FASHION Magazine

A photo posted by Serena Williams (@serenawilliams) on Oct 20, 2015 at 8:01am PDT Growing up, whenever a girl at school would be mean to me—and it happened often (you know how young girls can be)—my mom would give me the same explanation, “She’s just jealous.” No matter how many times I heard it though, […]

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A photo posted by Lena Dunham (@lenadunham) on Dec 1, 2015 at 10:18am PST First came Free The Nipple, and now Free The…Manicure? According to Lena Dunham, yes. The actress’s newsletter, Lenny, has partnered with Chrissy Mahlmeister, the creator of Rad Nails (the brand that brought you cuticle tattoos and Ryan Gosling stickers. Bless) to […]

The post Lena Dunham’s nail art line lets you wear boobs and butts on your fingertips appeared first on FASHION Magazine.

May 3rd, 2015 brought us a real treat: a call from (American) conservative radio host Doc Thompson for listeners to list tips on #HowToSpotAFeminist. Needless to say, he scored some real gems. Misogynists from across the globe responded with… well, you can probably imagine. (Spoiler alert: nobody here’s going to link to their garbage.) But […]

The post How to spot a feminist: She looks just like you and me appeared first on FASHION Magazine.

So how about 2014, everyone? Here’s one thing we can say about it: it existed. It consisted of 12 months, 365 days (almost), and a whole lot of unnecessary drama in the world of pop culture. We’re not going to touch everything else because this is not the place. So where to even begin? The […]

The post Can We Not? The 2014 pop culture moments we hope never to relive appeared first on FASHION Magazine.

Feminism, where to start? Lately, you’ve heard the word tossed around like a Kardashian wedding gone viral. From actress Emma Stone calling out boyfriend Andrew Garfield for a sexist remark on live television, to Shailene Woodley‘s widely-publicized remarks about not classing herself as feminist—but what does it all mean? How and why should feminism affect you?

We’ve compiled a swift five-point guide so you can get clued up and tuned into the fourth wave of feminism (and that is not a euphemism for your period.) Surf that sea of female equality sister!

Briefly, in the early 1990s, I was a smut peddler. I edited an anthology called The Girl Wants To, which included art and writing about sex and the body, from Roberta Gregory’s “Bitchy Strips” to Barbara Gowdy’s strange, beautiful account of a young necrophiliac, “We So Seldom Look on Love.” The anthology was part of a growing wave of heated discourse by third-wave feminists—women making sense of sex in the ’90s. These were women who felt the need to write about want, desire, pleasure and other taboo information. Taboo because we were talking about our bodies and sexuality in ways we never had, at least publicly and en masse. Think forward, and think of what even the sweetest pop star imaginable, Katy Perry, is saying in virtually all of her songs: that she is a bi-curious, sexy dream-girl/gurl who refuses to “bite [her] tongue” any longer. Having been pushed down to the ground, she is up and roaring in the old-school manner of  “I Am Woman.” She is Helen Reddy 2.0, in other words: no bowl-cut and cardigan, no dulcet tones, but the same fervent desire to tell us that we, as women, need not suffer oppression lightly; that we are a pride of powerful lions.

Lately, there has been a sea change, with a powerful sense of another killer wave coming—a “sexplosion.” Writer and former Variety editor Robert Hofler used the term in his fascinating book of the same name. But while his exhaustive, illuminating book focuses on the period from 1968-1973, the wild time that followed the sexual revolution, Hofler’s theories suggest that the future of sex will become less “man-made.” And it already has, of course. Female performers are busily upsetting ideas about sex and power, about the naked body and their perceived passivity.

In her graphic song “Pour It Up,” Rihanna sings, “That’s how we ball out,” in a voice that is virtually empty of inflection. And in the controversial video for the song—“The really sad thing is that she thinks she’s being edgy and sexy when in fact she is slowly destroying her soul,” commented one disquieted fan—she sings this chorus as she presides over a strip club, sitting on a throne in a diamond bra, collar and Lana Turner wig, talking like a man, acting like a woman and unsettling our idea of what it means to be either.

Word: Hysteria

Meaning: A common 19th-century medical diagnosis; a nervous condition, or acute outbreak of nerves, that remains inexplicably linked to being female.

Word: Neo-Housewife

Meaning: A new breed of woman whose housewifeliness is basically independent from marriage, chores, and domesticity, and instead revolves around dieting, gossiping, and shopping while drunk.

Usage: “Yet across the various spinoffs, the real housewives reliably engage in all kinds of confusing, contradictory, neo-housewife behavior: they proudly show off their incompetence in the kitchen (as when Adrienne Maloof of Beverly Hills washes a chicken with hand soap) or their lack of interest in sex (as when her neighbor Lisa Vanderpump jokes about treating sex as a twice-annual gift to her husband) or their limited patience.” — from this past weekend’s New York Times Magazine