Ms. Magazine

I watched the Ms. Magazine doc this past week. The magazine hit the newstands in 1972 and still exists quarterly in paperform, and of course it is online. Ms. was a ground-breaking publication, that most, like Harry Reasoner declared on national tv, would fail. Ends up Ms., an all-women company, sparked a feminist movement and took on topics that most swept under the carpet such as abortion, domestic violence, workplace harrassment, and sexuality. Fifty plus years and it is still here.

All I could think about while watching the film, is we have come so far yet not far enough. I wondered what a room of 13 year old girls, 20 year old women, 35 year old women, 50 year old women and 70 year old women would say after watching the film. We forget how walking down the street in the 1970s men cackled, hooted and gaped at women, how women who made it into the workplace were groped, dismissed and ogled at, how talking about sexuality was never discussed, and how polarized women were.

Those brilliant women, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Gloria Steinem and Suzanne Braun Levine, behind Ms. changed the narrative. They gave women a voice that was sorely needed at the national level. They started institutional change. Yet these days, I wonder, what happened to MeToo, which we all know still continues. Based on what is happening at the federal level, we need new female voices from millennials and Gen Z speaking out for female empowerment although the right has slowly chipped away at that by taking away access to abortion and pushing for women to stay home. Even though women are slowly entering powerful roles as founders, CEOs, etc., they are still precarious.

What is still holding women back isn’t men, it is women. Women who are male apologists, who are ok with being treated like a secondary citizen even though they are in a room of their peers, who are ok with men being inappropriate, are willing to take accomodations vs taking what they deserve, who are willing to put up with microaggressions from men because they do not want confrontation, who are ok with catering to their husbands or male bosses, and I could go on and on. It doesn’t take much to find them, look at the women inside the Trump administration.

I have been championing championed women and putting my voice and capital behind culture-defining ventures for decades. If every women championed each other to be anything we want to be, and stopped succumbing to right wing conservative rhetoric, which is being touted as less burnout, more babies, less feminism, more femininity at a MAGA womens event. Are all those women sheep who are only looking for a voice no matter what the voice is? It is painful.

It is time to create a new movement because if we really think about it, if women ruled the world, I am pretty sure the world would be a better place.