Latest news with #GloriaSteinem
New Indian Express
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- New Indian Express
Deepika Padukone finds a place in 'The Shift's' 90+ women shaping culture list
Deepika shared the news with a post on her Instagram handle on Sunday afternoon. "In tribute to the one and only Gloria Steinem and her 91 years of activism, The Shift is honoring 90 voices shaping our future. @theshiftison grateful for the honour#TheShiftIsOn," read the caption. The 39-year-old actor has been an active mental health advocate over the last few years and is the founder of Live Love Laugh Foundation that aims to educate people regarding mental health as well as reduce the stigma associated with it. Deepika is also set to receive a Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2026, which will make her the first Indian actor to get the prestigious honour. Her latest work is "Singham Again" from Rohit Shetty. The film also starred Ranveer Singh, Kareena Kapoor Khan and Akshay Kumar and released in 2024.
The Sun
03-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Sun
Lily Allen should be ashamed of her sick confession, her X-rated antics have nothing on this… yet I know who's to blame
SHE has confessed to having a Mile High romp with a married Liam Gallagher, sleeping with high-class female escorts, seeing her father take cocaine and headbutting Orlando Bloom at a Hollywood party. But Lily Allen's latest revelation is her most explosive, and to me, repulsive, yet. 5 5 The Smile hit maker giggled away as she admitted she's had five abortions. Yes - five. That number isn't a typo. And yet while her outburst was crass it's not Lily who is to blame for this wildly feckless attitude. Triggered is a word I loathe. But I have zero doubt that her blase brag will have been a knife in the heart to thousands of 'Childless Not By Choice' (CNBC) women - myself included. We're living in a world in which women like mother-of-two Allen - whose previous relationships include Chemical Brothers DJ Ed Simons, art dealer Jay Jopling and Stranger Things actor David Harbour - assume it's fine to boast - on a BBC podcast no less - about having multiple abortions, 'yeah I'd get pregnant all the time'. Listen, my motto in life is you do you. But we all have a dark side – psychiatrist Carl Jung called it the 'shadow' – that is honestly best left in the dark. Why oh why would an emotionally intelligent woman ever assume that such an abhorrent admission would ever be okay? When the likes of the Suffragettes were dying to give us the votes, when Gloria Steinem galvanised the feminist movement in the late 1960s was it really so a pop star could brainlessly joke about her irresponsible lifestyle? Women in my CNBC tribe - and there are more of us than you think - have spent years, not to mention thousands of pounds trying to end up with a baby. When we call time on our dream of motherhood, grief is a lifelong companion. 5 To dig the knife in further, Lily's 'Miss Me' co-host Miquita Oliver also said she's undergone five terminations, too. Recalling her first abortion, Oliver said: 'I was very excited! I felt like I was like a woman.' When Oliver, 41, confessed she didn't know if Allen had ever terminated a pregnancy, she began singing to the tune of Frank Sinatra's My Way: 'Abortions I've had a few... but then again... I can't remember exactly how many'. She continued: 'I can't remember. I think maybe like, I want to say four or five.' Oliver, who doesn't have children, responded: 'I've had about five too! Lily I've never… I'm so happy I can say that and you can say it and no one came to shoot us down, no judgement. We've had about the same amount of abortions.' I'm sorry, is this where we're at in 2025? Part of me feels desperately sorry for the pair of them. That neither of them can recognise that this isn't something cool to riff and praise each other on. But the other part of me wants to wring their bloody necks for such an utterly irresponsible approach to conception and pregnancy. Look, we don't live in the Victorian era. Sleep with whoever the heck you want, whenever the heck you want. Lily has admitted her sense of desire fluctuates - 'I go through horny and unhorny phases' - but contraception is available everywhere. Also, anyone with a brain knows how to keep track of their menstrual cycle. To be clear, I am not against abortion. I am pro-choice and firmly believe a woman's body is her own. I've been on the planet long enough to accompany girlfriends through such procedures. One friend terminated at eight weeks because she didn't want the 'inevitable gossiping' (her words) she thought she'd get walking down the aisle with a baby bump – no judgement from me. WHY WOULD PEOPLE GOSSIP? WAS SHE YOUNG? Another terminated her pregnancy on the advice of her doctors because the foetus was malformed. I had so much compassion for her. Then there are the dozens of friends who have agonised and wept over the decision because they weren't in the right relationship or it was a one-night stand. All reasons I support. But I'm also 54 and, over the decades, I have witnessed the emotional and psychological fallout when women have terminated a pregnancy. They remember the due date for years to come. So many wonder what their child would have looked like. We should never ever normalise abortion or trivialise this act. It disgusts me that these women are trying to frame multiple abortions in society as a lifestyle choice, something so casual and everyday that it's akin to popping out for a coffee. An abortion is not a rite of passage. It is often a medical procedure that comes with health risks, too. And let's not forget our current political climate. They are handing the bonkers, yet growing, alt-right political movement a gift with their selfishly brazen attitude towards potential life. And boy are they rubbing such a revelation into the faces of women like me who weren't able to have children. Look, I'm no angel. Most women I know have had sex and not used protection - myself included - it happens! But that's what the morning after pill is for. I used it once at 17, after that I went on the pill. That's what grown-ups do. Help and support with an abortion In the UK, several organisations offer abortion services and support. You can access free NHS-funded abortion care or choose private options. Accessing Abortion Services: NHS Services: Abortion services in the UK are free on the NHS. Self-Referral: You can contact abortion providers directly to book an appointment. Referral from Healthcare Professionals: Your GP or a sexual health clinic can also refer you to an abortion service. Private Clinics: You can also choose to have an abortion at a private clinic. Important Information: Confidentiality: Staff at abortion clinics will not share your information with anyone, including your GP, without your permission, unless they believe you or someone else is at risk of harm. Counselling: If you're finding the decision difficult, counselling services are available to help you explore your options and feelings. Aftercare: Support is available after an abortion, including counselling and information about aftercare. And throughout my 20s and 30s I continued to use the pill. Yes, I know it isn't a right fit for many women. Thankfully there are a dazzling array of other contraceptive options which shouldn't include an abortion. When I tried to become a mum I was stable, settled and married in my late 30s. After trying for two years, we then turned to the fertility industry. Two attempts at IVF didn't work. We were going to try a third time, but my husband's son died from skin cancer. The devastation put paid to any more attempts. So yes, I am writing this from the pain of that experience. Even though I closed the door on motherhood 11 years ago - the grief never entirely leaves you. I feel nothing but pity for both women brought up to assume that abortions are an acceptable lifestyle choice. Their mothers must be looking in the mirror and wondering where they went wrong. Because in this instance I actually blame their parents. We can all imagine how a conversation about birds and the bees would have gone with hell raiser and feckless father Keith Allen. And Oliver seems like a together woman – but honestly this is an epic failure on her part. Who knows what Lily Allen's daughters are thinking about their mother now. Of course they'll defend her. But that's not to say that school is going to be fun for a while. Yes I know the pair will honk on about men being responsible too. But that argument has nothing to do with these circs. If I was living in the UK and paying the license fee I'd be campaigning to get this podcast pulled off air. It has zero merit in a world where such views are so utterly and pointlessly cruel. All it has demonstrated is that two privileged, middle class, nepo baby women don't give a monkeys how their lifestyle choices and opinions land with others. I actually don't wish either women the global slagging they are inevitably going to get. But I'd put a very large bet on them both regretting this conversation in the future. And if they don't? Then they are even shallower and more unevolved than I thought they were.
Wall Street Journal
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print' Review: The Language of Liberation on HBO
'I do not agree with your last article,' wrote an early correspondent to the now 53-year-old Ms. magazine, 'and am canceling my wife's subscription.' For younger female viewers of 'Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print,' such moments—and there are plenty—may be jaw-dropping. Older women will just smile. Maybe. No one will escape without feeling like they've taken a trip into something weirdly, even darkly, historical. Not historical enough, perhaps. While this nearly two-hour documentary triptych seldom exploits the comedy in people being quoted outside of their cultural moment, neither does it address the current perception that nearly everything Ms. magazine lobbied for is under attack by various factions governmental and/or religious. The ostensible motivation for this movie right now is the more than half-century of Ms., founded in 1971 by a group that included Gloria Steinem, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Pat Carbine and first editor Suzanne Braun Levine, all of whom appear here. (The magazine, which first hit the newsstands in '72, is now online, published since 2001 by the Feminist Majority Foundation.) But the omissions seem odd: During a segment regarding the coinage of 'sexual harassment' and the ensuing battles over that issue, no mention is made of the 1991 Clarence Thomas–Anita Hill hearings, which seemed to be the pivotal event in that particular fight. The oversights seem a conscious effort to skirt political fire. No pun intended.
Yahoo
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print' Trailer: Gloria Steinem Revisits Her Magazine Legacy
Gloria Steinem's legacy extends far beyond her literary achievements, but her beloved magazine Ms. is what really started a movement. The story of Ms. has been fictionalized onscreen in 'Mrs. America,' 'Minx,' and 'Good Girls Revolt,' and even had a real-life syndicated spinoff 'Woman Alive!' that started in 1974. The reach of Ms. is almost unfathomable — and its imprint (pun intended) on the sociocultural landscape is still being felt today. 'Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print' revisits the iconic publication through the lens of three directors: Salima Koroma, Alice Gu, and Cecilia Aldarondo. In the film, the trio each examine a different Ms. cover story to honor the legacy of the magazine. More from IndieWire 'Cloud' Trailer: 'Cure' Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa Again Proves He's a Master - This Time with a Grand Shootout Brian Cox Decided to Become a Character Actor After Visiting Hollywood: 'It Really Gave Me the Creeps' Ms. launched in 1972 and arguably revolutionized the feminist movement at the time. As the official synopsis for the documentary states, the magazine was suddenly 'bringing radical ideas to kitchen tables across the country and sparking provocative conversations about everything from politics to porn.' The documentary itself 'tells the untold story of the magazine's rise — how it defied the odds, transformed its readers, and continually fought to uphold its bold ideals in the face of cultural and political resistance.' 'Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print' features interviews with Steinem, Patricia Carbine, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Marcia Ann Gillespie, Lindsy Van Gelder, and Suzanne Braun Levine. The film premiered at Tribeca 2025 in the Spotlight Documentary section. William Ventura produces the feature, with Dyllan McGee, Amy Richards, Cindi Leive, Regina K. Scully, Nancy Abraham, Lisa Heller, Sara Rodriguez, and Anna Klein executive producing. Steinem was recently also at the center of 2020 biopic 'The Glorias,' which was based on her bestselling 2015 book 'My Life on the Road.' Julianne Moore and Alicia Vikander both portray Steinem across years of her life in the film. HBO Documentary Films additionally released 'Gloria Steinem: In Her Own Words' in 2011. 'There are more young women now who are feminist leaders than there ever were during my era,' Steinem said at the time when promoting the doc, 'and young women have better shit detectors than we ever had.' 'Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print' will premiere Wednesday, July 2 on HBO and Max. Check out the trailer, an IndieWire exclusive, below. Best of IndieWire Guillermo del Toro's Favorite Movies: 56 Films the Director Wants You to See 'Song of the South': 14 Things to Know About Disney's Most Controversial Movie Nicolas Winding Refn's Favorite Films: 37 Movies the Director Wants You to See
The Guardian
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Completely radical': how Ms magazine changed the game for women
The first of July marks the anniversary of Ms magazine's official inaugural issue, which hit newsstands in 1972 and featured Wonder Woman on its cover, towering high above a city. Truthfully, Ms debuted months earlier, on 20 December 1971, as a forty-page insert in New York magazine, where founding editor Gloria Steinem was a staff writer. Suspecting this might be their only shot, its founders packed the issue with stories like The Black Family and Feminism, De-Sexing the English Language, and We Have Had Abortions, a list of 53 well-known American women's signatures, including Anaïs Nin, Susan Sontag, and Steinem herself. The 300,000 available copies sold out in eight days. The first US magazine founded and operated entirely by women was, naysayers be damned, a success. The groundbreaking magazine's history, and its impact on the discourse around second-wave feminism and women's liberation, is detailed in HBO documentary Dear Ms: A Revolution in Print, which premiered at this year's Tribeca film festival. Packed with archival footage and interviews with original staff, contributors, and other cultural icons, Dear Ms unfolds across three episodes, each directed by a different film-maker. Salima Koroma, Alice Gu, and Cecilia Aldarondo deftly approach key topics explored by the magazine – domestic violence, workplace harassment, race, sexuality – with care, highlighting the challenges and criticisms that made Ms. a polarizing but galvanizing voice of the women's movement. Before Ms launched, the terms 'domestic violence' and 'sexual harassment' hadn't yet entered the lexicon. Women's legal rights were few, and female journalists were often limited to covering fashion and domesticity. But feminist organizations like Redstockings, the National Organization for Women, and New York Radical Women were forming; Steinem, by then an established writer, was reporting on the women's liberation movement, of which she was a fundamental part. In Part I of the documentary, Koroma's A Magazine for all Women, Steinem recalls attending a women's liberation meeting for New York magazine. Archival footage discloses what was shared there, and other meetings like it: 'I had to be subservient to some men,' says one woman, '… and I had to forget, very much, what I might have wanted to be if I had any other choice.' The response to Ms was unsurprising, its perspective so collectively needed. 'A lot of these articles could still be relevant,' Steinem muses in Part I. But, says the publication's first editor, Suzanne Braun Levine, 'I don't think we all were prepared for the response. Letters, letters, letters – floods of letters.' Koroma unveils excerpts of those first letters to the editor, vulnerable and intimate: 'How bolstering to find that I am not alone with my dissatisfaction that society had dictated roles for me to graduate from and into.' By the time Ms was in operation, the staff was publishing cover stories on Shirley Chisholm, unpaid domestic labor, and workplace sexual harassment. 'Who is it you're trying to reach?' a journalist asks Steinem in an interview back then. She replies: 'Everybody.' 'They tried to be a magazine for all women,' explained Koroma in a recent interview, 'and what happens then? You make mistakes, because of the importance of intersectionality.' In an archival audio clip, the writer and activist (and close friend of Steinem's) Dorothy Pitman Hughes says: 'White women have to understand … that sisterhood is almost impossible between us until you've understood how you also contribute to my oppression as a Black woman.' Marcia Ann Gillespie, the former editor in chief of Essence and later Ms's editor in chief, confides to Koroma: 'Some of the white women had a one-size-fits-all understanding of what feminism is, that our experiences are all the same. Well, no, they're not.' Alice Walker, who became an associate editor, shared her own writing and championed others', like Michele Wallace's, in the publication's pages before quitting in 1986, writing about the 'swift alienation' she felt due to a lack of diversity. Wallace recounts her experience as a Ms cover girl, her braids removed, her face caked in make-up. She adds: 'I want to critique [Ms], but they were very supportive of me. I don't know what would've become of me if there hadn't been a Ms magazine.' She left, too. 'I was not comfortable with white women speaking for me.' Levine admits, 'We made a mistake,' featuring Black writers but having few Black cover stars and no Black founding staff. 'The work still needs to be done; we're always going to have to rethink things,' Koroma says. It's a running thread in Dear Ms, one that creates a rich and ultimately loving picture of the magazine. 'Ms. is a complex and rich protagonist,' Aldarondo reflected. 'If you only talk about the good things and not the shadow, that's a very one-dimensional portrait. One of the things that makes Ms so interesting and admirable is that they wrestled with things in the pages of the magazine.' For Part III, No Comment (named for Ms's column that called out misogynistic advertising), Aldarondo chronicles its contentious coverage of pornography, which the staff primarily differentiated from erotica as inherently misogynistic, many of them aligning with the Women Against Pornography movement. In an episode that opens with unfurling flowers and the words of the delightful porn star, educator, and artist Annie Sprinkle, Aldarondo depicts the violence of the era's advertising and pornography, and the women who were making – or enjoying – pornography and sex work, proudly and on their own terms. In a response to the 1978 cover story Erotica and Pornography: Do You Know the Difference? Sprinkle and her colleagues, the writers and adult film actors Veronica Vera and Gloria Leonard, led a protest outside the Ms office. The staff hadn't 'invited anyone from our community to come to the table', says Sprinkle, despite adult film stars' expertise about an exploitative industry they were choosing to reclaim. 'To see these women as fallen women,' says Aldarondo, 'completely misses the mark.' Behind the scenes, the staff themselves were at odds. Former staff writer Lindsy Van Gelder states: 'I knew perfectly good feminists who liked porn. Deal with it.' Contending with the marginalization faced by sex workers, Ms ran Mary Kay Blakely's cover story, Is One Woman's Sexuality Another Woman's Pornography? in 1985. The entire issue was a response to activists Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon's Model Antipornography Law, which framed pornography as a civil rights violation and which Carole S. Vance, the co-founder of the Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force, describes in Dear Ms as 'a toolkit for the rightwing' that ultimately endangered sex workers. Dworkin, says Vance, refused a dialogue; instead, the magazine printed numerous materials, the words of opposing voices, and the law itself to 'reflect, not shape' readers' views, says founding editor Letty Cottin Pogrebin. The hate mail was swift – including Dworkin's, once a staff colleague: 'I don't want anything more to do with Ms – ever.' Gu reveals something far more frightening than hate mail, a horror that didn't make its way into the film: death threats and bomb threats, which the staff received in response to their most controversial stories. 'There was actionable change that happened because of what these women did,' says Gu. 'The danger they put themselves in is not to be discounted. I get emotional every time I talk about it ... I have benefited largely from the work of these women, and I'm very grateful.' That actionable change refers to the legislative reforms prompted by Ms's coverage of domestic violence and workplace harassment. In A Portable Friend, Gu examines the 1975 Men's Issue, the 1976 Battered Wives Issue, and the 1977 issue on workplace sexual assault. 'Back then, there was no terminology if a woman was being hit by her partner at the time,' says Gu. She spotlights heartbreaking archival footage of women sharing their experiences with abuse: 'If it'd been a stranger, I would have run away.' Van Gelder herself reflects on the former partner who hit her. 'Did you tell anyone?' Gu asks. 'Not really.' In an archival clip, Barbara Mikulski, former Maryland senator and congresswoman, says: 'The first legislation I introduced as a congresswoman was to help battered women. I got that idea listening to the problems of battered women and reading about it in Ms' Adds Levine: 'We brought it into the daylight. Then there was the opening for battered women's shelters, for legislation, for a community that reassured and supported women.' The same idea applied to workplace sexual harassment: 'If something doesn't have a name, you can't build a response,' Levine exclaims. 'The minute it had a name, things took off and changed.' Gu shared that while 'there's a little bit of questioning as to whether it was Ms who coined the term [domestic violence], they were certainly the first to bring the term into the public sphere and allow for a discussion'. The Working Women United Institute eventually collaborated with Ms on a speak-out on sexual harassment. Despite obstacles, the scholar Dr Lisa Coleman, featured in Part I, describes the publication as one 'that was learning'. 'It's easy to be critical at first,' says Koroma, 'but after talking to the founders, you realize that these women come from a time when you couldn't have a bank account. It's so humbling to talk to the women who were there and who are a large part of the reason why I have what I have now.' Gu noted that the lens of the present day can be a foggy one through which to understand Ms — which, in truth, was 'completely radical,' she says. 'You weren't going to read about abortion in Good Housekeeping. You have to plant yourself in the shoes of these women at that time.' Our elders endured different but no less tumultuous battles than the ones we face now, many of which feel like accelerated, intensified iterations of earlier struggles. 'Talk to your moms, to your aunts and grandmas,' Koroma added. Aldarondo agreed: 'One of the great pleasures of this project, for all of us, was this intergenerational encounter and getting to hear from our elders. It's very easy for younger people to simply dismiss what elders are saying. That's a mistake. I felt like I already understood the issues, and then I learned so much from these women.' Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print premieres on HBO on 2 July and will be available on Max
