Quote:Nine of the jurors who voted to acquit—presumably because they thought Clancy deserved pity rather than harsh punishment—were women

Quote:Although the Repeal the 19th movement expresses an extremism that even Trump would shy away from, it springs from the same authoritarian roots as Trump’s broader assault on democracy. The one saving grace is that the blatant misogyny of the movement is likely to mobilize women voters to come out in droves. There is little comfort to be gained as MAGA has mainstreamed extreme sexism. But for many women, voting might end up being the best revenge.

Quote:Activists point to the fact that anti-gender narratives gradually became central political tools used to mobilise conservative fears around war and national identity.

‘The government was not talking about healthcare or poverty’, one activist said. ‘Instead, they talked about protecting society from “gender propaganda” and queer people’.

Several activists argued that feminist and queer groups became especially vulnerable because they could be portrayed simultaneously as politically disloyal, socially ‘foreign’, and a threat to traditional ideas of family and national identity.

Quote:Indeed, a major gripe I have with anti-feminists is that they make it harder to achieve policy wins for moms and dads at home. In my own work advocating for homemakers, I can attest that it is extremely difficult to convince centrist and left-of-center lawmakers to support measures supporting stay-at-home parents when they fear these policies are actually a Trojan horse for trying to kick women back to the kitchen. There are many practical measures we could take to help these parents, including encouraging corporations to hire at-home parents who want to return to work, considering how to reform our Social Security system to better protect homemakers, or how to reform our 401(k) system to better protect “traditional families.” All these and more become fraught, though, when the question shifts away from helping families make the choices that work for them, and instead becomes: Are we trying to protect stay-at-home moms, or are we trying to force girlbosses into roles that they don’t want? Even reasonable measures can fail to gain traction when they are sucked up into a broader culture war.

Quote:What makes online tradwives’ advice especially sinister, though, is that these social media influencers don’t practice what they preach. Content creators with hundreds of thousands of followers, like Savanna Stone, may claim that they “just want to be a traditional woman … to stay at home, be a stay-at-home wife.”
If that were truly the case, why would they be creating social media content, loudly espousing their social and political views on podcasts, racking up brand sponsorships and providing paid “femininity coaching” services?

Quote:The Trump administration’s attack on diversity, equity and inclusion has rolled back decades of progress for women, who now face a widening gender pay gap and narrowing employment protections. In the process, discussions about women have become a third rail, a toxic topic that is too politically charged to touch. Companies, universities, law firms and cultural institutions are all expunging references to “women” and “gender,” even under the most benign circumstances.

Terrified of being the administration’s next target, organizations are descending into the realm of the absurd. A researcher focused on maternal health removed references to gender-based discrimination in order to receive federal funding. A medical trade publication warned scientists to avoid words such as “female” and “women” in grant applications. After Senator Ted Cruz of Texas released a list of supposedly “woke” National Science Foundation grants last year, ProPublica found that some were included merely because their project descriptions included words like “female,” as in a female research scientist, or “diversify,” as in the biodiversity of plants.

Quote:It’s the first EEOC lawsuit filed over a corporate diversity, equity and inclusion program, part of a sweeping effort by the Trump administration to stamp out what it describes as illegal discrimination.

But more such cases could be imminent. In December, a month after Trump designated her EEOC chair, Andrea Lucas issued an unusual public appeal, asking White men who feel they have experienced discrimination at work to contact the agency “as soon as possible.” In February, she said women-only networking events would create “new girls clubs” that operate like the “old boys clubs” before them, likening them to racially segregated employee social events of the 1970s.

Quote:“The thing that we heard that was different is: ‘I’m sick and tired of the Democratic Party. I’m sick and tired of being told to wait my turn,’” Litman said. “We’re also hearing a lot of: ‘The Democrats haven’t been where I am, they don’t know what it’s like to be in my shoes.’” 

“Trump is the water they’re swimming in but he is not the bait,” she added. 

Quote:If you’re anything like my parents, you probably wouldn’t even understand most of the content that floods my social media, no matter how hard I try to avoid it.

Here’s a recent example from Instagram: “Do y’all females ever tell ur homegirls ‘Sis chill you letting too many dudes hit?’” Essentially, that means: “Women – do you ever tell your girlfriends that they’re whores and need to stop letting so many guys fuck them?” The reel, posted by a 19-year-old man, appeared on my Instagram feed without me wanting to see it, or ever interacting with any other similar content. The comments that followed were pure misogyny. “Women see body count as a leaderboard and they try to outdo each other,” was one of them. Translation: all women are competitively promiscuous.

Quote:Consider the use of the word “female” in these posts. It is not a neutral term here, it is a term of abuse. It’s used by teenage boys to degrade us and equate us to animals. Boys are never described as “males”, but girls are always “females” – the equivalent of sows or calves, creatures that are less than human. We’re also “thots” (whores), “community pussy” and “bops”. “Bop” stands for “been over passed” and is a derogatory term used by boys to refer to a girl they’ve decided has been “passed around” or had too much sex. Sexual equality has ceased to exist online. It’s absolutely fine for boys to have sex, but when girls do, they are called worthless and referred to as objects. “When community pussy tries to insult me, I just want to beat that b*tch up.” That’s a message I saw on TikTok.

...

A few days ago I saw an Instagram reel of a young woman talking about how she had been raped six years ago, struggled with thoughts of suicide afterwards, but managed to rebuild her life again. Among the comments – the majority of which were from men – were things like “Well at least you had some”, “No way, she’s unrapeable”, “Hope you didn’t talk this much when it happened”, “Bro could have picked a better option.” Reading those comments, which had thousands of likes and many boys agreeing with them, made me feel sick.

If a girl my age posts any video of herself online, the comments section will be filled with objectifying and hateful remarks about her, regardless of what the topic of her post was. If she wears anything revealing, or just happens to have larger breasts, she’ll be abused and sexualised. Completely unprompted, there might be hundreds of comments insulting specific features she may have, or rating her attractiveness out of 10. “Sub5”, for example, describes someone who is below 5/10 in attractiveness. I’ve seen videos of boys telling anyone who is unattractive that they should end their own life.

...

Often it feels like we’re hated not only if we’re sexual but simply for existing. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t affected by seeing boys my own age post things about women like: “Men are objectively superior in pretty much every conceivable metric,” and “They are just devils that imitate feelings so we feel empathy.” Words such as “b*tch” are the least of it. One of the worst labels is “foid” – originally from incel subculture but now becoming mainstream – which refers to women as being less-than-human, female humanoids.

And what is the effect? If I spend even 10 minutes on an app such as Instagram, I will close it, feeling disheartened and unhappy about being a girl. When nearly every comments section on a video of a girl my age is filled with disgusting and objectifying comments about her body from boys, it causes me to feel deeply uncomfortable in my own body, and compare myself to her; especially if she is beautiful and still being deemed unattractive. Endless emphasis on beauty as worth and all kinds of videos criticising specific features, some of which I possess, have made me start to loathe my own face, as difficult as that is to admit. But the worst thing is knowing how much hate there is from men and boys for all women and girls, including me.

Using social media has ruined my self-esteem and my relation to being a girl in this world, and nearly every day I feel hatred towards my gender, my appearance, or even teenage boys as a category. The misogyny I see from boys my age online, which is echoed in real life too, has made me grow resentful and bitter towards them, as much as I try to avoid it. As wrong as it is, I persistently find myself considering if there are truly any boys out there who are not misogynistic to some extent, and have even questioned whether I can find love in the future because of this. I understand that boys are victims of harmful content, as well as perpetrators of online misogyny – they’re growing up learning how to do this from the adults who post misogynistic videos first. But even so, I feel such a strong divide now between girls and boys in my generation, especially when the way they talk about us in real life mirrors the way they do on the internet.

Quote:The Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women says it has identified a rise of regressive and anti-feminist groups in Canada in recent years, which use social media and online platforms to spread their messages and recruit members.
Those groups seek to dismantle feminist and gender equality movements in favour of male superiority and recreating a “romanticized” vision of the past, a 2025 report said.

Quote:Gender has always been an important throughline of fascist politics, particularly in creating a heroic narrative that men themselves can internalize and from which they can figure out how to perform masculinity. It is based distinctly on violence, but also on entitlement, what women are and what they should offer to men. By doing this it can capture resentment men feel, particularly the loneliness that comes from the lack of socialization for building relationships as well as just the reality of modern work life, and channel it back into their performance of masculine violence. If they feel alienated in their life, they are taught to blame women, thus putting pressure on the women in their life to engage in a kind of social reproduction that lets the system of alienation just continue further.

Quote:The current escalation is retaliation. Physical violence against women is happening alongside attempts to erase the feminist meaning of the uprising itself.

Outside Iran, this reality is persistently misread. The revolt is frequently reduced to a confrontation with Islam and framed as a civilizational conflict between religion and modernity.

Such interpretations turn a political struggle into a cultural one. They’ve fuelled hesitation and selective solidarity in parts of the western left and Muslim communities, erasing decades of resistance directed not against faith, but against a regime that has used religion as an instrument of punishment, surveillance and death.

What is at stake in Iran is not faith — it’s power.

The Islamic Republic doesn’t govern through Islam as a lived religion but through Islam as institution: codified in law, enforced through policing and ultimately used as a tool to imprison, torture and kill. To view Woman, Life, Freedom as an anti-religious uprising erases a feminist political uprising that’s been unfolding since 1979, led by women who have continuously challenged compulsory veiling, gender apartheid and state violence.

Quote:...we are sharing—in full and in their own words—a powerful call from a collective of Iranian feminists in the diaspora. (Ms. and our publisher, the Feminist Majority Foundation, have signed on.) They outline the scale of the repression now underway and reaffirm the principles of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. They also urge feminists worldwide to take concrete action: Demand an end to the killings, press for restored internet access, and amplify the diverse voices of protesters, especially women and marginalized communities.