which “advocates for equal representation of women and men.” Blink Twice certainly has plenty of that. Though perhaps the most memorable character out of anyone is the woman billed as “Badass Maid” (María Elena Olivares). Tasked primarily with catching the snakes on the island that, according to Slater, have become a blight, it is she who will become the savior of the oppressed in this fucked-up situation.
As for Frida’s past history with Slater (which she, of course, forgot), it begs the question: are people—particularly women—doomed to repeatedly gravitate toward the same toxic situation so long as it “feels good” enough of the time to forget, so to speak, about how bad it is overall? The conclusion of the film would like to make viewers believe otherwise, ending on a “hopeful” even if “sweet revenge” note.
As for changing the name from Pussy Island to Blink Twice, it wasn’t just because marketing the film was going to be nothing short of an ordeal with the MPA’s censorship limitations, but also because, as Kravitz found, “Interestingly enough, after researching it, women were offended by the word, and women seeing the title were saying, ‘I don’t want to see that movie,’ which is part of the reason I wanted to try and use the word, which is trying to reclaim the word, and not make it something that we’re so uncomfortable using. But we’re not there yet. And I think that’s something I have the responsibility as a filmmaker to listen to.”
Perhaps if women had taken the word in the spirit intended when it refers to callow men, there might have been more acceptance. However, regardless of the title change, Blink Twice will undoubtedly still come across as “hardcore” to plenty of filmgoers. Mainly the ones who don’t like to see a mirror held up to a society run by soulless, amoral, bacchanalian knaves. Post-#MeToo or not.
