Feminism is, at its core, a relatively simple concept. Merriam-Webster defines it as “the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes.” Unless you’ve been trapped in a bunker since the 1950s or serving in the two highest offices of the United States, you’ll probably concede that this is a good idea. Yet according to a survey by GenForward, less than 20% of participants belonging to any racial or ethnic group self-identify as feminist, with most saying they “don’t identify as a traditional feminist, but support women’s rights and equality.” This cognitive dissonance is even more glaring when we look at celebrities’ interpretations of the term. Given their power and influence, it also makes it that much more disappointing. Below are five famous women who at one point or another have refused to identify as feminist, despite very clearly supporting feminist ideas. Celebrities—they’re just as clueless as like us!

1. Taylor Swift

When asked in a 2012 interview with The Daily Beast whether she considers herself a feminist, Taylor Swift said, “I don’t really think about things as guys versus girls. I never have. I was raised by parents who brought me up to think if you work as hard as guys, you can go far in life.” So adorable. While this is a lovely way to think, it presupposes, incorrectly, that feminism is a movement fueled by the hatred of men. On the contrary, feminism is about uniting men and women and putting them on equal footing. Luckily, Taylor has since changed her tune.

2. Miley Cyrus

Miley Cyrus skirted around the issue in a 2014 interview with Elle by saying, “I’m just about equality, period. It’s not like, ‘I’m a woman, women should be in charge!’ I just want there to be equality for everybody.” Miley’s concept of feminism suffers from a similar flaw in logic as Taylor’s: it assumes that the movement is about uprooting men and taking away their power. However, it’s not an either-or proposition. Both men and women can and should have opportunities to be in power and “in charge”. Crazy, I know.

3. Susan Sarandon

Susan Sarandon, actress and occasional problematic person, had this to say about identifying as a feminist in a 2013 interview with The Guardian: “I think of myself as a humanist because I think it’s less alienating to people who think of feminism as being a load of strident bitches, and because you want everyone to have equal pay, equal rights, education, and health care.” The “humanist” response is a popular one with celebrities and, IMHO, a bit of a cop-out because it doesn’t acknowledge the reality that we live in a world where women are the more disadvantaged sex. Even worse, it perpetuates the false notion that all feminists are militant, combat boot-wearing, bra-burning wenches who want to burn down the world and render men obsolete (though I’ll admit I’m down for the combat boots). Can we be angry sometimes? Sure. But some anger is more than warranted when we continue to live in a world where we’re paid 77% of what men make, account for only 25.4% of board members and 6.6% of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, are at a greater risk of rape  and domestic violence, and have little to no autonomy over our bodies. Instead of being afraid of appearing angry, perhaps we should ask ourselves why we’re so uncomfortable with women being angry in the first place.

4. Sarah Jessica Parker

Ironically, the star of Sex and the City, a show that’s supposed to be all about female empowerment, declined to take up the term despite clearly espousing feminist views in a 2016 interview with Marie Claire: “I am not a feminist. I don’t think I qualify. I believe in women and I believe in equality, but I think there is so much that needs to be done that I don’t even want to separate it anymore. I’m so tired of separation. I just want people to be treated equally.” The problem with SJP’s response is that she’s guilty of the very thing she doesn’t like about the movement. Women can’t begin to achieve the equality she desires if she and other non-feminist feminists refuse to engage and separate themselves from the cause. There’s power and unity in numbers.

5. Beyoncé

It may be hard to believe now, but there once was a time when the woman who closed out the 2014 VMAs by performing in front of a giant “FEMINIST” sign hesitated to accept the label. Just one year earlier in an interview with British Vogue, the one and only Bey said, “That word can be very extreme … But I guess I am a modern-day feminist. I do believe in equality. Why do you have to choose what type of woman you are? Why do you have to label yourself anything? … I do believe in equality and that we have a way to go and it’s something that’s pushed aside and something that we have been conditioned to accept… But I’m happily married. I love my husband.” The reference to her marriage and husband is strange as well as problematic, because it implies that a feminist can’t have a healthy and loving relationship with a man. Her aversion to labels sounds more like the Tuesday night musings of your run-of-the-mill f*ckboy rather than a compelling argument coming from one of the most powerful and innovative performers of our time. Without labels, we can’t identify ourselves and, in turn, effect meaningful change, something Beyoncé later realized and emphasized with her VMA performance.

It’s clear that when it comes to feminism, we can’t look to celebrities for guidance—not just because they often fundamentally misunderstand the term, but also because, like most things celebrity-related, it’s an exercise in distraction. Roxane Gay points out in a piece for The Guardian that, “We run into trouble, though, when we celebrate celebrity feminism while avoiding the actual work of feminism.” Identifying oneself as a feminist is a crucial first step, but it’s just the beginning of the conversation and work that needs to be done.

Images: Allie Smith / Unsplash; Giphy (5)

Siobhan Adcock is the author of the novels, The Barter and The Completionist. Her short fiction has been published in Triquarterly and The Massachusetts Review, and her essays and humor writing have appeared in Salon, The Daily Beast, and Huffington Post. She lives with her husband and daughter in Brooklyn.

You’ve devoured all three seasons of Hulu’s award-winning drama. You’ve read the classic Margaret Atwood novel on which it’s based. You’ve surfed the wide, exciting wave of feminist dystopian fiction that has flooded bookstores, from justly praised bestsellers like Naomi Alderman’s The Power and Leni Zumas’s Red Clocks to lesser-known but powerful examples like The End We Start From by Megan Hunter, The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh, and Mother of Invention by Caeli Wolfson Widger. (Maybe you’ve even read my own feminist dystopian novel, The Completionist.)

And you’ve still got that itch to scratch, that need, that fever…and not for more cowbell. No. What you want are even more scorching feminist visions of the hideous, inescapable future that seems to be hurtling us toward, if we’re not there already, with every day of rising maternal mortality, normalized sexual violence, curtailed reproductive freedoms, and toxic masculinity.

Well, I have good news and bad news. The bad news is, women continue to face violence, discrimination, predation, and the rollback of basic freedoms while earning 50 to 70 cents on the dollar compared to men. The good news is, all of this seems to be producing some incredible works of speculative fiction. Ya win some, ya lose some, I guess.

For better or for worse—but mostly, it seems, for the better—the wave that started with the 2016 election shows no sign of slowing down. Here are a few of the new and upcoming books by women writers presenting an unflinching, often enraging vision of a future that, at times, can bear an unsettling resemblance to our present. Read these while you wait for season four of The Handmaid’s Tale, and the long-awaited release of Atwood’s sequel, The Testaments, this fall.

The Farm by Joanne Ramos

Imagine a future in which surrogate motherhood becomes a luxury capitalist enterprise, a kind of Gilead driven by dollars rather than Bible verses, and you’ll have taken a first step into Ramos’s novel. Women willing to serve as surrogates (many of them low-income or women of color) are offered the handsomely paid opportunity to live in a posh “gestational retreat,” but the catch is, their every move, morsel, and emotion are monitored in order to produce perfect babies. The novel’s heroine, a Filipina single mother named Jane, is a worthy successor to Offred.

Oval by Elvia Wilk

In a near-future Berlin, a young scientist, Anja, lives with her artist/influencer boyfriend, Louis, in a disintegrating house on an artificial mountain, part of an experimental corporate-owned “sustainable” community that is manifestly anything but sustainable. The same corporation that employs Anja and owns their house also acquires the rights to a new drug Louis is working on, called Oval, that may improve humankind’s capacity for kindness…or inspire a collapse. Wryly funny, dark, and smart, Oval is squarely in the tradition of Margaret Atwood’s other dystopian masterpiece, the Madaddam trilogy.

Tentacle by Rita Indiana

This thrilling dystopian/historical mashup of a novel by a Dominican author begins in a post-apocalypse Caribbean, where income inequality fostered by environmental disaster has run to its most rampant extremes. Acilde, a former sex worker turned housekeeper who is saving up for an injection that will reassign her gender to male, is unexpectedly thrown back in time to the colonial Caribbean, with the opportunity to save the ocean from devastation. But to dismiss this as a time travel novel is to diminish its exhilarating blend of post-colonial criticism, queer politics, humor, and pop culture (including emojis) as artistic expression.

The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz

Purely by coincidence, yes, this is another feminist time travel novel, due out in September 2019. But Newitz, an award-winning author of speculative fiction and nonfiction, steers this traditional sci-fi trope in an exciting direction: A young woman living in a dangerous near-future, determined to fix the injustices of the past and protect other young women like herself, must fight for the power to create positive change that actually lasts. (If that sounds familiar, you might have been reading AOC’s Twitter feed.)

Motherland by Lauren Beukes

The new novel by bestselling author Beukes, coming in May 2020, takes place after a global pandemic has almost wiped out the global male population. Cole, a single mother of a young boy, is on the run through an America cruelly transformed by shifts in power, where men are a protected class. Like Naomi Alderman’s bestselling feminist dystopian novel The Power, in which women develop the ability to wield a mysterious electromagnetic force that has startling effects on men—and the power they wield—this novel looks to be set in a world in which gender dynamics have flipped, but not necessarily for the good.

Siobhan Adcock is the author of the novels, The Barter and The Completionist. Her short fiction has been published in Triquarterly and The Massachusetts Review, and her essays and humor writing have appeared in Salon, The Daily Beast, and Huffington Post. She lives with her husband and daughter in Brooklyn.

Imags: Hulu

“It was fine, I just wish he choked me a little bit more, you know?”

These are words that come out of my best girlfriend’s mouth and I try not to act absolutely horrified. It’s a typical girl’s night for my crew, so we’re getting completely wrecked over $8 bottles of Trader Joe’s wine and lamenting over the sh*tty men life has dealt us. My story for the evening was going to consist of “and then he refused to go down on me, can you believe it?!” I was going to be equal parts angry and indignant. There would be a lot of angry huffing and even more drinking. Or maybe I would talk about the guy I dated before this guy, whose idea of foreplay consisted of three minutes of finger banging and some closed-mouth kissing (ladies, there are so many good fish in the sea!!). Now, I’m rethinking those stories as my friends dive into their own light choking stories and I shrink further and further into my glass of wine. I was prepared to talk about sex, sure, especially bad sex—it is girl’s night, after all. But I wasn’t prepared to talk about kinky sex. And as I sit there listening to my closest friends mime choking hands and laugh into their wine glasses over the guys they’ve hooked up with who weren’t into kink, I have to wonder: am I lame for liking vanilla sex?

Fun fact about me: I’ve never been choked in the bedroom! And if someone had asked me if I enjoyed “light choking” I would have told them that I’d like my sex life not to end up as a future plotline on Law & Order SVU. But prior to this girl’s night conversation, I also wouldn’t have considered myself much of a vanilla sex girl. I, mean, I’ve had sex in a public restroom before, so that has to count for something, right? Apparently not.

The word daddy has been so sexualized that my kids are gonna have to call me bruh or some shit

— Devon Daigle (@devondaigle9) March 23, 2019

The older I get, the more I hear my friends talk about incorporating some form of kink into their sex lives. Whether it’s the light choking or using sex toys during intercourse or handcuffs—it’s stuff that I used to consider extremely kinky, but is now becoming the norm. These are not things that I incorporate into my own sex life, nor do I have any desire to. I’ve been single for the better part of seven years, casually dating guys for no longer than a few months at a time. I did try and spice things up in my last serious relationship, but my boyfriend at the time seemed disinterested in my attempts. Then again, he was more interested in sleeping with any girl who had a pulse, so perhaps that was the bigger issue we should have focused on in our relationship. And they say true love is dead!!

So I stayed the vanilla course without even really knowing it. The spiciest I get these days is public sex, and even those encounters are few and far between the older I get. Is it so wrong that I like vanilla sex? As a single girl dating around, does that make me boring in bed? I’ve never felt insecure in the bedroom, but now I’m starting to wonder if I should.

I just want to be popular, okay!

On some level, it makes sense that women are trying to spice things up in their sex lives. We’re living in a post-50 Shades of Grey world. Romance novel sales are skyrocketing these days. Women are no longer afraid to admit that not only do they want sex, but this is how they want it. More importantly, women are finally being heard in the world. Not just in regards to sex either. Women are demanding more from their circumstances: they want equal pay, political representation, safe work environments, rights to their own reproductive organs, representation in the media, accolades in their career fields, and now, their own sexual fantasies fulfilled.

But here’s the thing: my sexual fantasies are completely different than that of my married friends or my engaged friends or my friends in serious, long-term monogamous relationships. For example, while my friend Lissa might be fantasizing about her fiancé putting a little extra pressure on her windpipes, mine are more about a guy texting me during daylight hours. (I know, that’s f*cking wild!!)

For the most part, my friends see incorporating something different into the bedroom as a way to escape the mundane, to spice things up with their partner. The key word here being partner. There’s a level of trust they’re afforded to try these things out. They don’t have to worry about being embarrassed or shut down, or hell, their own safety being put at risk. And I think that’s what it comes down to here. It’s not that I’m necessarily opposed to light choking or handcuffs or roleplaying or whatever else. I’m not anti-kink so much as pro-trust. My love life has been like one long Fyre Festival, so, you could say I’m a little low on trust when it comes to the opposite sex. I barely trust a guy to call me back, let alone play Russian Roulette with my airways.

Look, I’m not saying I won’t ever try something a little crazy in the bedroom, but I know for me there needs to be a foundation of trust in place first. So, yeah, maybe I’m a little more vanilla at the moment, but I don’t think that makes me lame or bad at sex. Bottom line: it’s your sex life, and you should do whatever you feel most comfortable doing. If men can demand what they want out of the bedroom then so should we, no matter how “boring” it’s perceived. And you can still have a fulfilling sex life, whether or not you incorporate kink. I’m not here to judge anyone’s sexual preferences unless it’s one of those furry fetishes, in which case, I’m sorry, but you were asking for that one. 

Images: Unsplash; Giphy; devondaigle9 / Twitter

There are a lot of things you can do by mail. You can pay your bills, you can vote, and now you can even get an abortion. That’s right mail-order-brides, step aside because there’s a new in demand, and possibly illegal (depending on your state and/or where Brett Kavanaugh is at in his hangover) service coming to the U.S. We’re talking about mail order abortions and yes, this is legit a thing.

But before you ask, “Are Americans seriously so lazy that they can’t even go out to get abortions now?” take a pause. In reality, getting an abortion in the U.S.  can be very difficult, despite it being legal. Many states make it virtually impossible for a woman to terminate her pregnancy, and with Justice Fratbro joining the Supreme Court who knows how long Roe v. Wade will hold up. That’s part of the reason that Rebecca Gomperts, a Dutch physician and women’s rights activist, launched a mail based abortion service six months ago in the U.S. The service is known as “Aid Access” in the U.S and “Women on Web” internationally, where Gomperts has been offering the ability to get at home abortion drugs to women in countries that are two seconds from Handmaid’s Tale oppressed healthcare systems.

WTF Is An At Home Abortion?

So first of all, you don’t have to figure out how to perform surgery on yourself to do this. Think of it as Plan C, a pill that can be used up to 10 weeks into the pregnancy. You receive the pills (mifepristone and misoprostol) in the mail, which you can take at home and will result in the termination of your pregnancy. These are the same drugs that doctors use and are approved by the FDA, however in most states they are not approved for personal use. Those are typically the same states that make you jump through hoops to get an abortion in the first place, so definitely double check your state’s specific rules before hitting “pay now” at checkout.

Is This Safe?

Great q. Based on one study where women self reported the results of taking the pills at home, it seems to have very few negative side effects. Gomperts also does an online consultation with the women beforehand to assess if they fit very specific criteria that ensure it is safe. Then she fills the prescription through a trusted pharmacist in India. The biggest risk that many women face for using this service is being arrested for self-managed abortion, which, like I said before kind of a big no no in many states. In many cases the women who have been arrested for at home abortions have been turned in by someone else (it be ya own besties), so if you are considering this make sure you only tell your tight lipped friends or ones that will bail you out of jail. Also maybe take a quick vacay to a state where this is legal just to be safe?

This service will most definitely face opposition from the lovely men (and some women – Susan Collins what’s good?) in Congress who love to dictate what women can and cannot do with their bodies. (Though, of course, no one can ever tell a man what he can or cannot do with his gun.) The FDA is also currently investigating Aid Access “to assess potential violations of U.S. law,” so there’s a chance the service could be shut down by having its FDA approval revoked. For now, it’s one very good option for women who are in need and cannot get an abortion from a doctor because of the barriers put in place in their state. The pills cost $95 total and Aid Access says it will help women who can not afford the price still get the care they need.

In the end, it is up to the individual if they would like to go through with this, but if America’s healthcare system is messed up enough that women are actually ordering abortion pills by mail from India, it’s safe to say there are larger problems at work here.

Heads up, you need to keep up with the news. It’s not cute anymore. That’s why we’ve created a 5x weekly newsletter called The ‘Sup that will explain all the news of the week in a hilarious af way. Because if we weren’t laughing, we’d be crying. Sign up for The ‘Sup now!

The Trump campaign was apparently a free for all when it came to sex, drugs, and people who say “my significant other and I are separated ATM so it actually isn’t cheating.” The most recent scandal to come out of the mofo wood work is that former campaign adviser, Jason Miller, knocked up a stripper then gave her an abortion pill smoothie. But that’s not all! The reason we now know this is because he also had an affair with another campaigner AJ Delgado. The two are now fighting a custody battle over their child, so Delgado released all the receipts. I know, I know. That was a lot of information to absorb in one paragraph. Take a second to pick your jaw up off the ground.

The lovestory begins when Jason Miller was a spokesperson on the Trump campaign and AJ Delgado was brought on to help get the Latinx vote out for Trump. Of course, Miller said he was separated and, of course, that was a pile of BS. Fast forward and Delgado had their son in 2017 and – for some reason – she thinks the child having regular time with Miller will be damaging. There’s also a GoFundMe page to support Delgado’s legal fees, if you’re in the giving mood.

Clearly one baby mama per campaign is Miller’s limit (though he does not appear to have a limit on the number of affairs.) Miller allegedly hooked up with a stripper at a relaxing campaign after party at the strip club and, becase Miller apparently never learns, he got her preggo. Dude’s got some strong swimmers. Naturally then he freaked the fuck out and put an abortion pill into a smoothie he gave her, which caused the women to have a miscarriage and spend time in the hospital. Wonder how Trump’s pro-life and conservative base are feeling about this one. Not only would this mean that Miller drugged a woman and caused his own unborn child to be aborted, but he’s also pro-choice-is-all-mine-not-yours.

Splinter broke the story and sent a reporter to Florida that confirm the story with said stripper, aka Jane Doe. She was like which one of my friends told you because no one else knows that happened, aka confirmed. After the story broke, Miller took a page out of the Don’s book and took to twitter calling Splinter a liar. He also handed in his resignation as a CNN political commentator via tweet, v professional.

News on my departure from CNN: pic.twitter.com/IjNIgeRPRF

— Jason Miller (@JasonMillerinDC) September 22, 2018

“I will clear my name in this matter and seek to hold Ms. Delgado, Splinter and anyone else involved in spreading these lies legally accountable,” is apparently the last step in his 6 point plan. So get ready for the next tell all and someone should poss start a reality show of former campaign staff because this sh*t just keeps getting crazier.

6) I will clear my name in this matter and seek to hold Ms. Delgado, Splinter and anyone else involved in spreading these lies legally accountable.

— Jason Miller (@JasonMillerinDC) September 22, 2018

Heads up, you need to keep up with the news. It’s not cute anymore. That’s why we’ve created a 5x weekly newsletter called The ‘Sup that will explain all the news of the week in a hilarious af way. Because if we weren’t laughing, we’d be crying. Sign up for The ‘Sup now!

Some couples role play to spice up their marriage, others decide to bring in a third person. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump get off on trying to bribe Planned Parenthood. The only president I care about, Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards, wrote in her memoir that the West Wing – West World couple offered to increase federal funding for the organization if they stopped providing abortions. LOL. In your dreams, you heartless dorks. 

Whatever their reasoning, they aren’t savvy enough to understand that Planned Parenthood will never stop providing women with safe and legal abortions. That’s like asking Lindsay Lohan to stop giving unwanted legal advice. It’s their thing and you have to respect that. 

Obviously Richards was like hard pass and left the meeting being like, “omg I’m definitely going to write about these psychos in my book.” Jared and Ivanka left the meeting thinking “wow that lady was blonde enough to work for Fox News!”

Heads up, you need to keep up with the news. It’s not cute anymore. That’s why we’ve created a 5x weekly newsletter called The ‘Sup that will explain all the news of the week in a hilarious af way. Because if we weren’t laughing, we’d be crying. Sign up for The ‘Sup now!

(Images via Giphy)

It’s a pretty bad week/month/year for women. Trump and Republicans in Congress want to hike up the price of our birth control and outlaw abortions. One of the most powerful men in Hollywood has been assaulting and harassing women for YEARS and nobody did anything about it. Your favorite Hollywood hottie, Ben Affleck, gropes women on the regular (allegedly…). Oh, and women are still earning less than men even when performing the same jobs *screams into the void*. 

When women’s rights are under attack, you gotta step up and help. That’s just like, the rules of feminism. We’re partnering with the National Organization For Women on a new “Rules Of Feminism” T-shirt. 20% of the proceeds from this shirt will be donated to the NOW Foundation, and 100% of you will look both amazing and very woke wearing it. 

What is the NOW Foundation? They’re a nonprofit “devoted to achieving full equality for women through education and litigation,” according to their website. Basically, they do a little bit of everything, from the Love Your Body campaign aimed at promoting better body image among young women to voter mobilization efforts to preparing and submitting reports to the UN about global feminist issues, and much more. They are also affiliated with the National Organization for Women, the biggest feminist grassroots campaign in the United States. Buy this tee for yourself, for your friends, for your woke bae—whoever. It’s for a great cause.