SEX ED FROM CELEBS
The latest revelations by the stars on sex & relationships topics
Actor Abigail Breslin, age 27 – star of Little Miss Sunshine at age 10 and the 2023 film Miranda’s Victim about the rape that led to creating the Miranda rights – posted on Instagram about being raped by a boyfriend (see below). In 2020 she tweeted when a troll commented on her weight…
“‘Your words are the exact reason a 14-year-old me started throwing up after meals.
Btw, why are you so concerned about a young woman’s physique and why do you feel you have the authority to comment on it? [You could] cause severe damage to someone.’
Promoting body positivity, in 2015 she wrote in a blog: ‘All this stuff about Selena Gomez in her bathing suit is ridiculous.
Why are you commenting on a gorgeous, talented and smart young girl’s body?’”
WORDS Abigail Breslin weight gain: Little Miss Sunshine’s advocacy for body positivity (Sportskeeda, 29/1/24)
MORE FROM BRESLIN
• [On Gomez] “How are young girls supposed to grow up normally and not feel bad about themselves and not develop eating disorders if it’s headline news that a THIN girl may or may not have put on a few pounds and YET still remains THIN? If we taught girls they had more newsworthy qualities than how they fit into a bikini, we’d have a lot more happy girls”
• [On a 2016 Egyptian Gold’s Gym ad of a pear captioned: “This is no shape for a girl”] “Things like this are the reason 9-year-old girls develop eating disorders.
Working out should be something you do for yourself, not cuz a corporation declares your body shape isn’t what girls should look like.
Interesting they had to single out females. Good job for preying on people’s insecurities and perpetuating body image issues!”
• [During Domestic Violence Awareness Month 2022 she posted] “As a DV survivor I felt compelled to write. I was in a very abusive relationship for close to 2 years… I was forced to pretend everything was ok & normal while dealing with intense injuries most people didn’t even see”
• “[On not reporting having been raped] I was in complete shock and denial. I didn’t want to view myself as a ‘victim’, so I suppressed it and pretended it never happened.I was in a relationship with my rapist and feared not being believed”
Actor Cillian Murphy, age 47 – who walked the Oscars red carpet with his artist wife Yvonne McGuinness and sons Malachy, 17, & Aran, 16 – addressed his family at an awards ceremony in January: “Thanks for putting up with me – with the half me, the shadow me & the absent me, the remains of me when I’m doing a film like this or work in general. You’re always there. I love it. So thanks, guys” and said…
“My sons seem better adjusted than I was. More sure of themselves. I’m happy about that. For me, it was something that took a long time to figure out: that it’s all right to be you, all right to be an individual.
They’re really good boys. We have a laugh. We don’t do Dad’s Movie Night, but they like some of my films. They say all my films are really intense”
WORDS Cillian Murphy’s Sons Malachy, 17, and Aran, 16, Make Rare Appearance at 2024 Oscars Before His Best Actor Win (People, 11/3/24)
MORE ON FAMILY FROM MURPHY
• “It’s been the most important thing for me, having those kids and raising them.
[About his wife] To have a really secure, solid base is important. You have to have that safe place. It’s just like an island of comfort and ease”
• “That work-life balance thing is hard. I have an amazing wife – I couldn’t do this without her and her understanding. But it is a struggle. I think it is for any dad whose work takes him away, which it generally does, and which consumes him, which my work does”
• [On how becoming a father made him “a better person”and “aware of what’s important in life”] “I’m a father of 2 teenagers and I once was young as well so I recognise how tricky it is as a young person today in society.
It’s a very complex time growing up – things are changing a lot at a very accelerated rate. We’re all aware of the effect of the internet and life online. It feels to me like lots of kids’ life exists inside of this device.
The idea that empathy would form part of a curriculum is an excellent idea. Young people generally are caring and compassionate”
• [On being a teen] “I had bravado. But deep down…”
• [In his Golden Globes speech] “To my family – I’m the luckiest man and I love you”
• [To his family at the Oscars] “I love you so much”
🌈 “TV and radio presenter Graham Norton, age 60, has opened up about being a role model for LGBT+ fans throughout his career.
The native of Cork felt he ‘didn't have an option’ but to be authentically himself since the start.
An inspiration to young people, he addressed the fans he
has helped navigate being gay in an Ireland that was behind the times.
He says: ‘I meet young people, some of them not even young anymore, and they go: “You really helped me have a conversation with my parents.”
I get that. If you’re sat on the sofa and your mum and dad find my nonsense funny, they’re not as far away as you thought.’
About keeping his vows to husband Jonathan McLeod, whom he wed in 2022, he said that ‘being 60 is old’ so ‘til death do us part seems more achievable now’”
🌈 WORDS Honest chat: Graham Norton opens up about pressure during early career as he became role model for LGBT fans (Irish Sun, 16/2/24)
MORE FROM NORTON
🌈 “Norton paid tribute to ‘all the people who stayed in Ireland to fight for the modern tolerant place it has become’”
🌈 “I moved where the gays were. I went to London. Where nobody knew me so there was none of that scariness and there were gay bars that were just on the street so I could walk in and meet other gay people.I don’t want to be glib about it, because those people who stayed [in Ireland], who went on the marches and did the petitions, are nameless and faceless and I’ll never get to actually thank them, but they did the hard work”
🌈 “Footage has resurfaced of the time Graham Norton opened up about his homosexuality and revealed he thought it was due to being a Protestant in Ireland.
On the Late Late Show in 1999, when he was 34, he said: ‘I thought: “I’m feeling out of step now – it must be the Protestant thing.” It was a revelation when I left Ireland and realised that that wasn’t the Protestant thing at all.’ He said he never ‘really’ knew he was gay until he moved to England”
Actor Kate Winslet, age 48, said over lunch about the weight-loss drug Ozempic: “This sounds terrible. Let’s eat some more things!”…
“In 1997, when Winslet starred in Titanic aged 22, comedian Joan Rivers joked about her sinking the Titanic. In 1998 Winslet tried to stifle conversation about her weight by explaining that she was a heavyset teenager who ‘sensibly lost the weight doing Weight Watchers’.
[About having an eating disorder] ‘I never told anyone about it. Because people around you go: “You look great! You lost weight!” So even the compliment about looking good is connected to weight. That is one thing I will not let people talk about. I pull them up straightaway.
[Filming Titanic] I felt I had to look a certain way or be a certain thing. Because media intrusion was so significant, my life was quite unpleasant.’
In 2022 she discussed being body shamed in the media after Titanic. She was called ‘blubber’ and was advised to settle for ‘fat girl’ roles.
Winslet said: ‘My agent would get calls saying: “How’s her weight?” I kid you not. So it’s heartwarming that this has started to change.’
If she could turn back the clock, she would tell body shamers: ‘Don’t you dare treat me like this. I’m a young woman, my body is changing, I’m figuring it out, I’m deeply insecure, I’m terrified. Don’t make this any harder than it already is. That’s bullying and actually borderline abusive’”
WORDS Kate Winslet calls Ozempic “terrible” as she opens up about past eating disorder (Independent, 9/3/24)
MORE FROM WINSLET
• “In my 20s, people talked about my weight a lot. I was called to comment on my physical self. Then I got this label of being ballsy and outspoken. No: I was just defending myself, still figuring out who the hell I bloody well was! They commented on my size, estimated what I weighed, printed the supposed diet I was on.
[On how this “damaged her confidence”] I didn’t want to go to Hollywood because I thought: ‘God, if this is what they’re saying in England, what will happen when I get there?’It tampers with your evolving impression of what’s beautiful”
• “My daughter Mia, age 23, is very much her own person. Young women now know how to use their voice”
🌈 On The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, the host showed the Rolling Stone cover of actor Kirsten Stewart, age 33, with her hand in her jockstrap. A self-described “openly gay movie star”, she came out as bisexual in 2017. RollingStone said the cover is “hypersexualised, left of andro and flips the gender script”…
Colbert: It’s a perfectly lovely cover. We were asked by CBS not to show it and I don’t understand why.
I want to say that you look better in a jockstrap than I ever did.
Stewart: It’s a little ironic because I feel like I’ve seen a lot of male pubic hair on the cover of things. A lot of hands in pants.
There’s a certain overt acknowledgment of a female sexuality that has its own volition in a way that’s annoying for people who are sexist and homophobic.
Colbert: I’ve certainly seen more revealing covers on Rolling Stone or Sports Illustrated.
Stewart: It’s not remotely explicit.
Colbert: It also violates public expectations of female sexuality as opposed to how you’re presenting it here.
Stewart: Yes, because female sexuality isn’t supposed to actually want anything but to be had. And that feels like it’s protruding in a way that might be annoying. But fuck you…
WORDS Stephen Colbert Says CBS Asked Him Not to Show Kristen Stewart’s Rolling Stone Cover; Stewart Says “F— You” to the Homophobic Haters (Variety, 12/3/24)
MORE FROM STEWART
🌈 [On her Love Lies Bleeding role] “It is a moving return to form. Kind of like who you are when you’re 11 – physically; the clothes you choose to wear – before you’ve been pummelled by male expectation”
🌈 “I’m just getting back to that 11-year-old. It takes a long period of growing up to get back to who you were when you were a little guy”
🌈 “My sexuality is totally fluid. I’m all over the fucking map and I was [at age 12]. I wanted to be normal and hot, so I was like: ‘I’m going to figure out how to look like a girl and get guys to like me.’ It’s totally a normal story”
🌈 “The violence and shame women internalise then use as triggers for pleasure? We can’t get away from it. To think we know what we want in a way divorced from the patriarchy is impossible. [I’m] Vagina Monologue-ing all over the place…”
🌈 [On female bodies] “The coolest fucking part of us is that we have this ever-present and unclosable opening – we’re walking around with it and we sort of pretend like it’s not there, but it’s our greatest strength”
🌈 Labour minister Jeremy Miles, age 52, who was “on the verge of becoming the UK’s most senior openly gay politician”but was not voted into the post, said of growing up in the 80s…
“I felt very much on the outside, very much that I couldn’t see my place in the world. No part of my life told me it was OK and normal to feel the way I did.
It was a time when the Tory government was finding new ways of being homophobic and oppressing people from LGBT+ communities. So as a young person trying to find your place in the world, that’s a hostile environment.
Life is a process where you’re constantly coming out as gay, in my experience.
Obviously, as you get older, that becomes more familiar and you’re more relaxed and comfortable about it. But it was difficult when I first came out.
I came out at university [at Oxford] to friends, and that was challenging but essentially fine.
Coming out to my parents was a lot more difficult and I think they found it quite difficult, and for a long time. That’s not the case now.
[On how leading the Welsh Labour Party would make him the UK’s most senior gay politician] It would feel like a very significant moment. If you’d been talking to the teenage me, I would never have imagined that to be remotely possible.
I think it’s also important that politics – UK politics and beyond – are representative and more representative than they currently are, because young people need to look at their public leaders and have a sense that they could be doing those roles in life.
And so I think – I hope – that if I do have the honour of leading the party, it will set that ambition for young people today who are gay”
🌈 WORDS “I found it hard coming out, now I might be about to become UK’s most senior gay politician” (Daily Mirror, 11/2/24)
Former tennis star Serena Williams, age 42, posted an Instagram picture of herself in a bikini less than 6 months after her daughter Adira River Ohanian was born…
“Showing her postpartum body some love, the tennis legend is looking blissful while holding her baby girl. In the caption Williams reflects on her body’s journey from winner of tournaments to maker of children:
‘Loving yourself is essential. I find that I have to remind myself of that self-love through all different stages in my life. Right now I love that my body is not picture perfect.
I love that I smell like milk – that milk sustains Adira Ohanian.
I love getting to know a new version of my body. It is a change, but it’s a change that has been well worth it. So start this week, knowing that you are loved and that starts with you.
Ok, now I’m about to go to the gym 🤪’
Williams’s husband, Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian, commented simply: ‘😍’ They also share daughter Alexis Olympia, age 6.
Williams recently captioned a video of her 2 girls playing: ‘We all work out in this family’”
WORDS Serena Williams Has the Most Relatable Message for Postpartum Moms Who Don’t Feel “Picture Perfect” (Glamour, 12/2/24)
MORE FROM WILLIAMS
• “You really have to learn to accept and love who you are. I’m really happy with my body type and proud of it. I talk about it all the time – how it was uncomfortable for someone like me to be in my body”
• “It was hard for me. People would say I was born a guy, all because of my arms or because I’m strong. I was different to my sister Venus: she was thin and tall and beautiful, and I am strong and muscular – and beautiful, but you know, it was just totally different”
• “I like who I am, I like how I look and I love representing the beautiful dark women out there”
• “How amazing that my body has been able to give me the career I’ve had. I only wish I’d been thankful sooner. It just all comes full circle when I look at my daughter”
• “Oh God, I’ll never be a size 4! Why would I want to do that, and be that? [Gesturing at her bicep] This is me, and this is my weapon and machine”
Prince Harry, age 39, addressed tech bosses in saying:
“‘Stop sending children content you wouldn’t want your own children to see.
We need to get out of this idea that young kids, there’s something wrong with them.
No, it’s the world that we’re allowing to be created around them.’
The Archewell Foundation he started with his wife Meghan Markle, age 42, issued a video of them speaking on World Mental Health Day in October 2023.
Explaining that they’re focusing on what they can do behind the scenes to make social media use ‘safer, better and more positive’, Markle said: ‘People are getting hurt – and people, specifically children, are dying.
When the car was first invented, there wasn’t a seatbelt. People started to get hurt, people started to die. So you started to change the car.
Archewell has been working on a support network for parents [who say social media contributed to their child’s suicide or abuse or] who have children managing serious mental health conditions as a result of their exposure to harmful online content. We met some of the families – it was impossible to not be in tears.
Our kids are really young – 2-and-a-half and 4-and-a-half – but social media is not going away. Everyone now is affected by the online world & social media.’
The death of 14-year-old Molly Russell – who took her life after being bombarded by self-harm and suicide content online – played a major role in pushing the Online Safety Act through the UK Parliament.
Molly’s father Ian Russell, Molly Rose Foundation founder, said: ‘Mark Zuckerberg displayed outright denial about Meta’s role in damaging the health and wellbeing of a generation of teens.
Like Big Tobacco decades before, Big Tech is actively evading the industrial level harm it’s causing young people’”
WORDS Harry and Meghan release video of Duchess telling families of children who have been victims of cyber bullying that “we all just want to feel safe” as couple front campaign calling for “urgent change in the online space” (Daily Mail, 1/3/24)
🌈 Actor Marcia Gay Harden, age 64, said during the 2023 telethon Drag Isn’t Dangerous: “All my children are queer” (Eulala, 25, identifies as nonbinary; Julitta, 19, as fluid and twin Hudson as gay). Harden says she “always will be” an LGBT+ activist…
“[Being on the telethon] I got so much hate mail and so much how I’m ‘grooming my kids’– all this, that and the other. The response from each one of my kids was: ‘Work it, Mom. You’re doing something right if that’s happening.’
I often want to catch my kids, protect them and not let them learn hard lessons because you don’t want them to hurt.
I just have to stand back and go: ‘This is yours right now and it’s painful, but I know you know what to do. You have it in you and you can do it.’
You’d have to ask them how I am as a parent. In the day, they would’ve said ‘strict’. They would all say ‘hands on’ and they would not be wrong.
I want to be involved in their life. I’m not a helicopter mom who’s like: ‘Shouldn’t they get a participation award because they were in the soccer game?’ I don’t like that at all. Earn it, but I want the best for them.
Having a child will literally be the greatest masterclass anybody will ever have in love and the ability to love.
I’ve learned to accept each of my kids for the beauty that they are and dispel expectation. At the end of the day, it’s their life. I want them to be happy in it.
I’ve learned an awful lot about gender nonconformity and about what I was already understanding in my own life, even in high school. My first boyfriend was gay and too afraid to come out until later. Then I was learning about the gay community. Now the kids talk about the queer community and it’s much more expansive, much more gender-nonconforming, much more embracing.
I’m learning on a daily basis about that from all of my kids. They’re all artists on some level, very gifted at what they do. They all have an incredible humanity as well.
I like it when I feel like they’re seen. I’m really supportive of what they want to do and who they are”
🌈 WORDS Marcia Gay Harden Says Her 3 Queer Kids Inspired Her LGBTQ+ Activism: “This Hatred Has to Stop” (People, 17/2/24)
Comedian Amy Schumer, age 42, who was on the Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon last week, said in an Instagram post about comments on her “puffy” face…
“Thank you so much for everyone’s input about my face.
I’ve enjoyed feedback and deliberation about my appearance, as all women do, for almost 20 years.
And you’re right: it is puffier than normal. I have endometriosis – an autoimmune disease that every woman should read about.
There are some medical and hormonal things going on in my world but I’m OK.
Historically women’s bodies have barely been studied medically compared to men. I also believe a woman doesn’t need any excuse for her physical appearance and owes no explanation.
But I wanted to take the opportunity to advocate for self-love and acceptance of the skin you’re in. Like every other women/person some days I feel confident and good as hell and others I want to put a bag over my head.
But I feel strong and beautiful and so proud of this TV show I created. Wrote. Starred in and directed. Maybe just maybe we can focus on that… I hope you enjoy [my show] Life & Beth. Love and solidarity”
WORDS Amy Schumer hits back at comments about her “puffy” face (Evening Standard,17/2/24)
MORE FROM SCHUMER
• [On celebs] “Everyone has been lying saying: ‘Oh smaller portions.’ Like shut the f**k up. You are on Ozempic or one of those things or you got work done. Be real with the people. When I got lipo, I said I got lipo”
• [On getting liposuction] “I’ve never been famous for being hot. But I reached a place where I was tired of looking at myself in the mirror. Everybody on camera is doing this – I just wanted to be real about it”
• “Girls in your 20s, guess what? I looked like you too. Life is coming for you”
• “I’m probably, like, 160lb and I can catch a dick whenever I want. I’m not going to apologise for who I am and I'm going to love the skin I’m in & not strive for some other version of myself”
• “Anyone who has ever been bullied or felt bad about yourself: I am fighting for you, for us”
• “C-section. Hysterectomy. Lipo. This summer is about letting the love in. Trying to be healthy and strong for myself and my family. I want to feel hot too. In my prime. Let’s go”
🌈 Singer Boy George, age 62, says in his book Karma: My Autobiography: “By about age 6, I knew I was gay and so did everyone else. Though I was bullied for being effeminate and pretty, I never really wished I was straight. Of course I knew I had to keep it quiet” and…
“‘In the 1970s there was a sense that I should get on with my gay business over there in the corner and not talk about it.
That was never going to work. As a kid I went to Sunday school in one of Mum’s hats. Her friend said: “Do you know what he’s wearing?”
“I do,” she said defiantly.
When I left the house, Mum said: “Look what he’s wearing.”
Dad would lower his newspaper and say: “Up to him if he wants to get beat up.”
Being the gay) middle child in a London Irish family was less of a big deal than you might think though.’
The family was aware of George’s sexuality but hadn’t discussed it with him: ‘My dad announced my “homosexuality” to my brothers in his van. Turning down the radio, he said: “You know, your brother’s a bit funny.”David chipped in: “Funny peculiar or funny ha ha?”
Richard corrected Dad: “You mean he’s gay.” Dad turned the radio back up.’
George left his turbulent home for a squat in London, where he decorated a wall with numerous X-rated pictures of men.He came back to find a note left by his builder dad Jerry and mum Dinah that read: ‘Nice wallpaper. Love you, son.’
That ended up being an emotional point in their relationship”
WORDS Boy George reveals graphic way his parents discovered he was gay (Metro, 9/1/24)
🌈 MORE FROM GEORGE
• “Violence in marriage was accepted and never discussed. I saw terrible things. One day Mum was under the table screaming up at Dad, who was holding a knife”
• [At a charity event] “Princess Diana broke protocol and approached me. She complimented my outfit: ‘That must have taken forever.’
I said: ‘I didn’t do it myself, love.’ I asked if she would meet Mum and they spent 10 minutes chatting”
• “Dad loved Muhammad Ali. We had a picture of him next to a picture of the Pope.
[At a nightclub I saw Ali] I was, like, full on in total drag. He goes: ‘Are you a girl or boy?’ I said: ‘I’m a boy.’ And he goes: ‘You’re a very pretty boy’”
Actor Julia Roberts, age 56, reminisces…
“‘I waved and people saw I had armpit hair. It was a scandal.’
Though Roberts wasn’t the first star to unveil au naturel armpits in public (Sophia Loren was flouting that beauty norm in the 1950s), she is arguably the most memorable, not least for the amount of discussion – even outrage – that her hirsute appearance at the 1999 London premiere of Notting Hill prompted”
WORDS Julia Roberts Remembers That “Scandalous” Underarm Hair Moment (British Vogue, 13/1/24)
• Roberts on not doing nude scenes during her 35-year “G-rated” film career:
“‘Not criticising others’ choices, but for me to not take off my clothes in a movie or be vulnerable in physical ways is a choice that I guess I make for myself.’
Roberts had a body double for revealing scenes as a prostitute in Pretty Woman (1990) and asked for an explicit sex scene in Duplicity (2009) to be changed, saying: ‘It’s not really what I do, so if you’re going to ask me to do it, you have to expect it to be toned down. You know, as a mum of 3, I feel like that.’
She also once said: ‘I wouldn’t do nudity in films. To act with my clothes on is a performance. To act with my clothes off is a documentary’”
WORDS Julia Roberts says she has made the choice not to do nude scenes (BBC, 12/1/24)
MORE FROM ROBERTS
• “I have girlfriends who were having to juggle being at work and having to go into the bathroom and, you know, get out that breast pump. I sort of went through that with them by proxy. To be allowed the luxury of staying home and being with my family – I had a deep gratitude for that time.But there’s also something to my kids seeing that my creative life is meaningful to me. Going outside of the house and being creative is really important. And it doesn’t take away from my love of home. It’s another level of my life”
• “When you’ve got 3 toddlers in the house, you’re performing all day long with puppet shows and stories. I act around the clock”
• “I am a feminist”
Actor Jamie Dornan, age 41, who hid when reviews for Fifty Shades Of Grey came out (it was “just ridicule almost”), recalls seeing himself on a billboard…
“I was walking through New York and I’d done this Calvin Klein campaign & there’s a massive billboard. Model Natalia Vodianova’s pulled down my jeans and she’s basically taking a bite out of my arse. [Laughs] Or looking like she’s about to.
And I just looked up and was like: ‘Oh my God’ & a woman beside me went: ‘That’s disgusting!’ [Laughs]
And I went: ‘That’s me, that’s actually me. That’s my bum and that’s my face!’
Rugby is a huge love of mine. But there’s also a sort of boys’ club side to it: it’s like you’re this kind of proper man and I’m fine with that. But there was this side of me that wanted to skip about and be a bit more free. The school’s drama studio was the most joyous space ever because everyone left their inhibitions at the door and you could muck about and play.
My dad, a doctor, was in the Royal Victoria Hospital outdoor pool for staff and he saw a beautiful brunette climbing out of the pool.
That was my mother. When, later, they were about to fill in the pool, Dad asked: ‘What’s the craic with the steps? I’d love to keep them.’ So he had the steps propped up against the shed in our garden for years that he first saw my mum on”
WORDS 10 things we learned from Jamie Dornan’s Desert Island Discs (BBC, 29/1/24)
MORE FROM DORNAN
• [On daughters Dulcie, Elva & Alberta] “I want to be someone they feel they can trust & say anything to”
• “Any chance I get to be doing the school run, I’m doing it. I’m not missing out”
• Insta post of him in a dress, wig & heels: “Dressing up with my daughters took a turn. Meet Jenny (with the blue hair). She’s sweet”
• “Being a dad is the best. I feel a healthy & lovely duty to provide for my kids. Making my kids happy is a good thing for my wife & me to be driven by.
Part of me feels like I need to put a cork in it after this. Maybe we’ll just – if my wife’s willing – do it until we can’t anymore. It’s all up to her. I do the fun bit”
• Insta post of his wife & girls: “I’m nothing but a pile of dust without this crew #internationalwomensday”
Actor Christopher Eccleston, age 59, who talks about having anorexia in his 2019 book I Love The Bones Of You: My Father And The Making Of Me, says…
“As a divorced man, a single father, my focus is on spending time with the kids. Watching 2 human beings develop has been fascinating.
My daughter Esme [age 10] is, quite rightly, very quick to highlight misogyny and feminist achievement. It fills my heart with joy.
But what I’ve noticed in the discussions is that my son Albert [age 11] is very quick to trample on his gender. I had to take him aside and say: ‘Son, the people in front of you may have sinned, but you haven’t and you have nothing to be ashamed of.’
Because, as we know from the global picture, if mothers and fathers don’t have these conversations with young boys, they will gravitate towards hate when puberty kicks in. We don’t want our boys to grow up thinking they’re rapists.
The way people have sex is how they communicate.
I did a sex scene with an A-list actress and she implied, in front of the crew, that I was copping a feel. Because she didn’t like me.
I’m fortunate it happened before the Harvey Weinstein stuff came to light so I wasn’t put in the stocks for it. But I’ve never felt more betrayed by a fellow actor. It was an abuse of power.
As a bloke, a young man, you see the majority of people in the crew are male. Then there’s a beautiful woman who’s naked. So unless you’re a complete a***hole, you just continually ask her: ‘Are you comfortable? Is there anything I can do?’
But the intimacy coordinator on True Detective said: ‘I’m here to protect you too.’ I’d not thought about that. You don’t think that maybe somebody’s copping a look at you. You just don’t, not from a working-class northern British background.I was born in ’64, when men were really not the objects of desire as far as I knew”
WORDS Christopher Eccleston on the sex scene that still upsets him: “An A-list actress implied I was copping a feel” (Independent, 20/1/24)
MORE FROM ECCLESTON
“I didn’t want Albert and Esme to ever feel there was anything they couldn’t talk to me about. I couldn’t talk to anyone. I still carry baggage about masculinity and toughness”
Actor Emma Stone, age 35 – who stars as a woman developing emotionally, intellectually and sexually in the black-comedy sci-fi fantasy Poor Things, which “has drawn criticism for its graphic sex and masturbation scenes” – says…
“So much of this was about being true to my character Bella’s experience. Sex is obviously a huge part of her experience and growth, as it is, I think, for most people in life.
But I see it as just one aspect of many: her discovery of food, philosophy, travel, dance. Sex is another aspect.
One things we talked about early on and I thought was extremely important was that Bella is completely free and without shame about her body.
She doesn’t know to be embarrassed by these things or to cover things up or not dive into the full experience when it comes to anything.
So for the camera to sort of shy away from that – or to say: ‘We’ll just cut all of this out because our society functions in a particular way’ – felt like a lack of being honest about who Bella is.
I’m not a person that just wants to be naked all the time, but I am someone who wants to honour the character as fully as I possibly can. That’s part of her journey, so who am I to say that should be shameful?”
WORDS Emma Stone defends glut of sex scenes in provocative Poor Things movie (Evening Standard,19/1/24)
MORE ON POOR THINGS
• “I wanted to play Bella because it felt like acceptance of what it is to be a woman, to be free, scared and brave. She’s understanding what it is to be a member of society. The more autonomous she becomes, the more challenged men seem to be by it” – Stone
• “The film was certified 18 after a scene with 2 boys watching Bella work as a prostitute – their father hires her to teach them how to have sex – was modified.
Director Yorgos Lanthimos said the intimate scenes were a ‘very intrinsic part of the film. We had to be confident and, like the character, have no shame.
With Emma we decided: ‘What position would they be in? What would they do? What’s missing from the experience of sex… that we need to portray to [represent] desire and its idiosyncrasies?’”
• “This is probably one of the most daring female performances in decades” – co-star Mark Ruffalo
Actor Mark Ruffalo, age 56, on starring in Poor Things, which the Daily Star calls a “misogynistic mess” and the Guardian calls funny, filthy, extravagantly peculiar, explosively inventive, steampunk-infused Victoriana & a “carnival of oddness”, a “pervert’s playground full of subliminal smut”, a “wild wild ride” of a film…
“[The sex scenes] are a huge part of the story. It’s a woman growing from very early on through her teens to her fully realised adult.
How many of us in our teens – all we really cared about was sex.
If we can do what the characters Bella and Duncan did in our teens – some of us more lucky than others did get to do that – it’s such an important part of our human development.
There is a lot of gratuitous sex scenes in movies. All of a sudden, you’re in a sex scene like: ‘Why am I…’ and it feels weird as an actor, but you know it’s to get a certain audience in and that’s fine. But this does not smack of that at all”
WORDS Mark Ruffalo defends Poor Things sex scenes (Digital Spy, 9/1/24)
MORE FROM RUFFALO
• [On appearing naked in the film] “I was like: ‘Do I have to?’ All I can hear is: ‘Nobody wants to see your old ass anymore. Maybe you shouldn’t be doing movies like that anymore.’ [The nudity is] my least favourite part of it, but I also saw it as an extension of the physical comedy that we were finding. So it was just another way to tell the story”
• “I didn’t know if I could pull this off. I’ve never done anything like Poor Things. So, like, the sex scenes: ‘Am I too old to be doing that kind of stuff? Does anyone want to see that?’I feel like we’re in this prudish time for films.
Sexuality is so deeply connected to the psychology of a character. And it should be explored in that sense too”
• “What’s so remarkable about this movie, it’s… shaking off cultural oppression in a lot of ways”
• In 2015 Ruffalo posed shirtless on Instagram, posting: “Men get breast cancer too. I’m supporting @One4TheBoys #InTheNipOfTime campaign”
Actor Gillian Anderson, age 55, “made a bold fashion choice for the Golden Globes with a dress subtly embroidered with vaginas”. Vulvas actually…
“Fans zooming in on her gown noticed it was covered in female-anatomy motifs.
Asked why, Anderson said: ‘Oh for so many reasons. It’s brand appropriate.
Yonis [Sanskrit word for wombs or vaginas] – there are so many yonis on my dress. It took 3.5 hours per yoni to embroider. So it was about 150 hours of embroidering.
Since my Instagram presence has been highlighting yonis since Sex Education landed on Netflix and with the mantra of my brand, G Spot, being to prioritise pleasure, I wanted to bring this element into the design.’
Anderson posted a photo of herself, quipping: ‘Sometimes you just need a sausage to go with your yoni dress.’
The designer, Gabriela Hearst, declared the look ‘vulvaliciously chic’.
Anderson explained that her ‘alternative wellness brand’ G Spot was a response to the restrictive diets she was made to follow in her 20s and 30s. When she was in her 40s the diets made her feel like saying: ‘Don’t f***ing tell me what I should and shouldn’t be consuming; I can do whatever I want.’
Anderson has compiled a book based on women’s sexual fantasies: ‘The book and a few other things have the same messaging in terms of pleasure and empowerment, and being honest with oneself about what one wants and what feels good.’
She had written: ‘I want women across the world, and all of you who identify intrinsically as women now… to tell me what you think about when you think about sex. When you’re having it by yourself or with a partner, or with more than one. Fantasies, frustrations, explorations, the forbidden, childhood, sounds, fetishes, guilt, insatiability. 50 years on [after Nancy Friday’s 1973 book My Secret Garden], the boundaries have been erased, no more so than in our own sexuality… Are women still the silent sex?’
After playing therapist Jean Milburn in Sex Education, she said: ‘I’ve been sent more vibrators than I ever have, which isn’t a bad thing!’”
WORDS Gillian Anderson explains why she wore a Golden Globes dress covered with vaginas as fans declare she “stole the show” (Daily Mail, 9/1/24)
Two Calvin Klein ads are making headlines. Compare and contrast…
1) “A Calvin Klein ad featuring UK musician FKA twigs, age 36, was banned in the UK by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) this month for depicting her as a ‘stereotypical sexual object’. It had received 2 complaints.
twigs wrote on Instagram: ‘I do not see the stereotypical sexual object that they have labelled me. I see a beautiful strong woman of colour whose incredible body has overcome more pain than you can imagine.
In light of reviewing other campaigns, past and current, of this nature, I can’t help but feel there are some double standards here.’
Citing Josephine Baker, Eartha Kitt and Grace Jones as inspirational women ‘who broke down barriers of what it looks like to be empowered and harness a unique embodied sensuality’, the artist says she is proud of her physicality and ‘will not have her narrative’ changed.
Calvin Klein said the ads were similar to the posters it has run in the UK for years which did not overly sexualise women and that the women in the ads had approved the images”
WORDS FKA twigs Calls Out “Double Standards” After Her Calvin Klein Advert Is Banned in the UK (Time, 11/1/24)
FROM NYOME NICHOLAS-WILLIAMS IN GLAMOUR
“twigs was policed & dubbed ‘offensive’. Black & Brown women’s bodies are being observed, studied & ridiculed for simply existing”
2) About the new ad with actor Jeremy Allen White, age 32 – which in 48 hours generated $12.7 million in media exposure for Calvin Klein and has been jokingly called a “national landmark” – White said…
• “I was used to running around in front of large groups of people in my underwear because of the film The Iron Claw, so maybe there was some mental and emotional prep from that job.
I didn’t see this in my future necessarily. Who grows up thinking: ‘Yeah, I’ll be in a Calvin Klein campaign?’
In my head, I was just like: ‘I can’t see myself on a billboard. I shouldn’t be here.’ Just real imposter syndrome”
• “It is bizarre doing Calvin Klein and now it is even more bizarre having it come out, but everything feels OK for now”
WORDS How Jeremy Allen White prepped for his Calvin Klein underwear campaign (GQ, 4/1/24) & Unpicking The Politics Of The Male Thirst Trap (Grazia, 9/1/24)
Actor Jacob Elordi, age 26, who stars in Saltburn, on the infamous bathtub scene **SPOILER ALERT**
“In Saltburn, Felix (Jacob Elordi) pleasures himself in the bath before hopping out after finishing washing and his moment of pleasure, with Oliver (Barry Keoghan) watching on.
Moments later, Oliver dives into the bathtub and slurps up the water and Felix’s bodily fluids.
Elordi says: ‘I was like: “Thank God, it’s mine.” I was very proud.
I was very proud to have Barry Keoghan guzzling it like that.’
I was just really excited when I read that scene because you don’t really see things like that in mainstream movies.
So it’s great that director Emerald Fennell was allowed to kind of push those boundaries and expose people like that.
At a screening in Brisbane, it was unbelievable because everybody was engaged and sort of gasping and yelling at the screen.
I haven’t been in a movie like that in a really long time”
WORDS Saltburn’s Jacob Elordi admits being “excited” over infamous Barry Keoghan bathtub scene (Daily Mirror, 7/1/24)
ON JACOB ELORDI’S BATHWATER MERCH
1) A cocktail inspired by the scene contains cream coconut, pineapple juice, rum and lime juice
2) Smelling a Jacob Elordi’s Bathwater candle (sold in Vanilla, Comfort Spice or Sea Breeze), producer MargotRobbie said: “So accurate”
MORE FROM ELORDI
• “You learn quickly that what people take away from movies is your stature and figure. You have all sorts of aged people around the world only talking about what you look like.
[On male objectification] I don’t think it’s really a conversation that people have in regards to men. It doesn’t keep me up at night but it’s definitely frustrating. You’ll go to a shoot and you’ll be getting changed & someone’s like: ‘Oooaaah, would you look?’ Can you imagine if I said to a woman: ‘Daaaaamn, look at your waist!’? Like, see you later. I would never do that.
It’s a slippery slope to put all your value into the vanity of what your body looks like. Your body is going to deteriorate”
• [On starring in The Kissing Booth at 23] “I got thrown into a world where everyone wanted to talk about my body. It really fucking bothered me. I don’t identify with that whatsoever. I was trying to prove myself & be known as an actor”
• “I would just rip my shirt off and have headphones on, playing Rage Against the Machine. I was trying to understand this mentality of what it is to be in the gym and look at yourself in the mirror and be like: ‘F**k I look good’”
Actor Barry Keoghan, age 31, from Dublin, grew up without a dad, lost his mum to a heroin overdose, was in foster care with his brother and finally found himself, first in a boxing ring then on a film set… **SPOILER ALERT**
[On his character during the infamous bathtub scene in Saltburn] “Oliver was submitting to his obsession and trying to figure out what it is he’s chasing.
When he gets down there, he’s just confused, helpless & sick, you know, to do that. Ugh!
[On the grave scene] I asked for a closed set to see what I’d do as Oliver when ‘Action!’ happened & where I went. To me, he went to a place of being totally heartbroken, lost and confused.
[On the dance scene] I think it was gorgeous to look at a figure like that, roaming that manor dripping in money and paintings from the 1700s and to move so freely.
It’s not a normal thing to see.
But it’s a normal thing to do, because I know we all do it at home. Every single one of us – we all dance around naked.
So it’s probably the most relatable scene in the movie to everyone watching”
WORDS Barry Keoghan Explains Why 1 Of Saltburn’s Most Talked-About Scenes Is Also Its “Most Relatable” (HuffPost, 10/1/24)
MORE FROM KEOGHAN
• [On dancing naked] “It’s full confidence in ‘I can strip to my barest & waltz around because this [place] is mine.’The initial thing was about me having no clothes on. I’m a bit ‘ehhh’. But after take one, I was ready to go. I was like: ‘Let’s go again.’ Yeah, it was fun”
• “I’m really flirtin’ with Jacob. We were constantly close. It ain’t just for the cameras & premieres. Me & Jacob – he’s like a brother. When you’re comfortable with someone, you can be as close as you want. When I’m comfortable, I’m COMFY. I’m comfortable with Jacob. Messin’ about. Havin’ a laugh. We’re bein’ lads.We did a movie where we had to kiss, man. Look at the scenes we’ve done. You have to be comfortable with yourself”
• [On his son, Brando, 18 months old] “I feel a responsibility, enormous pressure, which is good. And I can’t get the little boy off my mind.
It’s beautiful. It’s crazy, but when he looks at you, you feel like the most important person in the world. That’s the effect he has on me”
Singer Taylor Swift, age 34, gives women and particularly girls – who have been “conditioned to accept dismissal, gaslighting and mistreatment from a society that treats their emotions as inconsequential – permission to believe that their interior lives matter”.
“Women have been fed the message that those things we naturally gravitate toward – girlhood, feelings, love, breakups, analysing those feelings, talking about them nonstop, glitter, sequins! – are more frivolous than the things stereotypically gendered men gravitate toward, right?
And what has existed since the dawn of time? A patriarchal society. What fuels a patriarchal society? Money, flow of revenue, the economy.
So if we’re going to look at this in the most cynical way possible, feminine ideas becoming lucrative means that more female art will get made. It’s extremely heartening.
I’ve been raised up and down the flagpole of public opinion so many times in the last 20 years.
By the time an artist is mature enough to psychologically deal with the job, they throw you out at 29.
In the 90s and 00s, it seems like the music industry said: ‘Let’s take a bunch of teenagers, throw them into a fire and watch what happens. By the time they’ve accumulated enough wisdom to do their job effectively, we’ll find new teenagers’”
WORDS 2023 Person of the Year: Taylor Swift (Time, 7/12/23)
MORE FROM SWIFT
“There’s always some standard of beauty that you’re not meeting.At 18 I was on the cover of a magazine and the headline was like: ‘Pregnant at 18?’ because I had worn something that made my lower stomach look not flat.I tend to get triggered by something – a picture where I feel like I looked like my tummy was too big and that’ll just trigger me to just starve a little bit, just stop eating.
If you’re thin enough, you don’t have that ass that everybody wants. But if you have enough weight on you to have an ass, your stomach isn’t flat enough. It’s all just f—ing impossible.I would go into a real shame/hate spiral.
I didn’t know if I’d feel comfortable with talking about body image and the stuff I’ve gone through in terms of how unhealthy that’s been – my relationship with food and all that”
Actor Jodie Foster, age 61, says her sons Kit and Charles, who are in their 20s, had “an early confusion over how to be male”, adding…
“My two don’t like sports. They like to watch movies and sit at home, and they’re really into their female friends. They’re super feminist.
And there was a moment with my older one when he was in high school, when, because he was raised by 2 women – 3 women [her, her partner Alexandra Hedison and their mother Cydney Bernard] – it was like he was trying to figure out what it was to be a boy.
And he watched television and came to the conclusion: ‘Oh, I just need to be an asshole. I understand! I need to be shitty to women and act like I’m a fucker.’
And I was like: ‘No! That’s not what it is to be a man! That’s what our culture has been selling you for all this time.’
[The phase lasted 6 months. Did she let it play out?] Yes and no. I was like: ‘You won’t be talking to me like that.’
[On ‘achieving a washboard stomach’ by working out for 6 months to play a swimming coach in the film Nyad] I’ve been waiting to be objectified my entire life so I’m very happy that people have started talking about my body parts.
[On actor Bella Ramsey, age 20 – who told British Vogue: ‘I’m not 100% straight’ – introducing her at the Elle magazine Women In Hollywood event] I said: ‘I want you to introduce me at this thing.’ All the attendees are wearing heels and eyelashes. There are other ways of being a woman and it’s really important for people to see that. Bella was wearing the most perfect suit, beautifully tailored, and a middle parting and no makeup.’
[Could she have looked like that when she was young?] No, because we weren’t free. Because we didn’t have freedom. And hopefully that’s what the vector of authenticity that’s happening offers – the possibility of real freedom.I would say: I did the best I could for my generation. I was very busy understanding where I fitted in & where I wanted to be in terms of feminism. But my lens wasn’t wide enough. I lived in an incredibly segregated world”
WORDS “There are different ways of being a woman”: Jodie Foster on beauty, bravery and raising feminist sons (Guardian, 6/1/24)
🌈 Actor Ncuti Gatwa, age 31, Sex Education star & the charismatic Doctor Who…
“[The first day of school I was nervous until my mum said]: ‘The teacher has the same shirt as you.’ I was like: ‘Oh yeah, I’ll be fine.’ I was always gonna grow up into a fashion girl.
From ages 11 to 15, it was very [TV show] Skins. We were living hard and fast. I wouldn’t do half of those things now.
Then I became a nerdy, swotty-type boy. That was my new aesthetic: a prefect with full colours on my blazer and I got good grades. I was like: ‘I’ve got a goal: get out and see the world and fucking go for it.’
I love Dunfermline [in Scotland], but I knew there was more to life and I wanted it all.
[At 26 Gatwa came out to his mother] I thought: ‘What?! All this trauma for years. That’s your response?! We’re not gonna have a fight about it?’
I’ve never been in the closet, you know. I just never talked about it. The work I do is what’s important.
It became a situation that ran away from me. I kind of thought my participation in Vogue’s Pride issue was a statement. You know: 2 plus 2 equals 4. I couldn’t be louder about this. I literally got naked.
What is the point of putting a label on anything? I’m not going to do that for people I don’t know. I remember seeing stuff like: ‘You’ve taken up space from an openly queer person.’ If you think it’s that easy, I’m happy for you. That’s a very privileged position: to think that sexuality, talking about sexuality and existing with one’s sexuality is so easy. I’m so glad that you think it’s that easy, because the world isn’t like that.
We all have internalised hate that we’re working through. I’m trying to work through it in therapy.
But we’ve just got to live our life and make the decisions you feel are the healthiest & best for you”
WORDS Ncuti Gatwa Rising (British GQ, 8/11/23)
🌈 MORE FROM GATWA
“I was quite an easy target in a state Scottish high school in a working-class area. I stood out – for my voice, my appearance. I did dance and things like that”
“Growing up there were many times I felt like an alien, so [playing the doctor] I feel like I get it. It’s a joy to draw on elements of your own life, your upbringing”
Actor Olivia Colman, age 49 – patron for the charity Tender, which uses drama and the arts to promote healthy relationships and prevent domestic abuse and sexual violence – said on The News Agents podcast…
“I find it fascinating that it’s hard to get classes run by Tender into private schools.
Private schools think: ‘We don’t have issues like that.’ Statistically they do.
Alcoholism, if it is from a posh wine bottle, is still alcoholism.
Just because the front door is nice, there can still be coercive, controlling, unpleasant behaviour behind that posh front door.
You are not avoiding it by being of a higher socioeconomic background.
I would love all schools to want their children to have happy lives.’
The actor, who attended the private Norwich High School for Girls, said there have been changes in how people view the LGBTQ + community, women speaking up and attitudes towards masculinity – but that young people being influenced by misogyny and hateful online content is ‘endemic’.
Colman said: ‘You need people coming into your school to say: “It’s actually not cool and it’s not funny.
To be a man who is gentle and protective is much more impressive.”I don’t want to get gloomy about the fact that we have the Andrew Tates of the world.
A masculine role model of gentleness is so much cooler, so much hotter.Those people exist. Harry Styles is a very attractive man to the women who fancy him and he is not remotely aggressive’”
WORDS Olivia Colman: Harder to get domestic abuse awareness classes in private schools (Aol, 26/11/23)
FROM COLMAN IN 2014
“I have two young boys. I will never be able to – nor should – control everything they are exposed to or the conclusions they draw from those experiences.
25% of women will suffer domestic violence at some time. Please think about that in relation to your young daughters and young sons.
Think ahead to the next 10, 15, 40 years. You will dearly want their lives to be wonderful, but there will certainly be a degree of suffering. Ask yourself: what shape will that suffering take? Will it involve domestic violence? Statistics say there’s a good chance it will. Let’s do our best to ensure it won’t”
Actor Mia McKenna-Bruce, age 26, was inspired to play Tara in the film How To Have Sex to further consent education…
“‘My sister, at 16, is navigating who she’s becoming. I remember how difficult that was, not knowing where to turn. If I’d had a film like this, that would have made my time a hell of a lot easier.’
Writer-director Molly Manning Walker says that, during research, teen girls reacted to an assault scene with: ‘“I don’t see any issues with this. Girls have to wear better clothes, protect themselves and not get drunk.” It makes you realise how deeply ingrained pressures from society are.’
The only way to ‘unlearn’ these narratives is to ‘start conversations’, as her film does, ‘breeding a safe space to talk’. She didn’t want to create a ‘blame game or make [the perpetrator] Paddy a monster or Tara a victim. Because this story is meant to resonate with people. If you go to extremes, it can shut people out.
Guys see themselves in Tara. They haven’t been able to voice that they want a genuine connection when they first have sex.’
McKenna-Bruce says: ‘Young people need conversations like this to understand their feelings. It’s not hard to look at another human and know if they’re feeling comfortable or not. But because of the way we’ve been taught, or not taught, we’ve searched for answers in other places.Consent is not binary – yes or no. There’s more to consent than words – it’s the person as a whole.
There’s a need for change, but there’s the want for it as well – and that is very positive’”
WORDS How To Have Sex star Mia McKenna-Bruce: “Consent is not binary” (GlamourUK, 3/11/23)
FROM THE DIRECTOR & CAST
• “The story idea came from Manning Walker’s ‘formative memory’ of a man being given oral sex during a bar crawl on a holiday she went on as a teen: ‘But these things happen in all circumstances – in London, camping, at music festivals, wherever’”
• “A lot of people my age back home will watch it, look into themselves, what they’ve done or experienced, and ask questions” – Sam Bottomley
• “I was asked if porn is an issue for young men. It definitely is. It distorts your perception of sex. It’s obviously a problem” – ShaunThomas
Designer Diane von Fürstenberg, age 76, on her mother, sleeping with women & her love affairs…
“Von Fürstenberg’s mother, who was taken to Auschwitz at age 21, would bless Diane’s bed every night, thankful for the sheets, blanket, pillow and warmth after sleeping on a plank shared with rats in the concentration camps. When Von Fürstenberg was afraid of the dark, her mother locked her in the closet: ‘She taught me that fear is not an option.’
Love affairs with Warren Beatty, Omar Sharif & Richard Gere; nights at Studio 54 with Andy Warhol & fellow designer Halston; surviving cancer: Von Fürstenberg has kept diaries throughout. Would she publish them? ‘No. A diary is a communication with yourself. That’s the most important relationship you will have’”
WORDS The tragedy and triumph of Diane von Fürstenberg: “My mother taught me fear is not an option” (Guardian, 7/11/23)
MORE ON VON FÜRSTENBERG
• “Diane’s first serious boyfriend was Sohrab, born in Iran and an architecture student. Diane was a virgin at 16, wearing little-girl
cotton underwear that embarrassed her. The pair broke up – until she bought silk panties & then he became her first lover at 16. The next summer she met Lucio on the beach in Italy. ‘We fell in love,’ she said. ‘He would hold my arm firmly and take me into the pine forest. He would make love to me endlessly.’
During the day she was on holiday with her father & brother but ‘at night I had a secret life, a grown-up woman having a very sexy love affair’ – at 17.
• [About her husband Barry Diller she said] “From the first moment our bodies met he surrendered to me in a way that no one had ever done before. He had certainly never opened himself like that before either, he confessed to me later.
Have I slept with women? Yes. But I’m definitely not a lesbian”
• “Her first lesbian affair was with fellow Oxford pupil Deanne, of whom she said: ‘She was very shy and masculine and she intrigued me. I was in love.
There is nothing that anyone can blackmail me with because I’m very open and there is nothing I have done that I would be really embarrassed for anyone to find out. I’ve never been conventional. Who wants to be conventional?’”
Singer Rihanna and rapper A$AP Rocky, both age 35, posed with their sons RZA Athelston Mayers, 16 months, and Riot Rose Mayers, born on 1 August. Rihanna had said about RZA…
“I like to dress him in things that don’t look like baby clothes.
I like to push it. I put him in floral stuff. I put him in hot pink.
I love that.
I think that fluidity in fashion is best. I always shop in the men’s department, you know.”
She has many of her sons’ clothes custom-made, she says, because: “When you come up with something in your head, half the time it is not available because kids’ clothes are so… they’re sooo boring. I’m like: ‘This is what y’all been doing to these people’s kids all along?’
One of my favourite outfits RZA has [a tartan kilt] is a miniature version of one of Rocky’s.”
An insider explained the reason behind Riot Rose’s name: “Not everyone knows this, but Rocky loves flowers – he loves having fresh flowers in the house, he loves decorating with flowers, and he even had real flowers in his grill once”
WORDS Why Rihanna’s baby boy Riot Rose was dressed in pink in his first photos (Independent, 22/9/23) IMAGE @diggzy
MORE FROM RIHANNA IN BRITISH VOGUE
“Having a kid honestly unlocks another side of life where you’re now in the matrix with the people who’ve already had kids.
[Having done all-night workathons – product developing, marketing, brainstorming – she marvels at working parents] “‘Were you doing this all along? Are you serious? When I had you guys in meetings all the way until 6am you didn’t say how nuts that was?’
You come to have a different respect for moms and dads”
Singer Billie Eilish, age 21, says…
“I’ve never felt like a woman or desirable or feminine. I have to convince myself that I’m, like, a pretty girl.
I identify as ‘she/her’ and things like that, but I’ve never really felt like a girl.
Being a woman is just such a war, forever. Especially being a young woman in the public eye. It’s really unfair.
I’ve had big boobs since I was 9 and that’s just the way I am.
Nobody ever says a thing about men’s bodies. If you’re muscular or not, cool. If you’re rail thin or have a dad bod, cool. If you’re pudgy, love it! Everybody’s happy with it.
You know why? Because girls are nice. They don’t give a fuck. Because we see people for who they are!
[At 16 she wore a tank top in public] You wear something that’s at all revealing and everyone’s like: ‘Oh, but you didn’t want people to sexualise you?’
I wasn’t trying to have people NOT sexualise me. But I didn’t want people to have access to my body, even visually.
I wasn’t strong enough and secure enough to show it. I would have been devastated if people had said anything.
Maybe my not really caring about being sexualised is because I’ve never felt desired or desirable.I’ve never really felt like I could relate to girls very well. I love them as people. I’m attracted to them as people. I’m attracted to them for real. I’m physically attracted to them. But I’m also so intimidated by them and their beauty and presence.
I have deep connections with women in my life, the friends and family in my life.I’m becoming a person I really love and doing things I feel proud of. In many ways, I feel like I’m just now waking up”
WORDS Billie Eilish Was Made for This: “Being a Woman Is Just Such a War, Forever” (Variety, 17/11/23)
MORE FROM EILISH
• “It’s really hard to be a woman out here, guys. I’ve spent a lot of my life not feeling like I fit in to being a woman.I have a lot of internalised misogyny inside of me & I find it coming out in places I don’t want it to”
• “Honestly, nobody can say anything about my body that I don’t have a stronger opinion about.If I was younger, like if the internet talked about me the way they do now when I was like 11, I don’t think I’d be able to exist”
🌈 Comedian Marlon Wayans, age 51, says his next special (called Skittles or Rainbow Child) is about his “daughter that transitioned into a son” – Kai, age 23…
“I talk about the transition – my transition as a parent going from ignorance and denial to complete and unconditional love and acceptance.
There’s a lot of parents that need to have that message. I know: I’m dealing with it. It was a very painful situation for me.”
Ex-NBA basketball star Dwyane Wade, age 41, said: “I salute Marlon for speaking up the same way as I’ve done.
We’re just the voices speaking for our kids before they get an opportunity to grab that microphone & speak for themselves.
Unconditional love allows us to step in and listen and learn of what we do not know and what we were not taught, especially in the Black community.
It’s great for fathers especially to speak from their point of view and how they had to handle it”
WORDS Dwyane Wade Praises Fellow Father of a Trans Child Marlon Wayans for Showing “Unconditional Love” to Son:
“I Salute Him” (Variety, 17/11/23)
🌈 MORE FROM WAYANS
“I tell Kai: ‘You’re transitioning into your brother. You look just like him.’ I can’t tell the difference.
[On using they/them pronouns] “They see I’m trying. But I gotta respect their wishes, right? And as a parent, I just want my kids to be free. Free in spirit, free in thought. Free to be themselves.
The more you know yourself, the more you can govern yourself, the more you live your truth, the happier your existence. So if they can’t get that in the household with their father and mother, how the fuck do I send them out into the world with that kind of confidence?
I’m just so proud of them for being them, but that don’t mean I don’t got jokes. Skittles is one of the best, funniest hours I could possibly imagine.”
[His Insta caption for Kai’s birthday] “daddy loves you to the moon and back. I’ve always asked people to love me unconditionally, thank you for teaching me what that really means. Be you! Your best you!
you’re the gift and I’m the wrapping paper
Excuse my ignorance, chalk it up to growth. Love you so much, thank you for making me a man. So proud”
Actor Annette Bening, age 65…
“‘We’re moving away from the female stereotypes we all struggled with for so long. But there’s been this weird backlash, a beauty standard for young women that is really pretty tough. I don’t envy young women growing up now.
When I was 35, people talked about how I was ageing. Now when I hear people worrying about it at 50, I think: what?’
Bening auditioned for Dangerous Liaisons: ‘I was up for the woman who gets the letter written on her ass. It was a weird time.’
She spent the first 10 years of marriage to Warren Beatty being asked how she tamed the ‘samurai of sex’.
At 28 she switched from stage to screen: ‘They’d always say: ‘You put on 10lb’ about the camera – it made you look heavier.
In these piquant details you remember how fat-phobic the 90s were.
Being onstage is very liberating. You’re not thinking about how you look.
Being confronted with how you look and how your face responds when you’re having a certain reaction – it never occurred to me to deal with that until I had to watch myself.I was hypercritical. That’s usually why people don’t watch themselves – having to be confronted with self-criticism.’
[About long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad, who she plays in Netflix biopic Nyad] ‘Diana had a coach who abused her as a kid. It is part of who she is. What happened to her as a teenager with this coach did inform her swimming and her 20s.
Just like all of us, right? All these things we’ve gone through, they inform us in the present’”
WORDS “They told me: you’re too loud and you put on 10lb”: Annette Bening on success, surgery and surviving Hollywood (Guardian (11/12/23)
FROM DIANA NYAD IN 2017
“‘I wanted to be one of the leaders of the #MeToo movement.’
[At 21 she revealed that from age 14 she was sexually abused by her coach] ‘This deviant, this criminal, assaulted me ad left me with shame, humiliation, rage. People are affected for their entire lives once this happens.
We could go from every sector of society – rabbis, priests, stepfathers, boy scouts and athletic coaches, politicians, choir and Hollywood directors. It is an epidemic. The good ol’ boy system has protected these people.
I’m trying to help other people’”
🌈 Set in Spain’s Basque country, the film 20,000 Species of Bees follows 8-year-old trans girl Lucía (Sofía Otero, age 9), who finds the confidence to be her true self one summer.
First-time filmmaker Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren, age 39, read about the suicide of a 16-year-old trans boy who had left behind a note in which he dreamed of a better, more accepting world: “He said he was making this decision to shine some light on people in his situation – for visibility. He was accepted by his family but was suffering a lot.”
Solaguren spoke to 20 local families: “They said it wasn’t the kids who had changed. What had changed was the others’ gaze. The transformation is the way we look at these kids, no?
I want to make a luminous, bright film, so trans kids also could have a healthy reference, not a character who would suffer, die or be a problem for their family.
In Spain the issue has become a weapon politically. But we are talking about real people struggling with real difficulties”
🌈 WORDS 20,000 Species of Bees was inspired by a trans teen’s suicide – but it centres joy, not tragedy (PinkNews, 4/10/23)
MORE ON THE FILM
• “The mother is relaxed with her ‘son’ having long hair and wearing gender-neutral clothes then worried when Lucía openly identifies as a girl.
A casting call went out to trans groups, primary schools, dance clubs and children’s theatres for ‘girls’ – not trans or cis girls. The children are played by a mix of trans and cis first-time actors. On the advice of lawyers in the trans community and at the request of the children, their gender identities are not being revealed”
• “Summer can be a mortifying time for a child who is uncomfortable in their own body.Handheld cameras pick up on details: Lucía’s smile when she is complimented as a girl; a cloud that darkens her expression when her grandmother forcibly asserts that she has a grandson, not a granddaughter.
It’s the most scalding of hot-button topics and a brave choice for a debut film. But with this gentle, empathic picture, Urresola joins a conversation that usually plays out as a screaming match and tones it down to a murmur”
Actor Andrew Garfield, age 40 – who has starred as Spider-Man, as a man living with Aids and in a verbatim-theatre piece about homophobic murder – made a surprise appearance this summer in London in the play A Survivor’s Manifesto, performing the words of a real-life male survivor of sexual assault. Garfield explained…
“Men in the West are encouraged from an early age to not feel – to not feel things that aren’t just anger and aggression.
[For me acting meant] having a space within which to be all of the parts of myself and express parts of myself that were not welcome at the dinner table, or at school, or in the playground – the more tender parts of myself, the more vulnerable, hurt parts, the more shameful, enraged parts of myself.
So taking part in A Survivor’s Manifesto was not only a therapeutic, detoxifying experience but also an artistic one.
This is something close to my heart because I have lots of friends who have been through this experience. And I’ve seen what it has done to their lives: the struggle it has created, the injustice and unfairness, the pain and inability to connect – and the lack of safety they feel just leaving their room in the morning in some cases.
You’d have to have a heart of stone not to care about something like that.
[The men voicing their experiences onstage were almost saying] ‘This is not mine to keep holding’ and ‘I will keep expressing it until it needs no further expression.’
The healing process is the process of a life. There were a couple of very profound moments where some men who were speaking got deeply touched by the words, by their own experience. And you could feel the trauma seeping out. It’s powerful”
WORDS Spider-Man star Andrew Garfield on why he’s standing up for male sexual abuse victims in “therapeutic” play (iNews, 9/7/23)
Actor Joan Collins, age 90, recalls how actor Maxwell Reed “raped her after spiking her rum & Coke: ‘I was 17 but I was the equivalent mentally of 12.
We did not have sex education. I never saw a penis till I got raped and then I refused to look at it. Hahahaha!
My mother told me men only want one thing and I guess she was right. Hehehehe!’
Astonishingly Reed became her first husband ‘because I come from a generation where if you’re going to have sex, you get married’.
Collins adored her mother, a dance teacher who died at 52: ‘Mummy was the 1950s housewife, sweet and docile.’
[She says her mum died so young because] ‘she didn’t answer back to Daddy.
I inherited my father’s outspokenness.
I loved my mother but I considered her to be weak and I hated all the clothes she wore – the underpinnings, stockings and suspenders, girdles, tight bras and corsets.’
At 18 Collins was voted the most beautiful girl in England by a photographers’ association. Her father told the newspapers: ‘I’m amazed. She’s a nice-enough-looking girl, but nothing special.’
At 22 ‘I was in my Juliette Gréco stage, so I had no make-up, jeans and scruffy hair. The director Richard Fleischer said: “I cannot look at you – you are so ugly. You cannot go around like that: put some make-up on, get your hair done, get a proper dress.”
They took you down all the time at Fox. That’s why I wouldn’t go out without 5 inches of pancake on.’
Collins dodged the casting couch. She was promised the role of Cleopatra if she agreed to be ‘nice’ to the head of Fox and the chairman of the board: ‘I couldn’t & I wouldn’t – the very thought of these old men touching me was repugnant.Actors, directors and producers took it as their right to take their pick of the pretty young actresses. It was very sad.’
[On female actors having to take their top off] ‘I hated it. Some women can do it but I’m a bit shy.’
So what led her to strip for Playboy in 1984? ‘I got paid $100,000!”’
WORDS Joan Collins on love, loss and lust at 90: “You have to eat life or life will eat you!” (Guardian, 25//9/23)
Musician Mick Jagger, age 80 – who had his 8th child, his 6-year-old son Deveraux, when he was 73 and his girlfriend Melanie Hamrick was 29 – on being a parent…
“It’s fun to have children at any age. But if you’re working and always away, you don’t get to enjoy it quite as much.
When Deveraux was born I wasn’t working so much, so I was able to spend more time. And then we had the lockdown. He’s only 6, and 2 of those years I did almost nothing with the band.
[With fatherhood] you get a bit out of practice – it’s not like riding a bike.
The more children you have, the more laissez-faire you get about them, to be honest.
And it depends on the child – they have their own personalities and you can mould them to a certain extent, but you see their likes and dislikes and encourage them to do things they gravitate towards”
WORDS “The more children you have, the more laissez-faire you get”: Mick Jagger on ageing, rage and missing Charlie Watts (Guardian, 20/10/23)
MORE FROM JAGGER
[On his dad, Basil Fanshawe “Joe” Jagger] “He was a teacher & fitness enthusiast. He taught me how to be academic, how to learn things & how to be fit. He was inspiring in terms of physical exercise.
He wasn’t that tough a father, not a severe disciplinarian or anything like that, but he taught me how physicality was important.What he was so against, actually, was me being involved in any way in the arts.
With my children, if they want to do acting classes I’ll say: ‘Do acting classes.’ That’s the modern parent for you”
About actor Robert De Niro, age 80…
“An only child, he had a bohemian early life. His father, a painter, & mother, an artist, briefly wrote erotica for the writer Anaïs Nin at $1 a page. They later divorced. His dad being gay was never discussed between father & son.
De Niro says: ‘I’ve tried to keep my father’s legacy going. To me he was a great artist, a genuine artist.
I want my kids, my grandkids, to know who he was, what he stood for.
I think he was proud of me. At the same time a little jealous or envious.
I wouldn’t sit still [for a portrait] but I was proud of him when I was a kid.
He was not with me; we didn’t live together. We had what I suppose people would call an understanding. We were close in some ways.
I wish I’d listened more to him so I could speak more carefully about his work.’
Why is this important to him? ‘It’s family. Tradition.’
[About raising kids] ‘It’s always good and mysterious and you don’t know what the hell is going to happen. You never know.’
[About having a 7th child, he shrugs and makes a parent-face that suggests he might be muddling through] They surprise you.It doesn’t get easier. I don’t do the heavy lifting. I’m there: I support my girlfriend [Tiffany Chen] but she does the work and we have help.’
[Does he enjoy fatherhood?] Of course I do. All of it! With a baby it’s different to with my 11-year-old, my adult children, my grandchildren.[With age] you think more about time. You say: ‘I’m going to use these few months of the summer to be with my kids, my family’”
WORDS “Our political situation is such a fragile thing”: Robert De Niro on fatherhood, family – and Trump (Guardian, 15/10/23)
MORE FROM DE NIRO
• “Sometimes you’re the last person your kids want to deal with. It’s like when you walk them to school and they get older and they don’t want to hold your hand or kiss you goodbye”
• “I don’t like to have to lay down the law. You always want to do the right thing by children & give them the benefit of the doubt but sometimes you have no choice. Any parent, I think, would say the same thing.My daughter, she’s 11, she gives me grief sometimes and I argue with her. I adore her, but you know… But that’s what it is”
In her young adult fiction book Babushka, LBC presenter and campaigner Natasha Devon, age 42, tackles themes like victim blaming, safe sex and healthy relationships through the eyes of a teenager in the year 2000.
Devon says: “Problems with body image and mental health shapeshift with each generation.
They’re structural issues intertwined with sexism, racism, homophobia, the education system. It’s about systemic injustice.
Sex education needs to cover explicit topics to reflect what young people are seeing.
Many kids stumble across porn on TikTok or YouTube, or a friend shows them.
So if we don’t grow up and go: ‘We need to teach kids about things like consent’, then the internet will educate them.
[With the growing backlash against inclusive relationships & sex education – RSE] MPs are trying to make parents believe that lessons aren’t age appropriate or children are being encouraged to be trans, which feels reminiscent of the language around LGBT+ people a few decades ago.
Until I was 17, when a teacher used the word bisexual about a Shakespeare character, I didn’t know there was a word for people like me.
I ask boys what they find appealing about Andrew Tate. He makes them feel the enemy is female emancipation and they’d be happier if men were ‘real men’.
Nothing will happen with violence against women & girls until we bring boys & men into the conversation.
But they can get defensive hearing the term toxic masculinity. We don’t mean masculinity is toxic – we mean this idea of prescribed ways to be a man. So I challenge stereotypes & introduce boys to positive role models. There’s more than one way to do masculinity.
We can all remember books that had a profound impact on us as teenagers because they spoke to something we were going through.
I’m encouraging us to remember how bad sex ed used to be. There’s something powerful in recognising that it’s better now – and we should be celebrating that”
WORDS “If we don’t teach kids about consent, the internet will”: Natasha Devon on the importance of sex education by Outspoken Sex Ed co-founder Leah Jewett (Guardian, 9/10/23)
EXTRA CREDIT See our video for parents with Natasha Devon on kids & body image
Actor Sir Patrick Stewart, age 83, in his new memoir Making It So describes how his father, a soldier and “weekend alcoholic”, would beat his mother, a “downtrodden” mill worker. By age 7 Stewart “knew exactly when to insert a small body between the fist and my mother’s face, a skill no child should ever have to learn”…
“‘Our home life didn’t have much to offer and occasionally it had horror to offer. Weekends were always perilous, never fun.
I would like to have said to my father: “Dad, there were so many aspects of you and your life that have taken me by the hand and led me on my way through adulthood and into old age. You are, in many respects, an example to me. In other respects you are still a bad man.”’
[Pointing out that Stewart talked a lot about violence in his home, a historian said]: ‘Your father had shellshock – PTSD. It can stay with people their whole lives.’
This was a breakthrough: ‘It’s not a get-out but an understanding, yes.
I used to feel that my father and his violence is what had the biggest impact on my life.
There have been times I’ve been violent. Rarely to other people and never to my children. But I can get angry. And it comes from my father.I denied myself certain things. Because I felt I didn’t deserve them. Because I didn’t do enough to protect my mother.
Over time my father’s rage dissipated andn the violence stopped. But there was still trouble in the house.
I didn’t talk about my family for decades. The conversation we’re having I would never have had. I kept it close.
There were years when I hated my father so deeply and feared him too.’[An army peer of his dad’s said]: ‘When your father walked onto the parade ground, the birds in the trees stopped singing.’
Stewart says: ‘My discipline comes from him. My self-discipline – sometimes at a cost. But the impact of him, the subtle impact, I have only come to understand. This is the result of 30 years of therapy.I’ve been in denial about my life for a very long time’”
WORDS “On stage, I could escape”: Sir Patrick Stewart on childhood trauma and acting success (Guardian, 1/10/23)
Stewart works with Refuge Charity for his mother and supports Combat Stress for his father
🌈 Canadian sex educator Cory Silverberg, author of the picture book What Makes A Baby and kids’ graphic novel Sex Is A Funny Word for ages 8+, says in You Know, Sex – his book aimed at teens…
“‘Sex is a word people use to describe something they do to feel good in their bodies. People call this “having sex”. Having sex is something people can choose to do on their own or with other people.’
The books’ content is informed by discussions with young people. Featuring 4 kids with a range of body shapes and skin tones from pink to green, they’re from the perspective of people of different races, classes, sexualities, genders and abilities rather than from a grown-up eager to deal with the facts of life.
In You Know, Sex, Silverberg explains: ‘This book is for adults too. Most adults didn’t have the opportunity to think and talk about sex and gender when they were younger. There will be things in this book that are new for adults. If you know an adult who is open to reading this book with you, remind them that they may need time before they are ready to talk about what they learned here.’
Silverberg says: ‘Some educators say not to talk about boys & girls, just gender. But that doesn’t make sense. I don’t understand gender. Start with the world kids live in – which is one of boys & girls. In Sex Is A Funny Word, I say there are boys & girls, and the rest of us.’
Parent to a child aged under 10, Silverberg identifies as non-binary: ‘My books are queer because they’re trying to make a world I want to live in where there’s nothing unusual about 2 boys having a crush on each other – but they also reflect the actual world, which I don’t perceive as being super full of joy. When I see a book saying everything’s great or it’s all about love, I think: That’s not my world.’
Silverberg’s books feature things most parents & children worry about, such as watching porn, kissing with braces, sexual safety and boundaries. Choice and consent are front and centre. In You Know, Sex, the kids are told: ‘We all deserve respect, trust, joy, justice and lots of choices’”
🌈 WORDS “Upending the genre”: the children’s author rewriting the rules of sex ed (Guardian, 9/10/23) IMAGE Steph Martyniuk
Writer Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett says…
“The mid-2000s was a horrible time to be a teenage girl. The objectification, abuse and derision we received from boys at school and older men were directly related to the media climate.
The challenging of sexism or misogyny was quashed, the objector painted as humourless and unfuckable then mocked, bullied and harassed. Being a young woman who dared to profess a mild preference towards bodily autonomy saw you vilified.
I was invited onto a TV show to debate whether ‘bum pinching’ was OK (I declined). We were groped in nightclubs. We were fair game.
From accounts of grooming, rape & sexual assault to stories of ‘fittest freshers’ lists on college noticeboards (is there a woman my age who escaped being publicly rated out of 10 by her male peers?), boys with their penises out in the classroom and pornographic university hazing rituals, the women of my generation are angry and sad that their formative years were overshadowed by a pervasive rape and raunch culture that felt impossible to speak out against.
Watching Russell Brand onstage joking about choking women with his penis felt so painfully familiar. When in 2012 we launched a feminist blog, the Vagenda, to challenge media sexism, we were called silly little girls by almost the entire media establishment.In our book it’s all there: women’s magazines encouraging you to be stick thin and please your man; lad mags and toxic websites normalising rape, posting images of women cut in half and asking ‘which half’ men preferred; tabloids reporting the countdown to teenage girls reaching the age of consent. Along with the No More Page 3 campaign, Everyday Sexism and other young feminists, I believe we changed the media landscape. But as writers like Laura Bates highlight, misogyny remains rife online and off.
Now that I’m a parent, I realise that many of the adults in TV and the media failed to safeguard women and girls from the abuse and misogyny of predatory men.Sexism didn’t start in the toxic 2000s, but the victims of that culture should be listened to”
WORDS The 2000s lad culture that Russell Brand epitomised wasn’t funny then. It looks even more hideous with hindsight (Guardian, 21/9/23)
🌈 Labour politician Wes Streeting, age 40, is one of the first openly gay MPs in Parliament…
“I can’t remember when I first realised I was gay.
Throughout my adolescence I was trying to be ‘normal’. I had to bury a huge secret.
I had a poster of England’s 1998 World Cup squad on my bedroom wall partly because of my crush on Michael Owen – but every time I felt gay I also felt afraid. Afraid of my feelings, that I would be rejected by family and friends.
No matter how well I did in school, my pride began to be eclipsed by the deep sense of shame about who I was. What I was.
I was terrified that accepting who I was would add to the abuse I suffered. I’d been hit with homophobic slurs since I was 11 – imagine the carnage if my bullies knew the truth.
I was one of the sensitive kids, slightly camp and effeminate. This was a hard character to play in an inner-city boys’ school. And I had the bruises to prove it.
It was expected that I would be appointed head prefect. I wasn’t. What added injury to the perceived insult was an openly gay teacher telling me a teacher had justified their decision on the grounds that I was gay & wouldn’t make a good role model. A devastating blow.
While I had the courage to be myself at university, I hadn’t yet found the courage to tell my family. One evening in 2006 my stepmum said: ‘Your dad knocked some papers off your desk. One was a civil partnership invitation for you & someone else. Your dad put 2 + 2 together and I think he’s made 4.’
My secret was out. Coming out in Cambridge felt liberating; coming out at home felt terrifying.
Dad was on the sofa. I can’t remember what I said, but his reaction was sadness that I hadn’t told him: ‘Why am I the last to know? Why did you think I wouldn’t accept you? Are you happy?’
The worries Dad had were ones shared by lots of parents. Would my life be harder being gay? Would it affect my career? Would I catch HIV and Aids?
It didn’t take long for us to deal with any awkwardness in our usual Streeting family way: with humour. I felt loved & accepted”
🌈 WORDS Wes Streeting describes struggle coming out as gay, first love and cancer shock aged 38 (Daily Mirror ,12/6/23)
Edited excerpt from Consent Laid Bare by campaigner and Teach Us Consent founder Chanel Contos, age 25…
“You’re at a party with a boy. He asks you to do something you’re not sure of. He complains: ‘All my friends have done it.’ He asks: ‘Why did you come upstairs if you didn’t want to do this?’ You don’t exactly say no but you shy away as he pushes you slightly and pleads. Suddenly you’re doing it. Sex isn’t meant to feel good the first few times, right?
You feel strange, so you don’t tell anyone at school on Monday. But he does. By Wednesday everyone knows your cup size and you’re classified as a slut.
At university you learn about consent and sexual coercion. You confide in close friends & family. You’re asked: ‘Why are you bringing this up now?’, ‘What were you wearing?’, ‘Were you drunk?’ You’re told to consider the implications this claim could have on the boy’s life and career. You say nothing. He is now an executive at a large corporation.
Let’s imagine another scenario. You grow up without any part of your body being taboo. You know the difference between your vagina, labia, clitoris and all the rest.
You know your body is yours and if anyone ever touched you in any of those places, you could detail what happened without shame or being accused of making it up. You have sex when you’re ready and it will be fun.
You teach your kids about boundaries and respect. When they go to parties, you remind them to be considerate of other people’s bodies – especially your sons.
One day your teen tells you they were subjected to an unwanted sexual experience. You do not blame them or question what they were wearing or how intoxicated they were. You are grateful you have created a safe home environment where they feel comfortable speaking to you. You both know what sexual assault is and that it is not their fault or shameful. You take measures instantly so the perpetrator is held to account and does not carry those values with them if they go into a position of power.
If this second scenario was standard practice, the structural conditions that maintain rapecculture would fall in a generation”
WORDS Why rape culture thrives: An excerpt from Chanel Contos’ debut book Consent Laid Bare (Fashion Journal Magazine, 18/9/23)
🌈 Actor Ncuti Gatwa, age 30, the next Doctor Who, says…
“People need to be f*cking seen. What are you going to do – tell the same stories, have the same people fronting things for all of eternity?
Tick f*cking boxes! Representation, inclusivity & branching out: it enriches us all. How embarrassing, you people with your tiny mindsets. Open a book, look out the window and then f*ck off.
[On playing Eric in Sex Education] Shoutout to screenwriter Laurie Nunn for giving nuance to this gay Black character and gifting him to the world. He’s so fierce and unashamed. It was healing for me and great for people to see themselves represented. It taught me the importance of representation: it’s so powerful & necessary.
It undid a lot of the internalised hate I had. I’ve experienced racism my whole life, and while I always believed in myself, always knew racists were stupid & uneducated, I guess it did misinform my view of how the world works.
It makes you think everyone has that opinion and you’ll constantly have to fight through life – then you learn that you don’t: you can find a tribe, you can find your people.
Clothes are to play with. There’s something about being in a corset that makes me feel so masculine. I love seeing men in ‘women’s’ clothing. There doesn’t need to be a label. I believe that fully: that’s why I don’t like to label myself – and I don’t owe it to anyone.
At Manchester Pride, going through the streets with all my boys, shaking my cha-chas, living it up, I saw this woman who looked exactly like my auntie – I knew she was Rwandan. It blew my mind that she was there.
I can feel myself getting emotional just thinking about it. We were holding hands and she said: ‘I don’t really know why I’m here.’ I told her: ‘Honey, you don’t need to know. You absolutely. Do not. Need. To. Know. You’re here. Be proud of who you are.’
I had never met another queer Rwandan person before. I thought I was the only one in the world”
🌈 WORDS & IMAGE Elle Style Awards: Ncuti Gatwa Is The Modern Pioneer (Elle UK, 31/8/23)
Football player Jenni Hermoso, age 33, wrote about being kissed on the lips by her boss Luis Rubiales, which sparked the hashtags #contigoJenni (With you, Jenni), #TodosSomosJenni (We’re all Jenni) and #SeAcabó (It’s over) – Spain’s #MeToo – moment…
“With the passage of time after delving a little deeper into those initial feelings, I feel the need to report this incident because I believe that no person in any work, sports or social setting should be a victim of these types of non-consensual behaviours.
At no time did I consent to the kiss he gave me. I won’t tolerate that my word is called into question & even less so that words are invented which I didn’t say.
I want to reiterate that I did not like this incident.
I felt vulnerable & a victim of an impulse-driven, sexist, out-of-place act without any consent on my part.
Simply put, I was not respected.
Attitudes like this have been part of the day-to-day life of our team for years.
This type of incident joins a long list of situations that we players have been denouncing in recent years, so this event is just the straw that breaks the camel’s back and what everyone has been able to see. All the players from Spain and around the world have given me the strength to come out with this statement. As the world champion national team we do not deserve such a manipulative, hostile and controlling culture.
I have ZERO TOLERANCE for these behaviours. We will push forward more united than ever. I know I am not alone”
AND MORE…
• UN Human Rights: “Women in sport face sexual harassment & abuse – every one of us has the responsibility to call out and challenge it. We join Jenni Hermoso and all those working to end abuse & sexism in sport. Make this a turning point”
• England’s Lionesses: “Abuse is abuse. The behaviour of those who think they are invincible must not be tolerated and people shouldn't take any convincing to take action against harassment”
• Spain's minister of culture & sport Miquel Iceta: “Rubiales’s acts caused damage to our sport & our country that is difficult to repair”
• Barcelona player Ana-Maria Crnogorčević: “I'm freaking out. It's over. F*** this bulls**t, f**k all this f**king lies. This is insane”
Actor Matthew McConaughey, age 53, was inspired to write the children’s book Just Because by conversations he had with his kids – Levi, age 15; Vida, 13, and Livingston, 10. The dedication reads: “To my kids, your kids & the kid in all of us. We’re all as young as we’re ever gonna be so let’s just keep learning.” He says:
“At home we’ve talked about a lot of the couplets in the book in different ways for years. My kids told me I’ve been trying to father some of these things into them.
I hope the book brings generations together to understand each other, ourselves & humanity.
As a dad, you’re thinking about your kids all the time.
I’ve been having conversations with my children about certain new things they experienced.
We’re just getting into those teen years – a whole new rollercoaster. I’m starting to become their buddy a little bit, which is cool. My daughter will call & go: ‘Hey, I wanna talk to you about this thing’ & we can just talk.
I noticed early on these young people are who they are.I can shepherd them, nudge them, put in front of them what lights their fire & try to keep them from hurting themselves too badly. But they are who they are. We’re filling their passports, which is one of the best résumés someone could have”
WORDS Matthew McConaughey releases new book inspired by his three kids (News24, 15/9/23)
MORE FROM McCONAUGHEY
• [On fatherhood] I’m not making straight As but I think it’s going pretty well. Hopefully my kids can get out of the house confident, having an idea of who the hell they are & who they’re not”
• “Listen, man, to all the fathers out there, I just want to say this: I know it’s hard. But we’ve got the most privileged job going. Let’s do our best”
• [On talking with son Levi about social media] “‘Let’s talk about what it is – the up-falls, downfalls, assets, traps and what you wanna tell. What’s your story?’
We had him look at people he looks up to – their posts: ‘Why do you like those?’ On people who maybe had more hits: ‘Why did they? Were they relevant for the right reasons, reasons that spoke to being more of themselves rather than acting like someone else?’
The discussion is ongoing”
🌈 Actor Sir Ian McKellen, age 84, who is starring in Frank And Percy at The Other Palace through December, came out in 1988 by saying of Section 28, which prohibited the “promotion” of homosexuality: “It’s offensive to anyone who is, like myself, homosexual, apart from the whole business of what can or cannot be taught to children”…
“Almost overnight everything in my life changed for the better – my relationships with people & my whole attitude toward acting changed.
Before that, the kind of acting I had been good at was all about disguise – adopting funny voices & odd walks. It was about lying to the world.
[After coming out he found it easier to be emotional while acting & could cry at the drop of a hat onstage]
People who are not gay just simply don’t know how it damages you to be lying about what you are & ashamed of yourself.
I was brought up at a time when it was illegal for me to have sex with a man. And that was not that long ago”
WORDS Ian McKellen’s life and career “changed for the better” after he came out as gay (PinkNews, 8/9/23)
🌈 MORE FROM McKELLEN
• On not telling his dad he was gay: “It wasn’t fair of me. You’re 24, you’re living with another man, you know that about yourself, your father loves you, is always asking how you are in every possible way and I think if he’d lived a bit longer I would have told him.
We couldn’t really have a proper relationship until I had. I didn’t give him a chance to say: ‘That’s alright’ then get interested in my life from that point of view.
[He feels his father would have been concerned & angry about gay rights before Ian was] He was a good man from that point of view”
• On coming out: “On air we debated the new law and, riled by the bland pomposity of Sunday Telegraph editor Peregrine Worsthorne’s homophobia – and honestly without thinking – I mentioned to those few thousands who tune into Radio 3 that I opposed Section 28 because I was gay.
That I had actually come out probably surprised me more than my being gay can have shocked any listener. Indeed some of them wrote to say that they’d known I was gay for years and couldn’t care less. When I told my stepmother soon after, she said the same”
TV chef Nadiya Hussain, age 38, the ambassador for Inclusive Books for Children (IBC), says…
“Diverse representation in children’s fiction is so important.
As a mum, I’m always trying to make sure my children can see themselves represented in media and feel included & seen.”
On the charity’s website you can find over 700 books with characters of different ethnicities, abilities & families. They focus on:
• An own-voice perspective (books by people with the same identity as their characters)
• A challenge to patriarchal #genderstereotypes
• Representation of diverse families (eg same-sex parents, blended, single parent)
• A diverse cast of characters
According to a survey commissioned by IBC, 2 in 5 ethnic-minority parents struggle to find books for their child that represent them.
Of the 1,003 parents of all backgrounds surveyed, 64% want to read their child a book with a diverse mix of characters – meaning who come from different racial, cultural & religious backgrounds, or who are disabled, neurodiverse or #LGBT, or who have diverse families.
83% of mixed white & Black Caribbean parents, and 61% of Pakistani parents, say it’s hard to find books representing their family or child.
While 77% of parents aged 18-24 want their chid to read a book with diverse characters, just 47% of parents aged 45-54 feel the same.
You can, on the IBC site, nominate the best inclusive books published in the UK since last November for ages 1-3, picture books for ages 3-7 & children’s fiction for ages 5-9. Winners get £10,000 each.
Having trouble sourcing inclusive books for their 2 mixed-heritage kids, Sarah & Marcus Satha founded IBC because “stories are powerful tools that allow us to relate, understand & connect. We all want the children in our lives to be able to access the power of stories”
WORDS Charity launches award and database to encourage diversity in children’s books (Guardian, 14/9/23)
SEE ALSO • Ayr young carer launches inclusive book series to teach children about disabilities and additional support needs (Daily Record, 31/8/23)
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Actor Liam Neeson, age 71, recalls talking, at 15, with a visiting missionary priest during confession at church…
“So we start, and I had learned how to pleasure myself at home, into the sheets, right?
I had looked up the appropriate word. I remember that. ‘Masturbate? Masturbation? OK. That seems harmless enough, I’ll say that.’
So I told him: ‘I got in an argument with my mum, my sister, and I got in a fight and I masturbated.’
[In a ‘booming’ voice the priest said:] ‘You what?!’
This guy literally, I mean, he almost said things like: ‘The grass will grow over the palm of your hand before you’re 21! Stop that evil practice!’ He’s shouting this.
There were old women just outside the confessional kneeling down & saying their prayers and they could hear everything.
That was the last time I ever went”
WORDS Liam Neeson says he was shamed by a priest during NSFW confession (Independent, 26/8/23) IMAGE John Russo/AARP
MORE FROM NEESON
• “It’s a continual process, isn’t it? Sometimes you see in your kids a flash of their mother or your grandmom. You see the connection. My friend Gabriel Byrne said of his son: ‘I was there when he was born, and when he came out, I realised my place in the universe.’
I was there for the birth of my 2 boys and that’s exactly what happened. Something shunted into place, a continuum. It’s strange & miraculous and kind of frightening too”
• “I was an amateur boxer as a kid, from age 9 to 17. We had a neighbour – we lived in these little terrace houses – and I remember hearing her being beat up by her drunken husband every weekend. That’s a memory I am still coming to terms with. I’m talking 50 years ago. It’s kind of a post-traumatic stress disorder.
I don’t know if it scarred me, but it definitely formed something of my character. Maybe even when I play these violent roles, I’m trying to bring some quality of redemption or justice”
Love Island star & biotechnologist Yewande Biala, age 28, made the Channel 4 film Secrets of the Female Orgasm, which highlights the orgasm gap (65% of women vs 95% of men climax during heterosexual sex)…
“[At school in Ireland a rumour went around that a girl masturbated] and people did not let her live it down. So why would I ever do that and have people slag me? I felt so sorry for her.
You’d never want to say to your friends: ‘Do you masturbate?’ because if that got out, it would have been hell.
Because I’d never experienced [an orgasm], I thought my friends also hadn’t experienced it. It wasn’t until I was about 20 that I was like: ‘Oh, it’s just me.’ I believed I couldn’t have an orgasm, so I didn’t make a big deal out of it.
[At 15 she was grounded for a year because her Nigerian parents wrongly believed she was sexually active. Of wanting to talk in the film about the messages around sex she’d got growing up, she says of her mother] ‘If you really thought this, why didn’t you say this for years? We wouldn’t be having this conversation; I wouldn’t be filming this documentary.
I probably would have been a really different person.’
[In Ireland Biala learned sex] was a sin – you shouldn’t have sex before marriage & if you did, you would literally go to hell. Imagine growing up in that type of environment.
[As a woman] you’re shamed if you have sex with too many people, but how are you supposed to figure out what you like and don’t like if you’re not having sex?
[She wants to show self-pleasure in a positive light] for people who maybe feel a bit dirty when it comes to masturbation or feel they should not do it or talk about it.
There’s no shame in starting your journey, no matter how old you are, finding out what your blocks are and working through them.
I hope if anyone in education watches, they will understand that maybe we need to improve the curriculum about sex.
I have unlearned a lot of the things I thought about sex, all the toxic attitudes. I’m leaving all that shame behind”
WORDS “I’d never experienced an orgasm”: Yewande Biala on her journey into female pleasure (Guardian, 25/8/23)
MORE FROM BIALA
• “For someone who’s grown up in a conservative household and has never spoken about sex, those things were so uncomfortable”
• “Afterwards Mum said she was so glad we had that chat. It had taken all those years. But it’s a great scene”
Actor Charlize Theron, age 48 – mum to adopted daughters Jackson, age 11, and August, 7 – says about walking past a Dior ad she’s in…
“My oldest was so embarrassed. She’s like: ‘Oh my God, Mom! You’re not even wearing a shirt.’ I was like: ‘You’re right. I didn’t even realise.’ She’s like: ‘All my friends are gonna see this. I mean, can you just wear a shirt?’
My daughters have no concept of what age is like. They like what someone’s wearing or think they’re pretty & they don’t really know if she’s in her 20s or 60s. I love that. I wish we could just maintain that.
People think I had a facelift. They’re like: ‘What did she do to her face?’ I’m like: ‘Bitch, I’m just ageing! It doesn’t mean I got bad plastic surgery. This is just what happens.’
I love that my face is changing and ageing.
I’ve always had issues with the fact that men kind of age like fine wines and women like cut flowers.
I despise that concept and I want to fight against it, but I also think women want to age in a way that feels right to them.
We need to be a bit more empathetic to how we all go through our journey. My journey of having to see my face on a billboard is quite funny now.
I will never, ever do a movie again & say: ‘Yeah, I’ll gain 40lb.’ Because you can’t take it off. When I was 27, I did Monster. I lost 30lb, like, overnight. I missed 3 meals and I was back to my normal weight. Then I did it at age 43 for Tully, and a year into trying to lose the weight I called my doctor and said: ‘I think I’m dying because I cannot lose this weight.’ He was like: ‘You’re over 40. Calm down. Your metabolism is not what it was.’ Nobody wants to hear that.
The thing that really bums me out is that I make action movies now and if I hurt myself, I take way longer to heal than I did in my 20s. More than my face, I wish I had my 25-year-old body that I can just throw against the wall and not even hurt tomorrow. Now if I don’t work out for 3 days and I go back to the gym, I can’t walk. I can’t sit down on the toilet. It’s all those very real moments”
WORDS & IMAGE Charlize Theron Didn’t Get a Facelift, Thanks for Asking (Allure, 18/8/23)
🌈 Actor Annette Bening, age 65 & mum of 4 with actor Warren Beatty – including Stephen, age 27, who identified as trans at age 14…
“I have a trans son, and he is such an inspiration to me.
To love your child so much is the greatest way to learn about what trans people are all about.
I get to say this because I’m the mother: ‘My son is incredibly brilliant.’ He’s someone I admire & I’ve learned a lot from when he first came out.
I, like every other parent, want to protect my kids and make sure they’re OK – and I had a lot of learning to do.
I was very ignorant about what it meant to be a trans kid.
I didn’t always know what to do & I didn’t always make the right choices because of my own ignorance – but we got through it.
What’s happening in the political world with trans people is so concerning and so dire.
The right-wing in America has become more and more mobilised on misinforming people about the LGBTQ+ community. They have been vilifying our community, creating problems and sowing hate and fear as a way of rallying their base. They are trying to stir up all this fear in people about trans kids and parents.
This should not be scary to anybody else. This is a private, legitimate, complex, deep, spiritual, physical, psychological experience that must be respected and honoured.
I find it heartbreaking to see the coldness and lack of compassion that so many people have”
WORDS Annette Bening Shares What She’s Learned From Her Transgender Son Stephen (Entertainment Tonight, 16/8/23)
IMAGE Austin Hargrave/Hollywood Reporter
🌈 MORE FROM BENING
“I am incredibly proud of Stephen and he has carved his own way.We all have a responsibility to protect and defend the rights of trans folks in our world. They’re precious parts of our community.
I was raised in a Republican household. My mother, who is 94, was one of the first people to say: ‘I used to have a beautiful granddaughter. Now I have a handsome grandson.’ It’s that simple”
🌈 Actor Jamie Lee Curtis, age 64, has been a vocal trans ally since Ruby, age 27 – the daughter she adopted with her husband, Spinal Tap actor Christopher Guest – came out as trans in 2020…
“We watched in wonder and pride as our son became our daughter.
This life is about love. Being a parent is about love – and I love Ruby. Love her.
People have said: ‘You’re so great to accept her love.’
What are you talking about? This is my daughter. This human being has come to me and said: ‘This is who I am.’
And my job is to say: ‘Welcome home.’
I will fight and defend her right to exist to anyone who claims that she doesn’t – and there are those people.
[On #TransDayOfVisibility in April she posted] A mother’s love knows no judgment.
As a mother, I stand in total solidarity with my children as they move forward in the universe as their authentic selves with their own minds & bodies & ideas. On this trans visibility day my daughter and I are visible”
🌈 WORDS Jamie Lee Curtis believes it’s her “job” as a mother to “fight” transphobia aimed at daughter Ruby (Metro, 29/7/23)
IMAGE Alex Berliner/People
MORE FROM CURTIS
• [Declaring that the Oscar statuette she won as Best Supporting Actress for Everything Everywhere All At Once is non-binary]“Here they are! In support of my daughter Ruby, I’m having them be a they/them. I’m just going to call them ‘them’ – they/them. And they are doing great. They are settling in”
• “It’s speaking a new language. It’s learning new terminology and words. I am new at it. I am not someone who is pretending to know much about it. And I’m going to blow it; I’m going to make mistakes. I would like to try to avoid making big mistakes.
You slow your speech down a little. You become a little more mindful about what you’re saying. How you’re saying it. You still mess up – I’ve messed up today twice. We’re human” 🌈
Former Take That pop star Robbie Williams, age 49 and father of 4, posted a drawing with the caption: “My ideal goal weight is people being worried about me”, adding…
“If a genie appeared and said: you can either have your superpower be the ability to fly or eat what you want and remain at your goal weight? I would go for goal weight eating every day. What about you?
I could write a book about self-loathing where my body image is concerned. Like pure self-hatred, the ugliness of feeling ugly.
I’m body dysmorphic & on top of being dysmorphic at times, I can be 40+ pounds overweight.
So you can imagine what my mind sees. Or maybe you can’t either way it’s a f*****g disaster.
At the moment I’m skinny. But me being me, my mind is going: ‘F*****g great Rob, you managed to get skinny and now your old, congrats, golf clap.’
The struggle is real, the sadness shocking. I’ve had it all my life. And it won’t abate”
WORDS Robbie Williams opens up about body dysmorphia struggles after cosmetic procedures (Daily Mirror, 17/7/23)#
MORE FROM WILLIAMS
• “I was always terrified of the responsibility of being a father & being pinned down.You go: ‘Right, I’m a grown-up now.’ What you don’t realise is how much love you get back. Now I’m more of a family man. You have to be when you have kids.It used to be sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. One out of 3 ain’t bad, I suppose, at the moment – I’ll let you guess”
• “[The song Go Gentle is a dad’s advice to his daughter about men: Some of them are angry/ Some of them are mean/ Most of them are twisted] It’s about stereotypical things dads worry about. Meeting somebody like me, for example, in my 20s. But her mum [Ayda Field Williams] is really cool and I’m not too bad and we’ll give her a lot of love and time and I think that will provide the right ingredients for good decisions”
• “[The song No One Likes A Fat Pop Star] is me poking fun at myself and people’s obsession with weight; mine and the wife’s. It’s something I don’t want to pass on to my daughter. My weight still fluctuates. For a long time I’ve had one foot in the sporty athletics camp and the other in the excessive camp, and the excessive camp usually wins”
Actor Florence Pugh, age 27 – who was body shamed for a sex scene in Oppenheimer – got 2.5 million likes for a July 2022 post about wearing a see-through-top dress…
• “I was excited to wear it, not a wink of me was nervous.
It’s interesting to witness just how easy it is for men to totally destroy a woman’s body publicly, proudly, for everyone to see.
Thankfully I’ve come to terms with the intricacies of my body that make me me. I’m happy with all of the ‘flaws’ that I couldn’t bear to look at when I was 14.
So many of you wanted to aggressively let me know how disappointed you were by my ‘tiny tits’ or how I should be embarrassed by being so ‘flat chested’.
I’ve lived in my body for a long time. I’m fully aware of my breast size.
What’s concerning is: why are you so scared of breasts?
What. Is. So. Terrifying.
It makes me wonder what happened to you to be so content on being so loudly upset by the size of my boobs & body?
I’m grateful that I grew up in a household with very strong, powerful, curvy women. We were raised to find power in the creases of our body. To be loud about being comfortable.It has always been my mission in this industry to say ‘fuck it & fuck that’ whenever anyone expects my body to morph into an opinion of what’s hot or sexually attractive.Grow up. Respect people. Respect bodies. Respect all women. Respect humans”
• [Growing up by the beach in Spain, Pugh & her siblings ran around naked] “That attitude has trickled down from when I was a child.We are human, we are bodies. Yes, I can put make-up on and look good for a premiere. But at the end of the day, I still have hair on the top of my lip and I still smell after a workout and I still get spots when I’m stressed”
• “I was comfortable with my small breasts. And showing them like that. People were so angry that I was confident & wanted to let me know they would never wank over me. Well, don’t”
• [On wearing daring fashion] “It’s very important that we do this. If a dress with my breasts peeking through is encouraging people to say: ‘If you were to get raped, you would deserve it’ it just shows me that there’s so much more work to do”
🌈 Heartstopper actor Kit Connor, age 19, posted on Twitter in November 2022: “i’m bi. congrats for forcing an 18-year-old to out himself. i think some of you missed the point of the show. bye.” Now he says…
“Telling someone you’re gay or bi or part of the queer community – there’s a thing where you feel like they might see you differently or think it would change who you are.
For me, it’s just who I am. Coming out didn’t change me.
[I like the term queer for myself because it’s] more freeing and less about labels.
Now I’m a bit more confident in myself in a very open sense about who I am, what I can do, the way that I hold myself and the people I spend my time with.
I have a lot more pride”
WORDS Heartstopper’s Kit Connor, 19, “more confident” in himself after coming out as bisexual (Metro, 29/7/23) IMAGE Emily Malan/GQ
🌈 MORE FROM CONNOR
• “I don’t think there’s a lack of queer sex in the media, but a lot of the time when queer people are on screen, especially gay & bisexual men, they are heavily sexualised. So there’s something quite nice about the fact that Heartstopper is not sexualising it”
• “Queer media is pretty dark & depressing and involves a lot of trauma [by focusing on how hard it is to be yourself]. Whereas with Heartstopper we wanted to push the other message: that being queer can be beautiful. There will be adversity, sure. There are highs and lows. But the highs can be really high, so it’s worth fighting for”
• “I get stopped by older queer men in their 30s – but also plenty in their 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s – proud and overjoyed that younger people in the queer community are starting to have these experiences in school”
• “I knew that I was a queer man, but I didn’t feel I wanted the world to know. Not because I was ashamed, but because it was private.Now I know that I’m queer, I personally don’t find it a super defining factor. I wouldn’t want to be defined by ‘queer actor’. I want to play all parts”🌈
Actor Emily Blunt, age 40, and mother – with actor John Krasinski – to Hazel, age 9, and Violet, 7…
“I never feel I’m doing it right.
This year I’m not working. I worked quite a bit last year & my oldest baby is 9, so we’re in the last year of single digits.
I just feel like there are cornerstones to their day that are so important when they’re little. And it’s: ‘Will you wake me up? Will you take me to school? Will you pick me up? Will you put me to bed?’
I just need to be there for them for a good stretch. And I just felt that in my bones.
The projects that are time consuming are becoming few and further between because of just the emotional cost on me, on the kids, on balance.
And I’m very prone to guilt – I think all mothers are. You’re just prone to feeling bad for, god forbid, wanting something outside of being a mother.
I am a huge advocate for women being ambitious. I love the word ambitions – it’s just dreams with purpose.
I want my kids to grow up and find something they adore doing.
My toes curl when people tell me: ‘My daughter wants to be an actress.’ I want to say: ‘Don’t do it!’
Because it’s a hard industry and it can be very disappointing. A lot of people tell you not to take things personally – but it’s completely personal, especially when you’re being judged on how you look. So you just have to endure that side of things”
WORDS Emily Blunt talks “guilt” over separation from daughters with John Krasinski and acting break (Hello!, 11/7/23)
IMAGE Tom Schirmacher
MORE FROM BLUNT
• “We were in the kitchen the other day & Hazel goes: ‘Are you famous?’ We’ve never said that word in our house. We don’t talk about it. I was like: ‘Um, not really. I don’t think I am.’
My kids don’t want to see what I do. They don’t even like it when I put on make-up. They just want me to be their mommy”
• “I know so many women of a certain age who are angry at their lives being defined by being someone’s mummy or someone’s wife. And I have empathy for that. It’s OK that that’s not enough for them”
• “For female actors there is still a pressure to be likable, and sort of warm & understood, and men are not held to that same standard”
Actor Eva Mendes, age 49, on playing in the park with the daughters she has with actor Ryan Gosling – Esmeralda, age 8, and Amada, 7…
“If you can’t beat ’em, join them! It’s about respecting kids. All kids. Not just our own.
I grew up in an incredibly loving family, but in Cuban culture – the time I was growing up – respecting children wasn’t a thing.
I’m hoping to break this cycle with my kids. I value their opinion. I respect their body. I respect their suggestions/ideas – even if I don’t agree with them. And they have a voice in our home. A loud one”
WORDS Eva Mendes sparks reaction with rare insight into “respecting” daughters with Ryan Gosling (Hello!, 23/7/23)
MORE FROM MENDES
“I thought parenting was about controlling how much my kids melted down, lashed out or lost control. Turns out parenting is about managing how much I melt down, lash out or lose control. It’s kinda like we’re all out here raising ourselves right alongside our kids”
Let’s hear it from some of the stars of the camp, subversive, candy-coated movie Barbie…
• STEREOTYPICAL BARBIE Margot Robbie age 33: “We’re in on the joke. This movie isn’t a Barbie puff piece.
I didn’t know this character was going to get down into my bones. I didn’t expect to have so many big, profound conversations about the meaning of life & true happiness. It all became very existential.
Barbie is sexualised. But she should never BE sexy. People can project sex onto her. Yes, she can wear a short skirt – because it’s fun & pink, not because she wanted you to see her butt”
• AUTHOR BARBIE Alexandra Shipp age 31: “I had Kens but when I played house, I had 2 Barbies raising a Skipper.
Your toys are an extension of who you are & how you can exist in the world as an adult”
• PRESIDENT BARBIE Issa Rae age 38: “[Playing with dolls] was in some ways how I knew I identified as being Black – because my mum & aunt were so adamant about: ‘We’re getting you Black dolls! We want you to see yourself!’ I didn’t understand why it was so serious until I was older”
• WEIRD BARBIE (Kate McKinnon, age 39, as a kid played with shells & plastic zoo animals: “I didn’t see myself in Barbie. I saw myself in an inflatable lobster.
[Her friends cut Barbie’s hair, drew on her face, set her on fire] They were externalising how they felt – and they felt different”
• GLORIA America Ferrera, age 39: “I had the experience of being a bored kid with a poor defenceless Barbie doll. Half of my cousin’s Barbies were always naked and in the splits.
And of course if you had brothers or boy cousins, you knew the Barbies were going to be defiled in some way”
• Mattel executive “Barbie is a surprising spicy margarita. You can already taste the sweetness and you sort of go with the spice”
• DOCTOR BARBIE Hari Nef age 30: “This movie is candy with a little poison, and that’s what I like”
RECOMMENDED READING How Barbie Came to Life (Time, 27/6/23) • Toy movies like Barbie help us understand the stories that shaped us (iNews, 6/7/23) • Is Greta Gerwig severing her indie roots with Barbie? (Far Out, 5/7/23) • How exactly did Barbie get her groove back? (Irish Times, 15/7/23) • Issa Rae Says She Used Her Barbies to “Fulfill Scenarios” Growing Up – Like “Sex-Ed” (People, 12/7/23)
Dancer Liam Riddick, age 34, from Wales, says of being one of the 40 Ken dancers in Barbie…
“I was a big fan when I was younger of big Hollywood films.
So when on set they’d shout ‘Action!’, I’d have that small moment of pure joy just living my 6-year-old boy’s fantasy of being in Singing In The Rain and doing that dream sequence.
The whole project & being a part of it was my little gift to my 6-year-old self to say: ‘Look at you now – look what you’ve done!’
My sister used to have dolls and I think my cousin had the Dreamhouse. The whole set-up of opening it up and seeing the slide is exactly as it is in the film.
Barbie is not CGI. All the sets, the Dreamhouses – everything is built. That’s why the film is so fantastic. When you’re on set & you see the actual real lifesize Dreamhouse – like you’re the doll, almost – it’s mind-blowing.
Being part of the whole thing was just magical. On set was amazing. Ryan Gosling walks in the room and once you get over the initial ‘oh my god’, everyone’s human. Everyone’s the scene & in that scene we’re all Kens dancing about, being Ken.
I was expecting it to be a fun, silly kind of film – but it’s a really great film. It’s very funny, it’s got a lot of heart and it’s not just for children. I think it’s split 50:50, if not more projected towards adults.
I didn’t expect the amount of hype that #BarbieTheMovie is getting. It’s the biggest film in the world right now & it’s just bonkers.It’s really lovely to be a part of that hype. Even if it is just a small smidge of that, my name is still in that credit”
WORDS Barbie: Welsh dancer’s role as Ken alongside Ryan Gosling (BBC, 5/8/23)
MORE FROM RIDDICK
“I remember going on set and seeing the room – and the little boy in me was just like: ‘Wow!’ because it was this massive space that was half-pink, half-blue, and it looked like one of those old Hollywood scenes. When the cameras are rolling and you’re running around doing your steps, that was me living my little 6-year-old dancing dream”
Actor Ariana Greenblatt, age 16, who plays Sasha the teenager in the movie Barbie, says…
“We see Sasha get upset at Barbie when Barbie wants to give up. Sasha’s a big believer in trying again and doing what’s right until it is right.
[About the ‘It is impossible to be a woman’ monologue by America Ferrera] I wanted my reaction to be in the moment so my character could feel as impacted as possible.
We did that scene over and over. America did something different every time. I never got sick of it.
I was so affected by it, especially because I’m a young person & listening to this woman who is incredibly intelligent saying all of these things that are so unfortunately true – it hit really hard for me.
It puts a lot of things into perspective in such a beautifully written way, so shoutout America and Greta Gerwig for creating that incredible piece in the film.
I really am interested in writing my own story, especially after working with Greta. She inspired me a lot to write and direct. Also I would love to do a coming-of-age story of a teenage girl because I’m so used to playing sci-fi aliens or post-apocalyptic characters. If I was able to create a story about a teenage girl from a teenage girl’s perspective, it would resonate with a lot of people.
I just want people to watch Barbie 1,000 times, never get sick of it and just feel joy. I felt so much joy.
I feel like it’s such a nice movie to put things that are needed into perspective”
WORDS Meet Barbie Movie Star Ariana Greenblatt, Who Plays Barbie Hater-Turned-Hero Sasha (Teen Vogue, 21/7/23) IMAGE Samantha Annis/1883 Magazine
MORE FROM GREENBLATT
• “A lot of the time teenagers, especially teenage girls, are shown in such a false light on screen or written by an older man. And I’m thinking: ‘No matter if you have a daughter or a niece, you will never know what it’s like to be a teenage girl unless you were or are one.’ I would love to be the person to correctly represent teenage girls”
• “With Barbie I think a lot of women and teenage girls will feel seen and heard, and hopefully empowered. Even though when you think of Barbie you may not feel empowered, this movie will change your opinion”
Actor Issa Rae, age 38, who plays President Barbie in the movie Barbie, reflects…
“Barbies made me aware of race at a young age. There was so much held on Barbie’s shoulders.
As a child I felt like there was a lot of pressure, image-wise, playing with white Barbie dolls and my parents [giving me] Black Barbie dolls so I felt represented.
My mom was super intentional about making sure I had a Black Barbie, and I think it made me realise that I was Black.
It was another step on the ladder of my journey with my racial identity, just because I saw how passionate my parents were about me playing with Black Barbies, though I didn’t know it was that serious.
I was just trying to make scenes with my Barbies. And in some ways that was my first foray into storytelling and directing.
My Barbies were fulfilling scenarios. They were also like sex ed when I didn’t know what sex was. I just wanted to play and tell stories and make them kiss.
They were my opportunity to play God – Barbies were the Sims for me before I played the Sims.
My worry was that the movie would feel too white feminist-y, but it’s self-aware. Barbie Land is perfect, right? If perfection is just a bunch of white Barbies, I don’t know that anybody can get on board with that.
[On the first Barbie to have Black features, her friend Christie, which Mattel released in 1968] I gave a shout-out to Christie as President Barbie that isn’t in the final cut, but I was basically saying that Christie walked so I could run for president.
Christie paved the way for this particular Black Barbie, and I’m honoured to ‘rule over the Barbies’.
She’s just one of the Barbies that can do it all”
WORDS Issa Rae’s Soft Girl Summer (Ebony, 6/7/23) • “I hate the colour pink”: Issa Rae on being a reluctant Barbie and the legacy of Insecure (Guardian, 8/7/23) • Issa Rae Says She Used Her Barbies to “Fulfill Scenarios” Growing Up – Like “Sex-Ed” (People, 12/7/23) IMAGE Dan Doperalski/Variety
EXTRA CREDIT My first Barbie was Black and it made me feel represented even aged 5 (Metro, 17/7/23)
🌈 Actor Hari Nef, age 30, on playing with Barbie’s Magic Hair Styler on the computer as a kid…
“Through Barbie I could explore all kinds of people to be and things to do. It was mostly about her face and the glam.
The movie is literally the most preposterous, once-in-a-lifetime, orgasmic opportunity to go all in on this one little thing that I love so much, which is clothes and looks and fashion and the fantasy. I told them straight up: ‘I want the highest heel, the waist tiniest, the biggest hair every time.’
I’m a lover of drag. I’m a lover & admirer from afar of ballroom culture. It felt kind of like a legacy I could honour onscreen of dolls dolling, dolls dressing up.
It felt like Greta Gerwig’s Drag Race. I was cinched, wigged, painted from head to toe, padded. It’s a specific kind of femininity, one I feel very comfortable wearing in public and when the cameras are on and people are watching.
[On the movie being a celebration and a loving send-up of femininity and how far it can be taken] That contradiction and ambivalence is very close to the heart of probably a lot of girls like me and in general.
It’s candy with a little poison, and that’s what I like.
[On not being cast as Trans Barbie] Barbies are not human women. They don’t have genitalia.It’s probably positive for Mattel to include me because we’re trying to show all different kinds of Barbies – but the executive producer said when he saw my tape he didn’t know I was trans. I just got the tone of what they were going for.
[On the movie having a strong message for trans women (or The Dolls, as Nef & her peers call themselves)] As a trans girl, it’s easy to get caught up in big dreams of what you’ll become. It’s inevitable that you’ll get struck down by external messages and obstacles of what you’ll never be and what you won’t be able to do.You’re caught constantly between striving for perfection and recoiling from rejection. It’s hard.
The best we can do as women, as trans women, is be there for each other and take ourselves at face value without relying on the green light from anyone else”
🌈 WORDS Hari Nef and Barbie’s Empowering Message for Trans Women (Out, 5/7/23)
Actor Michael Cera, age 35, grew up in a suburb of Toronto with an older & younger sister…
• “We had a normal amount of Barbies in the house – a baseline of probably 5. They were just part of the texture of our life. We played with everything that was around – everything was just this big soup of plastic on the floor.
• I feel sorry for my son [almost 2 years old], I feel sorry for the world. I think it’s getting very lonely.
Sometimes on the subway I’ll do a head count of how many people are looking at their phones and it makes me feel lonely. Even being with friends or with family, you’re with someone you love & haven’t seen in a while, and they’re with their phone. It’s like they left the room.
• Things are a little too optimised. Even with parenting: you have a million questions when you have a new baby and you look online & there’s always some highly optimised answer about whatever problem you’re having. I kind of miss when things were a little sloppier.
• [With fame] there’s a lot of bad energies, ones that I was not equipped to handle.
When you’re a kid, people feel they can kind of grab you – they’re not that respectful of you or your physical space. At 19, I didn’t know how to respectfully establish my own boundaries”
WORDS “Fame makes you paranoid”: Michael Cera on Barbie, drunk fans – and not owning a smartphone (Guardian, 17/7/23)
MORE FROM CERA
• “I don’t have a smartphone and that is a conscious choice because I feel a bit of fear about it, honestly. Like I’d really lose control of my waking life”
• [On fatherhood] “The only thing that it affects is that you just want to spend as much time with your children as possible. So when I was 20, I would have been way happier to go off to some weird city and live in a hotel for 3 months. And when you have kids, you want to be with your family. And you miss them a lot”
In the surreal smash Barbie, America Ferrera, age 39, plays Gloria, mother of a moody teen daughter and assistant to Mattel’s CEO. The youngest of 6 kids raised by a single mum, Ferrera didn’t grow up with Barbies…
“‘My cousin had Barbies we played with,’ says Ferrera, ‘but everything – from the Dreamhouse to the Corvette to the pool to the 20 outfits – felt so inaccessible.
Barbie was blonde & blue-eyed & perfect. She probably made me feel bad about myself.
[As an actor I became] a symbol of embracing your beauty & telling beauty standards to fuck off. But I had internalised self-loathing.
I was surrounded by women who deeply internalised those standards [being beautiful, white, thin] and taught them to me.
Movies, musicians, models, dolls – everything we idolised [emphasised that there was one way to be beautiful & that wasn’t her].
I felt I wasn’t meeting the expectations of what an actress should look like, or how thin they should be, or how beautiful.
[I wrote] about giving myself permission to let go of expectations I was trying to meet & be my true self. And those things were at odds, and something had to give.’
‘Rewiring’ herself has been a lifelong process. For decades Ferrera’s work has questioned & critiqued beauty standards – she played the ‘beautiful on the inside’ Betty Suarez in Ugly Betty (2006-10), starred at age 17 in Real Women Have Curves (2002) as a teen whose mother tells her she would be beautiful if she lost weight and played a character in The Sisterhood Of The Traveling Pants (2005) who worries she’s too fat. Her book American Like Me opens with an essay about self-acceptance & explains that her first crush snubbed her for someone blonde & blue-eyed. In her TED talk My Identity Is A Superpower – Not An Obstacle, Ferrera discussed how she avoided the sun, straightened her curls and tried to lose weight to please Hollywood.
Next year Ferrera is set to direct the feature film I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter”
WORDS Into the Dollhouse: America Ferrera taught a generation of women to reject traditional beauty standards. So what’s she doing in the Barbie movie? (The Cut, 13/7/23)
Actor Ryan Gosling, age 42, on how his daughters – Esmeralda, age 8, and Amada, 7 – play with Barbies…
“When asked if he was a ‘good Barbie dad’ and if he can role-play with the dolls, he said of his kids’ dolls:
‘Their Barbies aren’t even named Barbie. They all have their own names, very complicated lives, backstories, interrelationships, history – you gotta know it all.
[If I] began playing with dolls that are estranged, it’s like: “Get out of here. They don’t even talk!”
Ken works at a grocery store – he’s not a fireman.
I saw him, like, face down in the mud one day,
next to a squished lemon, and it was like: This guy’s story does need to be told, you know?’
At a press conference in Canada, his home country, Ryan and his sister Mandi Gosling talked about him finding his ‘Kenergy’ (Ken + energy).
Mandi: ‘It felt like such a no-brainer to me. Like: of course he’s Ken! You had to look for the Kenergy, but I always knew it was there.’ Ryan: ‘Wow, that’s beautiful. Thanks. Well, [you’re] my original Barbie.’
Mandi explained that she had never owned a Barbie. Ryan: ‘Because she was too busy being Barbie. She was doing all the things all the time. You know, getting me to school safely – and then she was the president of that school. She had more meetings than classes. It was Barbie land. When I got to set I was like: ‘This is just like my house’”
WORDS Ryan Gosling spills on being a “Barbie dad” and jokingly reveals he struggles to follow his daughters’ “complicated backstories” for their dolls (Daily Mail, 2/7/23) IMAGE Gabe Ginsberg
MORE ON KEN
• “My daughters helped me a lot. They were a huge inspiration for me. But even though they’ve seen some pieces of the film, they aren’t ready to see the whole thing just yet. It was, I think, weird enough for them that I played Ken anyway. I might like, you know, just hold off on them seeing the full Ken energy”
• Ken to Barbie: “I just don't know who I am without you. It’s Barbie and Ken. There is no ‘just Ken’”
• “Ryan has taken over the Barbie conversation and Ken-ergy is now a part of the world’s vocabulary” (Grazia)
In the film Barbie, actor Ryan Gosling, age 42 – in a gender-role-reversing twist – plays bronzed-boyfriend Ken as a vacuous “himbo” accessory, eye candy, a toy boy.
About communing on set with a younger version of himself who “didn’t have a clue but did everything in total earnestness”, he says…
“There’s something about this Ken that really relates to that version of myself. The guy that was putting on Hammer pants & dancing at the mall & smelling like Drakkar Noir & Aqua Net-ing bangs. I owe that kid a lot. He didn’t know what he was doing or why.
I was very quick to distance myself from him when I started making more serious films. But he’s the reason I have everything I have. I owe my whole life to him.
I really had to go back and touch base with that little dude & say thank you, and ask for his help.
Ken: his job is ‘beach’. What the fuck does that even mean? Everyone was fine for Ken to have a job that is nothing. But suddenly it’s like: ‘We’ve cared about Ken this whole time.’ No you didn’t. You never cared. Barbie never fucked with Ken. That’s the point.
If you ever really cared about Ken, you would know that nobody cared about Ken. So your hypocrisy is exposed. This is why his story must be told.
care about this dude now. I’m like his representative: ‘Ken couldn’t show up to receive this award, so I’m here to accept it for him.’
[About criticism of his playing Ken at age 42] It is funny, this kind of clutching-your-pearls idea of, like, #notmyken. Like you ever thought about Ken before this?”
WORDS The Return of Ryan Gosling (British GQ, 31/5/23) IMAGE Gregory Harris
From Ken’s power ballad Just Ken: “Doesn’t seem to matter what I do/ I’m always No. 2/ No one knows how hard I try/ I have feelings that I can’t explain/ driving me insane/ All my life been so polite/ cause I’m just Ken/ Anywhere else I’d be a 10”
DIRECTOR GRETA GERWIG ON KEN
• “Ken has a journey. He doesn’t have a house. Or a car. Or a job. Or any power. And that is gonna be sort of unsustainable”
• “Ken was invented after Barbie, to burnish Barbie’s position in our eyes & in the world. Ken only has a great day if Barbie looks at him”
Actor & Barbie director Greta Gerwig, age 39, says…
“‘Barbie was, if not exactly forbidden in our house – well, it was not encouraged.
It was the usual criticisms: “If she was a real woman, she wouldn’t even be able to stand up; she wouldn’t be able to support her head.”
My mum was a child of the 60s. She was like: “We got this far – for this?”’
Eventually Gerwig’s mother relented. ‘She got me my own. Fresh out the box.’ It replaced the neighbourhood hand-me-downs she’d been playing with.
But Gerwig had a strong connection to other dolls, the kind you mother, and a vivid
imagination. ‘I played with dolls until… I don’t want to say too late, but I played with them long enough that I didn’t want kids at school to know I still played with them.
I was a teenager. I was about 13 and still playing with dolls. And I knew that kids at that point were already kissing. I was a late bloomer.’
Gerwig has said that Barbie’s story mimics that of a girl’s journey from childhood to adolescence.‘I always think that 8, 9, 10 years old is peak kid. I was brash & unafraid & loud & big. And then, you know…’
Puberty. ‘It’s a shrinking. Wanting to make yourself smaller, less noticeable, take in all that spikiness and bury it.
And you’re profoundly uncomfortable, because you’re going through metamorphosis, literally. But also, you’re getting tall. You’re getting your period. You get spots.’
Gerwig describes childhood as being at peace with the world and adolescence as being suddenly not: ‘My experience of it was wanting to hide.’
Is Barbie the movie about growing up? ‘It’s not about growing up, exactly. It’s about Barbie, an inanimate doll made out of plastic. But the movie ends up, really, about being human’”
WORDS “It had to be totally bananas”: Greta Gerwig on bringing Barbie to life (Guardian, 9/7/23)
IMAGE Time/A24
Actor Tom Holland, age 27, on mental health, a same-sex love scene & dressing up as Rihanna…
“In a bustier, hot pants, fishnets & a bob wig, Holland mimed the vocals of @badgalriri’s Umbrella on Lip Sync Battle in 2017.
Of the scene’s ‘lasting impact’ on pop culture he says: ‘I’m proud of it.
[Was it a statement about #toxicmasculinity?] No. I grew up in the most non-toxic-masculine environment possible [as a child star in London].
I didn’t realise what I was doing was so forward-thinking. I was just like: “Yeah, fuck it – I’ll put some fishnets on & dance in the rain. That’ll be really fun. I don’t care.”
You’d never catch me doing that now. I don’t want to do a fucking TV show that I don’t need to do. I’d rather go & play golf and live my little private life.
But for all the movies that I’m incredibly proud of, the Lip Sync Battle is what I get the most compliments for’”
WORDS Tom Holland Reflected On The “Lasting Impact” Of His Iconic Lip Sync Battle Performance And Said It Wasn’t Supposed To Be A “Statement About Toxic Masculinity” (BuzzFeed, 14/6/23) IMAGE Michael Muller
MORE FROM HOLLAND
• “I find Instagram & Twitter to be overstimulating, overwhelming. I get caught up & I spiral when I read things about me online and ultimately it’s very detrimental to my mental state, so I’ve decided to take a step back & delete the app” [2022 statement]
• “I wouldn’t say I particularly have a history of issues with #mentalhealth. I just feel like I am a young person living in a world where we are expected to share every moment online”
• [About doing a same-sex love scene] “It’s not a milestone. It’s not something that I’m like: ‘Oh wow. I got to play my first character with a different sexual preference than I have.’ It’s obviously a little more complicated. It felt very important to tell the story authentically”
• “The message of the show The Crowded Room is: asking for help should be something we celebrate. It’s an act of bravery. The mental aspect really beat me up & it took a long time for me to recover, to sort of get back to reality. I had a bit of a meltdown at home, thinking: ‘I need to shave my head to get rid of this character’”
Cultural pundit & feminist Caitlin Moran, age 48, on her new book What About Men?…
“If a boy grows up hearing that straight white men are awful – if he’s been made to feel shame & guilt simply because of who he is – then of course he’s going to be attracted to [Andrew Tate], who says: ‘Don’t be ashamed! Men are great! We need men! Fuck woke-dom!’
A boy needs a male role model who thinks men are awesome, because his job right now is ‘becoming a man’ – and Tate is the loudest voice shouting: ‘I can show you how.’
There is no movement that campaigns for solutions to male problems: educational underachievement & exclusion; sky-high mental ill-health & suicide rates; porn-influenced strangulation; fatherhood being seen as the
‘lesser’ parenting role; and the epidemic of loneliness in older men. There is no sense of these being folded in together under the subject ‘How things needs to change for boys & men’.
How can we make a world where boys find a new space & language to talk about their bodies in the same joyful, honest, affirming way [girls can]? Because the existence of dick pics alone tells us young men want to start a conversation about their penises. It’s just so far this is the best idea they’ve come up with (granted, it is a bad idea).
What men & boys need is feminism. And what women need is boys & men who use feminism. Two – possibly 3 – generations of men have watched as their wives, mothers, sisters, daughters & friends changed what our idea of ‘being a woman’ is.
Now those women need to tell men: ‘Your problems aren’t boring. It’s OK to make a fuss. We won’t accuse you of Emotional Man Flu. We love you & worry about you. Please use the tools we have invented to solve your problems now. But don’t leave them all over the kitchen once you’ve finished with them – The Girls are coming round at 6pm to do each other’s roots’”
WORDS Caitlin Moran: what’s gone wrong for men – and the thing that can fix them (Guardian, 1/7/23)
🌈 Actor Noah Schnapp of Stranger Things, age 18, shared photos from NYC Pride (and got 4 million likes in 2 days)…
“This marks Noah’s first Pride weekend after he publicly came out as gay in January.
He had shared a TikTok with the caption:
‘I guess I’m more similar to Will than I thought’, referring to his Stranger Things character. Noah had previously confirmed that Will was gay and in love with Mike.
[Posting a picture of him lying on a pillow in a hoodie] he shared the sweet way people reacted to him coming out:
‘When I finally told my friends and family I was gay after being scared in the closet for 18 years and all they said was “we know”’
Noah’s parents as well as his friends were right there beside him at his first Pride! His mom, Karine, shared a carousel of pics with the caption: ‘Happy Pride 🏳️🌈❤️#loveislove🌈’
I just love a family selfie. So happy for you, Noah!”
WORDS Stranger Things Star Noah Schnapp Went To His First Pride In NYC This Weekend And Shared The Happiest Pics (BuzzFeed, 24/6/23)
MORE ON SCHNAPP AT PRIDE
🌈 “Noah Schnapp publicly came out in January via TikTok lip-syncing someone saying: ‘You know what it never was? That serious. It was never that serious. Quite frankly, will never be that serious.’
On Sunday Noah shared a photo of himself splashing elatedly in the water fountain in Washington Square Park alongside other revellers.
He was dressed in a black tank top with ‘Straight Outta The Closet’ written on it in rainbow colours and white pants. He wore a rainbow headband and wrist bands.‘
First pride❤️’ he wrote next to the social media post”
“First pride!” Stranger Things star Noah Schnapp celebrates Pride Month in NYC – six months after coming out as gay (Daily Mail, 26/6/23)
🌈 Actor Elliot Page, age 36, starred in Juno at age 20, and came out as gay at 26 & trans at 33…
“He never felt right. As a 4-year-old, he used to try to pee standing up.
In his new book Pageboy he writes: ‘I would press on my vagina, holding it, pinching & squeezing it, hoping I could aim.’
He didn’t consider himself a girl. He didn’t quite know what he was. All he knew was that he felt a huge amount of discomfort & emotional pain.
He self-harmed from a young age, smashing himself in the head with a hairbrush when getting ready for school, failing to recognise, or accept, the face staring back at him in the mirror. He cut himself, got wasted and stopped eating. He wanted to obliterate himself.
‘[With acting] I was attracted to intense, traumatic work. As a teenager who dealt with a lot of shitty predatory behaviour, it was something I was interested in tackling.
[In 2010] How I was feeling in my body, and being closeted, was eating at me’”
WORDS Elliot Page on Juno, Hollywood’s dark side and coming out twice: “Living my life was more important than being in movies” (Guardian, 10/6/23) IMAGE Le Monde
MORE FROM PAGE
🌈 “When I was a little kid, absolutely 100% I was a boy. I knew I was a boy when I was a toddler. I was writing fake love letters and signing them ‘Jason’.I just couldn’t understand when I’d be [reminded that I was not a boy] and told: ‘No, you’re not. No, you can’t be that when you’re older.’I get waves of myself at specific ages, and I just want to cling to that person & hold them close”
“I knew I was a boy when I was a toddler,” says Elliot Page (Upworthy, 22/5/23)
🌈 “I was perplexed by my experience, severed from the other girls, twists in my stomach when I gazed at them”
🌈 “Shame had been drilled into my bones since I was my tiniest self.We need to feel represented and see ourselves, you know – that’s not something I had as a kid”
🌈 Actor Bella Ramsey, age 19 – star of TV show The Last Of Us (and Game Of Thrones at age 11) – on their sexuality…
“‘You never fully know who you are – it’s ever evolving. But I certainly think that people have gathered that I’m not 100% straight.
I’m a little bit wavy, you know? That’s what I like to say.’
Ramsey opts for ‘non-binary’ when filling out forms. Their gender has ‘always been very fluid. Someone would call me “she” or “her” and I wouldn’t think about it – but I knew that if someone called me “he” it was a bit exciting.
I’m very much just a person. Being gendered isn’t something that I particularly like, but in terms of pronouns, I really couldn’t care less.’
But using ‘they/them’ pronouns is the ‘most truthful thing. That’s who I am the most.’Ramsey praised the costume supervisor on @TheLastOfUs for supporting their queer identity: ‘She would put different undergarments in my room: a regular bra, a binder, a sports bra. She’d say: “You just pick whatever is most comfortable for you today.” And in the end, it was just a binder. There was never anyone pressuring me’”
WORDS “I’m not 100 percent straight”: Bella Ramsey opens up about their sexuality (Gay Times, 15/6/23)
IMAGE Austin Hargrave / British GQ
MORE FROM RAMSEY
🌈“This is what bothers me more than pronouns: being called a ‘young woman’, ‘powerful young woman’, ‘young lady’, but I'm just not that. In Catherine Called Birdy I was in dresses. In Young Elizabeth I was in a corset. And I felt super powerful in that. Playing these more feminine characters is a chance to be something so opposite to myself, and it’s really fun”
🌈 “The fact that the LGBTQ+ community – my community – is supporting me & uplifting me & making me feel cool is such a privilege”
🌈 “If you don’t want to watch The Last Of Us because it has gay storylines, because it has a trans character, that’s on you, and you’re missing out”
Actor Gary Oldman, age 65 – father to Alfie, 34; Gulliver, 25, and Charlie, 23 – who was raised by a single mum after his violent father left when he was 7…
“You couldn’t pay me enough to go back to my teens. It was very traumatic.
I don’t have fond memories of any of it.
I didn’t like school, your genes are rearranging themselves, your skin’s all oily and you’re getting acne, you’re trying to date girls and you’re getting rejected – and oh my God, I couldn’t bear to go through all that again.
When my sons were in their teens, I used to look at them and think: ‘My God, I wouldn’t want to go back there!’
[With kids] it’s about teaching them the fairly simple stuff at a young age – don’t bang your knife and fork, say please, say thank you, and learn to wait your turn in life.
If you learn to wait your turn in [the game of] Snakes and Ladders, you’ll know when you’re older that you don’t just walk into a restaurant or a bank and go: ‘I’m here!’ It’s about learning to compromise and realising life isn’t all about you”
WORDS Gary Oldman’s traumatic teen years (Yahoo News, 25/6/23) IMAGE Little White Lies
MORE FROM OLDMAN
• “I woke up one day & was 43 years old and I was a single dad & had these two kids. I asked myself a very simple question: ‘Am I a dad who’s away working all the time? Or am I going to be a dad who’s around at home?’ I decided to be at home. It set a new course for the ship. I had not done it successfully with my first son, although our relationship was always good. But I had been given the gift of a second chance. I’d been awarded these children by the court – unheard of in California – and I felt I now had these boys for a reason.
At the end of the day I have two fabulous boys at home. And they turned out OK. I’m proud of them. I pick my kids up from school & I say maybe ‘It’s a boys night out’ and I’ll go to the taco store with them.
Raising kids is the hardest thing I’ve done. Harder than anything”
• [On drinking] “I was just worn out. It’s like a three-headed dragon – it attacks you spiritually, emotionally & physically”
• [In 2019] “I’m nearly 60 and at last I think I’ve come home”
Actor Joanna Lumley, age 77, on being naked in films…
“Oh, everybody stripped. Everybody had to, from Diana Rigg to Julie Christie – we all had to take at least our tops off in something. It was standard and it was: ‘You’re not a real actress unless you take your top off.’
Nobody liked it, like nobody likes intimate kissing or sex scenes. All this ghastly stuff we have to pretend to do. Everybody knows it’s pretending and it’s kind of soft porn, and now we’ve got coaches to teach us how to do it. Thank God I’m beyond it now.
[Intimacy coordinators] are probably a nice thing [but she’d prefer sex scenes to be cut]. I find them intolerable! I think they’re revolting. I don’t know why people write them & I don’t know why
we watch them. We wouldn’t have films of people sitting on the loo. There are some things which are private.
[About going topless] You do it with hatred. Not hatred, but sort of sullenly.[Did it feel exploitative?] Oh, it always is. But there are lots of other things you have to do in life which are horrible, and you never wanted to do them & you find yourself caught up with them.
Also remember, the world… We were four girls sharing a flat but we weren’t allowed to sign the lease – a man had to. Men were always paid more, always top dog, and you could be sacked from a film if you didn’t take your top off. So then a lot of people go: ‘Shall I just take my top off and remain in the film?’ It was a different world.
[Sexual harassment was everywhere] – at the tube, in the pub, in the shops. There was always whistling, bottom pinching, overfamiliar hand on shoulder. It happened all the time. You get used to it, you know how to do that [slap a hand away]. Or move away. You deal with it”
WORDS “We all had to take our tops off”: Joanna Lumley on acting, travel – and her hatred of sex scenes (Guardian, 21/6/23)
LUMLEY ON BEING A MODEL & #MeToo
“Women were a lot tougher then. If someone whistled at you in the street, it didn’t matter. If someone was groping, we slapped their hands. We were quite tough and looked after ourselves. The new fashion is to be a victim, a victim of something. It’s pathetic. We have gone mad”
Radio broadcaster & novelist Annie Mac, age 44, on puberty, periods & body image…
“Growing up as the youngest of a large family in Dublin, I would play football all day with the boys then climb trees.
When I was 9, my relationship with my body was: does it function & does it get me up this tree?
After that I went through years & years of losing my confidence.I resisted the idea of puberty & didn’t want to know anything about becoming a teenager.
My mum never wanted to pressure or embarrass me, but I remember her presenting me with a book about puberty. I knew what it meant, what it symbolised – and I couldn’t deal with it. I ran out of the room.
The hormones hit me eventually. My social group used to call periods The Confidence. I remember in assembly nudging my friend and saying: ‘I’ve got The Confidence!’ It was a big deal.
I was really lucky in that I never felt oversexualised during those teenage years. Nobody ever pushed me into looking feminine.
Naturally I eventually did what most girls do: I wore short skirts & kissed boys. I still went through a period of hating my body & being confused about it, however. I had gone from this unselfconscious kid to becoming obsessed with my size from age 15 onwards.
I grew up in the 90s – and that whole decade of heroin chic, Kate Moss and trousers hanging off your hip bones really got to me.It was impossible not to feel affected by the media & how skeletal bodies were deemed desirable.
My body wasn’t like that, nor was anyone’s I knew. But it didn’t stop me thinking that something was wrong with me.
The best thing about getting older is that I feel more in tune with my body now more than ever. I’m in awe of my body & its ability. The fact that I am able to climb a tree at 44 is huge”
WORDS Annie Mac looks back: “I was wild, feral and very comfortable in a tree” (Guardian, 13/5/23)
IMAGES Pål Hansen / Baazar
Adventurer & TV survivalist Bear Grylls, age 48 – and father to sons Jesse, 19, Marmaduke, 17, and Huckleberry, 14 – answers a child’s question about the power of social media at the Hay literary festival…
“‘Social media can be brilliant. It connects us, and you can learn stuff so fast & you can have fun & it’s brilliant entertainment.
The key, though, is not letting it control you. You control it. So you be in charge.
If I’m on it all day, that’s going to erode your heart a bit.
[To my sons] I say: “Set your rules. You’re in charge, because after you leave school nobody’s going to be policing it for you. You’ll have to police your own life.
That might be eating healthy, or going to the gym, or if somebody treats you badly in a relationship then having some boundaries and saying: ‘No – I’m not going to let you.’You’ve got to police yourself with social media as well.”’
Grylls says he is concerned that children are sometimes ‘lost’ in the world of their smartphones”
WORDS Bear Grylls urges parents to let their children “set own rules” on social media usage (Independent, 27/5/23) IMAGE Daily Mail
MORE FROM BEAR IN 2014
“If you try to negate risk in children’s lives, you do them a disservice, because you teach them not to be afraid of risk. There is risk everywhere, even when you go out on the street. So empower kids by teaching them how to do something dangerous, but do it safely.
My sons love setting up ‘search and rescue’ scenarios at home: they’ve got to rescue one another as a casualty and lower themselves down a slope or from a tree and tie a rope around each other & haul each other up.
I think it’s important I teach them those sorts of things – it’s part of being a dad. I don’t want to bring up Rambo, but it’s good to show them how to make a catapult, tie a knot and improvise a kite.
There’s a duty of care which comes from experience. You’re right to say: ‘Don’t jump off there without knowing if there are rocks underneath’ or ‘Don’t play with fire without me.’ Because you love & care for your kids, and you don’t want pain or hurt to come to them – but you’ve got to let kids have the odd scrape and adventure”
🌈 Writer of LGBT+ hit Heartstopper Alice Oseman, age 28, on asexuality & aromanticism…
“‘We live in a society where sex & romance are prized above so many other aspects of being human. People are conditioned from birth to grow up, find a partner, get married, have children – and when you are ace and aro [asexual and aromantic], you don’t necessarily fit into that sort of structure of life.
Realising that I couldn’t fulfil those expectations was really difficult because I was wanting something that I actually didn’t want, and that’s a really tricky thing to make peace with.
It’s a really difficult thing to overcome mentally. To accept that your path in life is going to be different & the way you experience life will be too.
And there’s not a lot of guidance due to the lack of representation in the media. No very famous people who are openly ace & aro. No education about it in schools. You’re lucky to even learn what these terms are. It’s sad to think about how we’re still – how we just want a basic understanding of what these identities are.’
Alice came across the term asexuality online at around age 18 but it took some time for her to connect the term with her own experiences. ‘There was no one big moment where I was like: “Oh, that’s me.” But at uni I slowly felt more & more like I identified with those labels.
I went through a phase where I would try and force myself to like guys. A lot of people can relate to that. And then trying to force yourself to do those things and feeling like something is wrong and you don’t know what it is – that’s a really horrible feeling.
I often think about how many people out there are ace and aro, but they just have no idea and think that there is something wrong with them’”
WORDS Heartstopper’s Alice Oseman on asexuality, young fame and surviving social media (Hello, 6/6/23) IMAGE Attitude
🌈 Comedian/actor, political candidate & marathon runner Suzy Eddie Izzard, age 61…
“Trans people exist & have done so since the dawn of time. I knew when I was 5. I’ve been honest. In this world of Boris Johnson & Donald Trump, that’s got to be better than all the hatred & lying of the right wing. The new fascism tries to put a wedge between us.
I’m more able to access the female or feminine side of myself, more relaxed in my skin, than when I came out at 23. I grew up with a block around it.
After Mum died [when Izzard was 6], it was just me, my brother & my dad, so even to throw on a dress was impossible.
I’d been caught stealing make-up when I was 15. Suddenly I’m 16 & being cast as a gangster’s moll in a revue. I got psychosomatically ill, and they had someone else do it. From the room I was in I could hear his performance. By the time it was over, I was well again. I thought: ‘This is what I really want – but won’t I just sound like a boy?’
[About acting] At 13, I felt I didn’t have the skills to say ‘I love you’ so the audience would believe it. I could do the silliness: ‘I love you like trees & helicopters & bits of water…’ But I didn’t know how to do the rest, so I dumped the idea of being an actor.When I came out I realised I didn’t look terribly… well, I kind of look like a trans person, but I think the world is more relaxed about that now & I am too. We’ve gone through a unicorn phase but we’ve just got to be people.
When we hit boring, that’s when we’ve made it: ‘You’re lesbian or gay or bi or trans, yes, but what do you DO?’ ‘Oh, I’m a librarian.’ ‘Are you a good librarian or a bad librarian?’ ‘I’m a good librarian. I can find you all the books.’ Or an astronaut. ‘Are you a good astronaut or a bad astronaut?’ ‘Ah, a bad one, I’m afraid. I landed on the wrong planet…’”
WORDS “I’m going for it like crazy”: Eddie Izzard on her one-woman, 19-role Great Expectations (Guardian, 27/4/23) IMAGE Amanda Searle
MORE FROM IZZARD
🌈 “I’m Eddie. There’s another name I’m going to add in – Suzy – which I wanted to be since I was 10. I’m going to be Suzy Eddie Izzard”
Singer & actor Halle Bailey, age 23, says about The Little Mermaid…
“[As a kid] if I would have had a black mermaid, that would have been insane – that would have changed my whole perspective, my whole life, my confidence, my self-worth.
You’re able to see a person who looks like you when you’re young? Some people are just like: “Oh, it’s whatever”, because they’ve had it their whole life. It’s nothing to them. But it’s so important.’
Who did she look up to as a child? ‘A lot of musicians, amazing black women who were singers, like Jill Scott, Erykah Badu, Janelle Monáe, Alicia Keys, Beyoncé…
I remember growing up & feeling like I had a lane I could pursue because of these women.
They made me feel confident in the skin I was in.’
In playing Ariel, and soon Nettie in The Color Purple, Bailey says: ‘I’m trying to adopt certain characteristics about these women that I play, that teach me a lot about who I want to be.’
Comedian Trevor Noah joked that it’s ‘a beautiful story about a young woman changing her core identity to please a man’.
When news of Halle’s casting broke, the racially charged hashtag NotMyAriel trended on Twitter. Some trailers, posters and clips are still ‘downvoted’.
Halle reflects: ‘Being a black woman, you have a certain awareness that comes with life in general. So I wasn’t very surprised or shocked. I think it’s just the way you respond & move, and know that inside you’re worthy’”
WORDS The Little Mermaid’s Halle Bailey: “As a child, seeing a black Ariel would have changed my life” (Guardian, 20/5/23) IMAGE Greg Swales/Variety
MORE FROM HALLE
“What truly strikes my heart and makes me just cry are seeing the reactions of the babies & the children and the beautiful Black, brown boys & girls who see themselves in this version of Ariel. These reaction videos just make me feel like I’ve done a good job. When they’re rooting for me, I’m like: I don’t need anyone else to root for me”
WORDS Halle Bailey had to push herself “past what I thought I could ever do” in Little Mermaid (USA Today, 24/5/23)
EXTRA CREDIT! Little Mermaid returns as a live action heroine – and young viewers says it’s a smash (Daily Mirror, 24/5/23)
On the 23/5/23 episode of the Savage Lovecast podcast, brilliant sex-advice columnist Dan Savage says…
“I’m still plagued by listening to the pain in Billie Eilish’s voice when she talked about the porn she was exposed to at 10, 11, 12 years old that set her expectations around what sex or intimacy would be.
And it resulted in her doing things, consenting, seeming to consent to things – talk about manufactured consent! – not because they were things she wanted to do but because she thought that’s what sex was – because her vision of sex had been so tainted and warped by the porn she was exposed to at 11.
Porn is this open spigot that the ocean is pouring through – and it’s dam breaking, and some young people are being swept away and harmed.
I know Billie Eilish is a data set of one. It’s not a huge sample size.
But I’ve talked to a lot of people who didn’t have a space & time in their lives for their authentic sexual interests and desires to surface”
Which for us echoes the charity Brook’s observation on the impact of porn on young people: “Viewing pornography can shape sexual desires and practices”
WHAT BILLIE EILISH SAID IN DECEMBER 2021
“As a woman I think porn is a disgrace, and I used to watch a lot of porn.I started watching porn when I was like 11 and I didn’t understand why it was a bad thing. I thought that was how you learned to have sex.
I was an advocate and thought I was one of the guys and would talk about it and thought I was cool for not having a problem with it.
I think it really destroyed my brain, and I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much porn.It got to the point where I couldn’t watch anything else.
Unless it was violent I didn’t think it was attractive.I was a virgin – I had never done anything – so it led to problems where the first few times I had sex I was not saying no to things that were not good, and it’s because I thought that that was what I was supposed to be attracted to.
I’m so angry that porn is so loved – and I’m so angry at myself for thinking that it was OK, and it’s how so many people think they’re supposed to learn”
🌈 Mara Wilson, age 35 – child star of 90s films including Matilda – says…
“‘On film sets some sketchy, questionable things happened – adults told dirty jokes or sexually harassed people in front of me – but I never felt unsafe.’
‘But I was still sexualised’ by the world at large.
Men tried to contact her. ‘People sent me inappropriate letters. I made the mistake of Googling myself when I was 12 and saw things I couldn’t unsee.’ Her photo was on porn sites, her head superimposed onto girls’ bodies.
‘People don’t realise how talking to the press as a child weighs on you,’ she says.
When she was 7, journalists asked if she knew what French kissing was or which actor she found ‘sexiest’.
At 12, she was asked by a director to wear a sports bra, ostensibly to flatten her developing breasts.
She says: ‘I had this Hollywood idea that if you’re not cute any more, or beautiful, then you are worthless. I directly tied that to the demise of my career. For a long time I had this dysmorphia about the way I looked & I obsessed about it too much.’
At a teen disco on a cruise with her family Wilson, then about 16, was made to feel she had to dance with a boy because he was a fan (he didn’t speak, just grinded on her). She worried that others would think: ‘Matilda’s a slut!’
‘People-pleasing was something a lot of people, particularly women, told me they dealt with,’ she says. ‘I don’t think you can be a child star without there being some kind of lasting damage. You end up acting out. You can’t be yourself in public. There were times I was having a bad day because I was an emotional teenager or because my mother had just died.
Fans were expecting me to be Matilda, who is smart, kind & powerful. Then they met me, this nerdy, awkward teenager.
[I had an] earnestness & eagerness to please.
Later I started to realise stuff about my sexuality [she came out as bisexual in 2016].’
In her teens, Wilson rebelled and became angry and ‘a bitch’. She says: ‘I definitely had a self-destructive streak. There was a lot of hating myself’”
WORDS “I’d tell myself: you’re a loser, a failure, ugly…” Matilda’s Mara Wilson on the price of fame (Guardian, 15/5/23)
Actor Gwyneth Paltrow, age 50, on being shocked by what her kids Apple, 18, and Moses, 17, learned in sex ed…
“While Gwyneth Paltrow has always unashamedly laid bare details of her sex life and love of vibrators, she was ‘not prepared’ for the extent to which her kids learned about sex at school.
The Goop founder – who infamously created a sellout candle called This Smells Like My Vagina – opened up on the Call Her Daddy podcast about how thoroughly her children’s school taught them about sex.
She recalled that when they all moved to LA from London – along with their dad, her ex-husband Chris Martin of Coldplay fame – her kids went to a ‘fantastic elementary school’ which taught kids about sex when they were around age 11 or 12.
‘But I really was not prepared with the information they came home with,’ she said.
‘I will never forget Apple and her best friend Emily sitting at our kitchen banquette in shock, like colour drained from their face.
They taught them everything. Everything. Anything you’re thinking – they taught the 11-, 12-year-olds. Told them everything, I swear.’
Paltrow revealed that her children even asked her: ‘Do people do this?’
In the UK, all secondary school pupils are taught about sex, including key topics such as consent, sexual exploitation & sexual health”
WORDS Gwyneth Paltrow Was “Not Prepared” For What Her Kids Learned About Sex At School (HuffPostUK, 4/5/23) IMAGE @gwynethpaltrow
MORE FROM GWYNETH
• On teens & dating: “I think you have to tread lightly and let them come to you”
• “In a lot of ways, I didn’t really fully start to come into myself until I was 40 years old…”
Actor Rachel McAdams, age 44, who plays the mum in Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret:
“Hopefully with conversation & stories like this we’re moving into a more kind, compassionate time.
Movies, storytelling, is a safe buffer to inspire difficult conversations. It could be a great way in for parents to talk about something uncomfortable.
When you [talk about sex] kids want to, like, die…”
Abby Ryder Fortson, age 15, who plays Margaret: “I can vouch for that. It’s so uncomfortable.”
McAdams: “But so necessary. And to be able to go to your parent with questions & know you won’t be judged & will be embraced for whoever you are – that’s so beautiful. That served me well”
WORDS Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret: Judy Blume’s banned book hits the big screen (Sky, 13/5/23)
• “In a world where we’re obsessed with the bloody scenes in Game Of Thrones, how is a bit of period blood unacceptable?” – Wuka founder Ruby Raut
“While kids aged 11 & 12 gladly say dick or tits, they often can’t bring themselves to say breasts or vagina. There’s still intrinsic embarrassment. But there is a real thirst to understand periods. Boys are interested in what’s going on in the body: ‘How does that work? How does it feel? How do you know when you’re going to have a period?’
There is an assumption that kids today know everything, but actually there’s a lot of confusion. I hear questions like: ‘Do bigger boobs produce more milk?’ ‘If you have sex for longer, are you more likely to get pregnant?’” – parenting coach Katie Pratley
WORDS It’s over 50 years since Judy Blume wrote her world-famous novel about periods, so how do we feel about them now? (Metro, 13/5/23)
• “In 2023, Margaret likely would have access to a smartphone & consider signing up for a period-tracking app. Trying on bras, she might take selfies to share with friends to ask which bra she should get, or just to savour the moment that marks becoming an adult. She might send one to someone she likes – because they asked for it, or she just wants to”
WORDS Are You There, God? My Nude Photos Are All Over the Internet (Ms magazine, 12/5/23)
The rapper Lizzo, age 32, an ambassador for the Dove Self-Esteem Project for young people, says…
“‘There’s a completely unrealistic standard for your face & body. People are struggling with their self-image & self-confidence.
It’s happening to young people everywhere, so let’s talk about it.’
Lizzo’s journey began in a dark, ‘scary’ place: ‘When I was a teen, I remember waking up and wanting to be someone else, change my body, my hair texture, the colour of my skin.
It scares me that now there are tools that cash in on those insecurities. They feed the monster.
I thought: “If I’m going to continue living in this body, I have to find a way to like myself.”Everything changed when [on social media] I started following people who looked like me. I used to follow people who were society’s beauty standard. Looking at them I felt I needed to change my appearance.
But not only is this body fat & this body positive, but this body’s normal’”
WORDS Lizzo Is Dove’s New Brand Ambassador: “I Have Nothing To Hide. Take Me as I Am” (Fashion, 21/4/23) IMAGE Elle
MORE FROM LIZZO
• “I control social media. Social media does not control me”
• “When social media came in, I was like: ‘Are people really that perfect?’ My friend said: ‘Everybody modifies. These photos are altered.’
A child is going to look on the internet & believe everything they see. That’s why the selfie talk is so important.
I hope I can post the kinds of materials I post, showing my body and my rolls or whatever. And people are just like: ‘OK. Beautiful picture. Next.’ Instead of: ‘Oh my gosh, a full-figured body. How strikingly political!’ It don’t gotta be all of that! That is where I’m going with body-normative-speak.
I had to learn to find people who look like me, women who have bodies like mine, Black girls, girls who have hair like mine and smiles like mine. I believe that has greatly improved my relationship with social media.
A young person can learn that before it gets out of control – and that will make so much of a difference”
• What’s your No 1 rule with beauty standards? “I am the beauty standard”
🌈 Actor Marcia Gay Harden, age 63 – mum to Eulala, 24, and Julitta and Hudson, both 19 – explained why she took part in a Drag Isn’t Dangerous telethon fundraising to fight American anti-LGBT+ legislation, saying…
“What drives me is because it’s right and what’s happening right now is wrong.
This is so fear-based and it’s spreading that kind of fear and hatred among other people. I believe this country will fight that.
What drives me is – my children are all queer.
My eldest child is non-binary. My son is gay. My youngest is fluid.
And you know, they are my kids and they teach me every day”
MORE FROM MARCIA
🌈 “My son is gay. I just want to make sure he gets to have a family when he wants one”
🌈 “The only thing dangerous about drag is how hot these Queens are!
[Supporting] LGTBQ+ basically means [supporting] all of us! Our nation, our neighbours, our children, artists, our singers, our dancers, our better leaders, CEOs, writers, spiritual leaders, basically our humanity.
Gay is here to stay. Drag is here to stay”
🌈 WORDS Marcia Gay Harden Reveals “All My Children Are Queer” During Drag Isn’t Dangerous Telethon (People, 8/5/23) IMAGE Wonderwall
Actor Kate Winslet, age 47, in accepting the Leading Actress Bafta award for the Channel 4 drama I Am Ruth – in which she stars with her daughter Mia Threapleton, age 22 – said…
“I Am Ruth was made for parents & their children, for families who feel they are held hostage by the perils of the online world, for parents who wish they could still communicate with their teenagers but who no longer can.
And for young people who have become addicted to social media and its darker sides: this does not need to be your life.
To any young person who feels they are trapped in an unhealthy world: please ask for help. There is no shame in admitting that you need support. It will be there – just ask for it.
To people in power & people who can make change: please criminalise harmful content.
We don’t want to lie awake terrified by our children’s mental health.
Please eradicate harmful content – we don’t want it. We want our children back.”
She added about the award: “If I could cut this in half, I would give the other half to my daughter Mia Threapleton. We did this together, kiddo.
There were days when it was agony for her to dig as deeply as she did into very frightening emotional territory and it took my breath away.”
Crying, Mia blew kisses to her mum onstage before calling out: “I love you.”
Kate also thanked director Dominic Savage for his “delicate handling of real painful stories that really do happen to women. It is not only powerful but brave & important. We need this, we want to be heard. Thank you for creating this space for us to tell our stories”
WORDS Kate Winslet uses Bafta speech to call for action on “harmful” social media (Evening Standard, 15/5/23) IMAGE Joe Maher/Getty Images
Dr Alex George, age 32 – Love Island contestant in 2018, appointed UK Youth Mental Health Ambassador in 2021 & author of A Better Day: Your Positive Mental Health Handbook – said last month of his body-positivity Channel 4 show Naked Education…
“When I lost my brother to mental illness I promised myself I would stop at nothing to prevent other families living with empty seats at their dinner table. I knew it would be hard. I knew it would mean doing things differently.
I am annoyed at myself because we created something incredible with Naked Education, and I let the opinions of a minority of people (who almost certainly hadn’t watched the show) distract from what a life-changing program this is.
What is wrong is having young people hurt themselves because of how they look, develop eating disorders & live a life of suffering.
What is wrong is being a doctor in A&E and healing the wounds of a young girl who has harmed themselves again. Tears rolling behind my mask as I thought about the injustice of it all. Why are we doing this to our children? Those images never leave my mind.
To make a real change in the world you have to rock the boat. If that means upsetting some people so we don’t continue on this dreadful trajectory of mental illness, so be it.I am proud of Naked Education. Thank you to all our brave & inspiring contributors. I think you should watch this series”
WORDS @dralexgeorge IMAGE Love Island
WHAT OTHERS SAID ON INSTAGRAM
• This programme is powerful, amazing & necessary. Our young people need to know that the body standards fed to them as “normal” are false. We want them to feel comfortable & proud to be who they are. The friction is a sign of progress
• My husband and I in our mid-30s think it’s important for teenagers & for [parents] trying to bring up young children to feel good in themselves
• Naked Education should 100% be shown to/discussed with teens either at home or in school. Anyone who has complained or commented negatively needs to get a grip & look at their own views on nudity & body image
• Honestly think it should be shown in schools to show children what real bodies are & that we are all beautiful
“Singer Ariana Grande, age 29, asked fans to be ‘less comfortable’ about remarking on her and other people’s bodies after social-media scrutiny of her recent apparent weight loss.
In a 3-minute TikTok video, she said she had a body that is ‘paid such close attention to’ and that people were ‘comparing my current body to the unhealthiest version of my body. I was on a lot of antidepressants & drinking on them & eating poorly and at the lowest point of my life when I looked the way you consider my healthy, but that in fact wasn’t my healthy.
I know I shouldn’t have to explain that, but I do feel like maybe having an openness and some sort of vulnerability here will [mean] something good might come from it. Healthy can look different.
You never know what someone is going through. Even if you are coming from a loving and caring place, that person probably is working on it or has a support system that they are working on it with.
You never know. So be gentle with each other and with yourselves.’
Stressing that ‘there are many different kinds of beautiful’, she suggested fans should avoid making even ‘well-intentioned’ remarks about how ‘healthy, unhealthy, big, small, this, that, sexy, non-sexy’ people may look.
‘There are ways to compliment someone or to ignore something that you see that you don’t like, that I think we should help each other work towards,’ she said. ‘We should aim toward being safer, and keeping each other safer’”
WORDS Ariana Grande calls for fans to stop body shaming (BBC, 12/4/23) IMAGE Wegow
MORE FROM ARIANA TO HER FANS
“You are beautiful no matter what weight, no matter how you like to do your make-up these days, no matter what cosmetic procedures you’ve had or not, or anything.
I just think you’re beautiful and wanted to share some feelings”
Model, mum of 2-year-old son Sylvester Apollo and My Body author Emily Ratajkowski, age 31, when asked if she would date women, replied…
“I would love to. Waiting for the right one to come along.
I’ve always been someone who’s more attracted to vibe than specifics of physicality.
So sometimes it’ll just randomly hit me & I’ll be like: ‘Whoa, I’m attracted to this person!’
I’m proud of myself. Younger version of myself would have probably settled for some mid dude just to have a [boyfriend]. Glad I’m not in that era anymore”
In November, after news of her divorce broke, she said about her bisexuality:“Sexuality is on a sliding scale. I don’t really believe in straight people”
🌈 WORDS Bisexual Emily Ratajkowski “waiting for the right girl” after Harry Styles fling rumours (Daily Mirror, 10/5/23) IMAGE WWD
MORE FROM EMILY On being pregnant: “I’m completely & undeniably helpless when it comes to almost everything surrounding my pregnancy: how my body will change, who my child will be. But I’m already learning from this person inside my body. I’m full of wonder“
”Motherhood has made me re-evaluate what’s important to me, like: what do I want to teach my son?”
“I want my son to have an example of a mom who is happy.I think a lot of women in your early 20s – because it’s sort of like you’re sexualised & coming into your sexual being; you’re an adult, you know, but you’re still really young – have a really kind of sick relationship with your body.
Mine especially was that way because I was commodifying my body and it was my living and also like how I became famous, and it became my career & my whole identity.
I didn’t want to just be a body. And [writing My Body] was kind of born out of a depression essentially. And being like: ‘Wait, this has not made me happy.’I wanted to give this one-dimensional kind of caricature of myself that had been out in the world a voice”
“Actor Matthew McConaughey, age 53, is opening up about the importance of consent – and it’s something everyone should hear…
‘I remember my dad talking to me – and I shared this with my son – but he said a very, very cool thing.’
His father explained that whenever there is intimacy with a partner, there may come a point when there is a sense of hesitation or a desire from one party to stop.
‘He goes: “And if you stop, sometimes after you stop, she may go: ‘OK, well, now let’s go.’”
And he goes: “Don’t go further. Say: ‘Hey, nuh-uh. If we get back together [in the future] and it all just flows and goes further, great. But that’s all for now.’”
If both people are just flowing, if it’s all green lights, you go as far as it’s comfortable. But if you feel someone, you know, tense up, it’s like: “Hey, we don’t have to; we got time.”’
Although Matthew acknowledged that it can be hard for young people to realise that sex ‘can wait’, he believes it’s incredibly important to be in tune with your partner during sexual encounters.
At the end of the day, Matthew says, it’ll be better for both people to wait until later on, when it ‘flows all naturally’.
It sounds as if Matthew’s father was truly ahead of his time when it came to teaching lessons about consent – and as Matthew shares his story, it’ll hopefully continue to make a difference in people’s lives!”
WORDS Matthew McConaughey’s Dad Taught Him A Valuable Lesson About Consent During Sex, And It’s Something Everyone Should Hear (BuzzFeed, 23/4/23) IMAGES Getty
🌈 Trans TikTok star & influencer Dylan Mulvaney, age 26, has sparked a backlash from rightwing Americans against Bud Light beer and Nike plus calls for boycotts of Maybelline make-up over their brand partnership with her…
“‘During the pandemic I was at home living with my family and asking myself: “Dylan, do you feel like a boy?” and “Who am I without [my] career?”
I finally asked myself questions about gender. I had never asked myself those dark questions because when I was 4, I tried coming out to my mom as a girl – but it just wasn’t a thing then. Being trans was very taboo.
I come from a very conservative part of California – and not even my family’s fault, it just wasn’t really in the cards for me.’
So on TikTok in 2020 Mulvaney did comedy-style videos, threw a gender-reveal party for herself and documented the first day of her transition: ‘That video got some negativity because a lot of it was me talking about stereotypes that are placed on women.’
From buying her first set of boobs to discovering tampons & pads and throwing the ultimate slumber party, Mulvaney candidly shares the good, messy and vulnerable parts of her girlhood journey.
On her younger self: ‘I wish that little feminine Dylan would have celebrated more things like playing with Barbies and dressing up. There was a sweetness there that I think got taken away for a while because of how sad I was that I had to let so many of those things go. And now I’ve never been happier because they’re back. In a way, they’ve always been there, but we had some cleaning up to do’”
Dressed in a ballgown she told a crowd earlier this month: “Whether you’re a parent or a child or you’re young or old or you’re trans or you’re not, we are all just trying our best here, aren’t we?” then sang the Stephen Sondheim song No One Is Alone: “Hard to see the light now. Just don’t let it go. Things will come out right now. We can make it so. Someone is on your side”
🌈 WORDS Dylan Mulvaney Gets Candid About Girlhood With Her 6 Million Followers (Girlboss, 2022)
IMAGE @dylanmulvaney
🌈 Actor Daniel Radcliffe, age 33, spoke with 6 trans and non-binary kids at a roundtable organised by LGBT+ suicide-prevention charity The Trevor Project…
“‘I always knew I was a boy because that was a thing I grew up knowing.
There are some people in the world who are not trying to engage in this conversation in any kind of good faith.
I think a lot of the time it’s just because people don’t know a young trans person, so there’s this theoretical idea about this in their head.
There are also people who have a slightly condescending but well-meaning attitude of: “People are young and it is a huge decision.”
I would love to hear from all of you about why we can trust kids to tell us who they are.’
Last November Radcliffe fired a thinly veiled shot at Ms Rowling’s tweets from June 2020 in which she ridiculed an article’s description of women as ‘people who menstruate’ and tweeted: ‘I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?’
At the time, Radcliffe said: ‘To all the people who now feel that their experience of the books has been tarnished or diminished, I am deeply sorry for the pain these comments have caused you.’
Stating that ‘transgender women are women’ he said: ‘I felt very, very much as though I needed to say something when I did because, particularly since finishing [Harry] Potter, I’ve met so many queer & trans kids and young people who had a huge amount of identification with Potter on that.
And so seeing them hurt on that day I wanted them to know that not everybody in the franchise felt that way’”
🌈 WORDS Daniel Radcliffe tells trans children that adults concerned about gender transitioning are “condescending” and should “trust kids to tell them who they are” – as Harry Potter star makes another apparent dig at JK Rowling – includes 1-minute video clip (Daily Mail, 11/4/23) IMAGE Michael Schwartz
Desperate Housewives child star Madison De La Garza, age 21 – the half-sister of Demi Lovato – talks about the impact of reading abusive online comments about her weight when she was 6…
“The whole joke of my character, Juanita Solis, was that Gabrielle (played by Eva Longoria) was this thin, beautiful model – and her daughter [me] turned out to be quite the opposite.
I would spend a crazy amount of time reading through comments [about me online] – just horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible things, and this was when I was 6, 7, 8 years old. They said things like they wanted me to die because of what I looked like, ‘ugly fat cow’ and ‘I hope you get cancer and die because you’re so fat.’
These comments affected my mental health and ultimately played into my developing an eating disorder at a young age.
My first memories of trying to starve myself, I was 7 years old.
A lot of it came from reading the comments. My mom had no idea that I was seeing these things because I was very, very sneaky about it.
I was very good at hiding and throwing away meals and saying I ate them.
Production staff went out of their way to tell me I was beautiful and looked really pretty that day, or that outfit looked really cute on me. The wardrobe on the show was very aware of making me feel comfortable. And Eva went out of her way to make me feel special.
I’d like to say that things are different now but I don’t know if people are being more compassionate or don’t want to get caught. I worry that maybe things are just a little less anonymous, which is why people aren’t risking saying those things as much”
WORDS Desperate Housewives child star developed eating disorder due to horrendous trolling when she was just 6 years old (Metro, 14/4/23) IMAGE YouTube
Rapper Cardi B, age 30, on #consent & the Dalai Lama incident…
“In a video that went viral, a young boy at an event in India asked the Dalai Lama: ‘Can I hug you?’ Motioning to his cheek, the Dalai Lama, age 87, said: ‘First here.’ The child kissed him and gave him a hug.
The Dalai Lama kept hold of the boy, saying: ‘I think here also’ then planted a kiss on his lips. ‘And suck my tongue,’ the Dalai Lama said, sticking out his tongue, forehead to forehead with the student.
The boy quickly stuck out his own tongue and went to move away while the Dalai Lama laughed and pulled the boy in for another hug as the audience laughed.
Many called the incident ‘inappropriate’, ‘scandalous’ and ‘disgusting’. The office of the Dalai Lama said in a statement: ‘His holiness often teases people he meets in an innocent and playful way, even in public and before cameras.
Sticking out your tongue is a traditional Tibetan sign of respect or agreement and also a greeting.
Child rights activist Shola Mos-Shogbamimu tweeted: ‘This is NOT playful banter & so inappropriate to use “affectionately plants kiss” alongside “suck my tongue”. Hugs are fine not this. Don’t normalise molestation of kids – don’t care how revered the Dalai Lama is I’m not OK with a child sucking a grown man/woman/anyone’s tongue’”
Cardi B tweeted: “This world is full of predators. They prey on the innocent. The ones who are most unknowing, our children.Predators could be our neighbors, our school teachers, even people wit [sic] money, power & our churches.
Constantly talk with your kids about boundaries and what they shouldn’t allow people to do to them”And: “[sic] from the time you start potty training your kids you should tell them DONT LET nobody touch your privates, enter the bathroom wit you and don’t keep no secrets away from mommy”
WORDS Dalai Lama: The significance of “tongue greetings” in Tibetan culture (Independent, 11/4/23) IMAGE LaPresse
Activist and Everyday Sexism founder Laura Bates, age 36…
“A 14-year-old girl told me 10 boys had messaged her, pressuring her to send them nude pictures, in a single night. That landscape of what teenage girls are navigating is completely new.
What’s wild about the Andrew Tate conversation is that an Ofsted report found that 79% of girls said sexual assault was common in their friendship group – but we’re having this separate conversation about online misogyny.
Dress codes are a good example of where cultural norms feed into manosphere extremism.
We’re seeing schools where girls are being sent out of lessons, or sent home, because of skirt length, because of their shoulders, collarbones
or bra strap showing. In some cases the rhetoric is about distracting boys or making male teachers uncomfortable.
Schools are sending the message to kids that girls’ bodies are powerful and dangerous in a way that boys’ bodies aren’t; that girls are responsible for covering themselves up to avoid harassment rather than boys being taught to respect women.
But it’s also true that there are boys standing up against this stuff. And girls who are politicised, aware of feminism, advocating and starting campaigns – that wasn’t the case 10 years ago.
If you’re a parent – particularly of a teenage boy – who’s concerned about women-hating material, don’t panic. Any parent asking: ‘What can I do?’ is ahead of the curve.Try to cross that digital culture gap. Have a look at men’s rights pages on Reddit. Sign up for comedy meme accounts on Instagram. Type something innocuous about women on YouTube then pay attention to the 5 or 6 videos that the algorithm serves up. Make a TikTok account and get a sense of that world.
Talk little and often – it’s more about opening up channels of communication that are supportive and non-judgmental than trying to shut things down. Give your child opportunities to ask questions & feel you’d like to talk stuff through”
WORDS Laura Bates: For teenage girls, escaping harassment, revenge porn and deepfake porn is impossible (Guardian, 7/3/23) IMAGE Laura Nylind
London mayor Sadiq Khan, age 52, on being a male ally to women…
“My experiences are a million miles away from those of women & girls.
I’ve never been touched up on the tube or been looked at in a lecherous way in the gym, had to choose a well-lit path home or carried my keys as a weapon.
With male allyship I’ve had great teachers, including my wife and 2 daughters.
Often girls stop sports because of how boys look at them.
Boys don’t always understand the consequences of their actions, but 85% changed their behaviour when they saw our 2-minute film to counter male violence, Have A Word.
We have to make misogyny a hate crime and sexual harassment a criminal offence. We have to teach boys how to respect girls”
We were excited to hear Sadiq on the Big Ideas panel at the WOW (Women of the World) 2023 festival!
And we love what he said on International Women’s Day:“Human rights are women’s rights. Women’s rights are human rights.It’s not complicated. It’s not controversial. It’s fundamental to women & girls everywhere”
EXTRA CREDIT! Read about the award-winning 2-minute Have A Word film here: Mayor of London addresses sexism with Have a Word campaign (The Drum, 14/3/22) IMAGE Southwark News
LBC radio presenter & body image activist Natasha Devon, age 42…
“Much of the backlash against the Channel 4 show Naked Education revolves around the claim it sexualises children. But the young people in it are teenagers, approaching or at the age of consent.
In the UK, 4 in 5 kids have watched porn by age 16-17. Most porn depicts hairless, very slender yet pneumatic women pretending to derive enjoyment from being throttled by an improbably muscular man with an even more belief-suspending penis size. This is what many young people think intimacy looks like.
Alongside this, they hear commentators declaring that the bodies on Naked Attraction are somehow ‘gross’. The message is: ‘Your body is disgusting.
No one wants to see it.’ Imagine the damage that could do when you are grappling with puberty, hormones & the general confusion that characterises adolescence.
According to the charity Be Real, 52% of British teens often worry about how they look. As someone who visits about 3 schools a week delivering mental health education, I think this statistic is on the low side.
Girlguiding says that more than half of girls aged 12-14 avoid school activities because of concerns about how they look. By age 7 girls have internalised the idea that society values them more for their looks than their abilities or character.
We are setting young people up for a life of inner turmoil, disordered eating and taking dangerous risks with surgery & so-called tweakments.
To those who say: ‘How is more nudity the solution to all of this?’, Professor Keon West of Goldsmiths University published a paper showing that body image improves when people are exposed to a diverse range of naked bodies.
Body image dissatisfaction has the potential to have an impact on every area of a young person’s life”
WORDS Naked Education pearl-clutchers, you’re wrong: Britain’s teens need to see more real bodies (Guardian, 14/4/23) IMAGE @mhfaengland
EXTRA CREDIT! Watch our video for parents on body image with the captivating Natasha Devon
🌈 Actor Ncuti Gatwa, age 30, who played gay student Eric on Sex Education, is the next Doctor on Doctor Who and just topped the latest Radio Times TV 100 power list…
“It’s really nice to have a gay character, a Black character, be at the forefront of this story on a show like Sex Education that has the reach it does on Netflix.
It matters, I hope, that other little Black boys around the world can be like: ‘Oh, Eric is like this, and it’s cool.’ It’s important that we allow different people to occupy these spaces.
[With diversity in TV & film] we can show other people’s lives & experiences and show like: ‘See? It’s not that scary!’
Sometimes you do need to be like: ‘Has this voice been heard? No.’
[DoctorWho] matters for people of colour, for marginalised people, who really gravitate towards the show because it’s about friendship, adventure, union and unity. The Doctor is able to turn into anything or anyone, so the possibilities are endless”
🌈 WORDS Doctor Who star Ncuti Gatwa has never publicly disclosed his sexuality – so stop assuming he’s gay (PinkNews, 21/2/23) IMAGE Courtney Phillip for A Book Of magazine
MORE FROM NCUTI
🌈 “You’re not just doing this for you, you’re doing this for other people that are looking up to you & your future kids”
🌈 “Teenagers are so progressive. I live with my best friend and his mum, who runs a salon in Tottenham. Whenever the young boys come in to get their trims, the conversations they have, they’re like: ‘Ah Mum, they’re non-binary, you can’t call them ‘him’.’ That’s the generation that’s going to save the world”
🌈 On the relationship Eric has with his Nigerian dad, who accepts his homosexuality: “A lot of times in black communities, people are scared – it’s not what they are feeling towards their child but what aunties & uncles are gonna say. Eric’s father is just scared for the world his son is going to inhabit.If you are from that culture & background, and are having a situation where you’ve got somebody gay or LGBTQIA+ in your family, and you’re struggling with it, you can watch the show and be like: ‘It’s fine to love and embrace my child’”
Singer Christina Aguilera, age 42, on her daughter Summer Rain, age 8, and co-founding the sexual wellness brand Playground…
“In this business, opinions come at you about your body, your sexuality, what’s too much, too little. A lot of it comes from male opinions & older businessmen’s opinions, which should have nothing to do with your body and self-image.
I try to be really conscious about what I put in my body, what my daughter sees me put in my body. We have conversations like: ‘What’s a tampon? What’s your period?’ She’s 8, but education is everything.
And breaking down the conversation in digestible components that are easy to understand helps us take the fear and stigma out of things.
Everything across the board as a female, especially pertaining to your body, should be something you feel good about sharing.
The vagina is the epicentre of everything for us. It goes through a lot, so we got to let it feel good.Exploring yourself should feel empowering & something we all feel safe doing.
We think of sex, sexual awareness, sexual health as something on the back burner that’s irrelevant. But it should be part of every woman’s beauty routine. It’s like a vitamin, an energy booster, a life enhancer”
WORDS Christina Aguilera Opens Up About Dealing With “Male Opinions” of Her Sexuality at a Young Age (Allure, 28/3/23)
MORE FROM CHRISTINA “It’s really important for me that I open up this conversation to my daughter & make sure she feels empowered early on to feel good about asking me any questions. Simplifying the information & just making it very matter of fact. This is not something we should be scared or ashamed of”
• “I want my daughter to know from Mom first that your body is the most important vessel ever. It’s your safe space. It’s for you. It’s your playground”
• “[It’s important to ‘know your audience’ and not ‘overwhelm developing brains’. Summer and my son Max Liron, age 15, will] decide how their body should be used, treated & respected”
• “If I can give women the courage to explore themselves, my job is done”
• “I’ve always loved talking about sex”
Former chief crown prosecutor Nazir Afzal OBE, age 61, on galvanising men and praising women…
“I’ve been impacted by women’s experiences all of my career.
As my mother was dying I massaged her feet and realised how small they were.
My mother was a mountain to me. It’s in her name that I continue to work.
Everything we deal with is about male power and control.
Make #misogyny a hate crime – 90% of violence against women & girls is done by men, and it’s a pandemic.
Masculinity is about strength but also being empathic, caring, protective. Men are struggling with this now. It’s about men standing up – and it takes us men to make that conversation happen”
IMAGE Christopher Thomond for the Guardian
We were excited to hear Nazir on the Big Ideas panel at the WOW (Women of the World) 2023 festival! We are always impressed by his passion & insight ever since hearing him at the 2019 Sex Education Forum conference, where he joked that his children didn’t listen to him anymore and memorably said:
“We are seeing a pushback against relationships & sex education (RSE). We’re now at the stage of saying: don’t let young people know gay people exist.
Young people want to be listened to and informed, and they want parents to be informed.
Parents and RSE-positive parents go under the radar because they don’t shout and scream. Good people need to get louder. They shouldn’t stand by and allow people to try and ensure that our kids be in the 19th century. Call them out.
I am on the side of the people doing the right thing, trying to educate the next generation. There is merit in doing so. Why bother? Because we have saved lives”
On 23/3/23 Nazir tweeted: “Uganda passed a sweeping anti-gay law that can bring punishments as severe as the death penalty & life imprisonment. I’m not gay but I will fight for your right to be who you are”
Rizzle Kicks musician & actor Jordan Stephens, age 31, on consent and pleasure…
“With sex education, demystify sex as quickly as possible and don’t be prudish. The less prudish the better.
My school was druggy and sexy. The girls were on it – they knew what they wanted.
The guys’ mentality was: you got to run around town & take take take.
I want young men to feel their sexual energy is worth more than society gives it. To understand the pleasure you can gain from giving someone pleasure.
Explain to boys: ‘You want enthusiastic consent but “yes” isn’t always consent.’
What did Oscar Wilde say: ‘Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power.’
Society is obsessed with penetration, but what about a conversation around foreplay?
In teenage years it’s important to be open, so you can open up the concept of communication and say: ‘Sex with you is never rubbish, but here’s how it can be phenomenal. Also I would welcome guidance!’”
And on engaging boys… “Boys are often at odds with the world and unengaged.
For some boys Andrew Tate is a superhero. But superheroes can be a bit of a knobhead, like Bruce Wayne & Iron Man.
We have a responsibility to write different stories about strength. I want to hear about men being strong and vulnerable at the same time. I wish that, like with feminism, there was solidarity among men that didn’t come at the expense of women. Men have to work on sorting their own stuff out. It’s important that men do the work on themselves”
We were excited to hear Jordan on the panel Showing Up: Men And Allyship With Beyond Equality and in conversation with Oloni in The Big O at the WOW (Women of the World) 2023 festival!
EXTRA CREDIT! Read Jordan’s piece Toxic masculinity is everywhere. It’s up to us men to fix this (Guardian, 23/10/17)
Actor Brooke Shields, age 57, talked to her 2 teenage daughters about starring as a child prostitute in the film Pretty Baby at age 11.
Rowan, age 19, declared: “It’s child pornography! Would you have let us [do that] at the age of 11?”
Brooke replied “No” and broke down in tears. Later she said: “That was hard for me, to not justify my mom.
I could say: ‘It was the time back then’ or ‘It was art.’ But I don’t know why she thought it was all right.”
That’s a scene from the documentary Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields.
As a child Brooke was oversexualised, posing naked in Playboy aged 10 and at 15 starring in the
teen blockbuster Blue Lagoon and modelling Calvin Klein jeans (“You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing”).
Critics and fans chastised her working-class single mum Teri, who suffered from alcoholism, for not protecting Brooke.
Filming Pretty Baby, Brooke was forced to kiss Keith Carradine, who was 27. She gave a repulsed face and was yelled at by the director – but her mum didn’t step in. Carradine said: “This doesn’t count. It’s make-believe.” Brooke got through it by separating the sleazy onscreen version of herself from the real her: “I learned to compartmentalise at an early age. It was a survival technique.”
About being sexually assaulted by a friend when she was in her 20s she says: “I knew how to be disassociated from my body. I’d practised that”
WORDS 8 biggest revelations from Brooke Shields’ Pretty Baby documentary (Evening Standard, 28/3/23) IMAGE Jack Mitchell/Getty
MORE FROM BROOKE
• “The entirety of my life it was: ‘She’s a pretty face’ over and over and over and over again, and that always seared me”
• “I want to be an advocate for women to speak their truth. I’m more angry now [about the assault] than I was able to be then. If you’re afraid, you’re rightfully so. Situations don’t have to be violent to be scary”
• “Conversations [about objectifying women] are important to have for our young women. My daughters are beginning to find their own agencies. It took me until practically today”
AND A THOUGHT ON SHIELDS “This little child, Brooke, was being interrogated by hosts praising her beauty and her sensuality but also criticising her for being too sexual and for participating in what some people considered to be child pornography” – filmmaker Lana Wilson in Jezebel
Musician Ed Sheeran, age 32, on being a “binge dad”, having bulimia and body image…
“In this industry you get compared to every other pop star. I was in the One Direction wave, and I’m like: ‘Well, why don’t I have a six pack?’
And I was like: ‘Oh, because you love kebabs and drink beer.’
Then you do songs with Justin Bieber & Shawn Mendes. All these people have fantastic figures.
And I was always like: ‘Well, why am I so … fat?’
So I found myself doing what Elton [John] talks about in his book – gorging, and then it would come up again.
There’s certain things that, as a man talking about them, I feel mad uncomfortable. I know people are going to see it a type of way, but it’s good to be honest about them. Because so many people do the same thing and hide it as well.
I have a real eating problem. I’m a real binge eater. I’m a binge-everything. But I’m now more of a binge exerciser, and a binge dad. And work, obviously.
If I don’t cry in the next 40 minutes, that would be great”
WORDS & IMAGE Ed Sheeran Confesses: Tears, Trauma, and Those Bad Habits (Rolling Stone, 21/3/23)
MORE FROM ED “I went to a sport-orientated primary school. I had bright red hair, big blue glasses, a stutter. I couldn’t play sport because I had a perforated eardrum. You’re singled out for being different. I’ve kind of blocked out a lot of it, but I have a real hang-up about that. I think it plays into wanting to be on a stage and have people like you & stuff”
Author Judy Blume, age 85, whose novel Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (1970) has been banned for addressing periods. Deenie (1973) features teenage girls & masturbation and Forever (1975) discusses a teenager & sex in a serious relationship…
“There are laws being enacted where a librarian can go to prison if she or he is found guilty of having pornography on their shelves. Try & define pornography today and you’ll find that it’s EVERYTHING.
There’s a picture book I love, Julián Is A Mermaid. He likes to dress up in fancy clothes.
If you go back to the 80s, Heather Has Two Mommies was banned everywhere.
Well, there’s a lot of kids who have two mommies or two daddies, and that book is important! Today they’re considered pornographic by some legislatures.This is the real danger. We should have laws on the OTHER side! That’s why organisations that work to protect the freedom to read widely & freely are so important.
What are you protecting your children from? Protecting your children means educating them and arming them with knowledge, and reading & supporting what they want to read.
No child is going to become transgender or gay or lesbian because they read a book. They may say: ‘Oh, this is just like me. This is what I’m feeling and thinking about.’Or: ‘I’m interested in this because I have friends who may be gay, bi, lesbian.’ They want to know!
I just read a book that was wonderfully enlightening to me: Gender Queer. It’s probably the No. 1 banned book in America right now. And I thought: ‘This young person is telling me how they came to be what they are today.’ And I learned a lot, and became even more empathetic. That’s what books are all about”
WORDS Judy Blume Scoffs at Roald Dahl Books Being Rewritten for Offensive Language: “I Don’t Believe in That” (Variety, 31/3/23) IMAGE Sundance
MORE FROM JUDY “The only answer is for us to speak out or we will lose our way. Even if [parents] don’t let [their kids] read books, their bodies will still change & their feelings about their bodies will change. They have to be able to read, to question”
To foremost feminist activist Gloria Steinem – still phenomenal at 89! – a belated Happy Birthday for 25 March…
We’re thrilled that Gloria endorsed Outspoken by saying: “When parts of our bodies go undescribed, we often feel they are wrong or forbidden. Outspoken Sex Ed is a step toward universality and acceptance – for ourselves and for each other.”
Outspoken co-founder Leah Jewett interviewed her in 2016 for the Guardian/ Observer Q&A Gloria Steinem: “Do what you love so much you forget what time it is”.
Leah recalls: “Sinuously elegant – with a great warm confident smile and a black jumper pulled down over her hands teenager-style –
Gloria was gracious, interested, relaxed, approachable. In her soft-spoken, measured way she said she was happy to meet me.
I asked her a question from my daughter Dare, age 10: ‘When did you become a feminist, and how did you know you were one?’
Gloria’s laugh was maple-syrup rich and smooth, a way for her to pause and take stock. She replied: ‘It took an alarmingly long time because it wasn’t present in the culture when I was growing up. I thought I might be able to escape a female fate as an individual, but I didn’t understand it was possible to change the fate itself. That only became clear to me, thanks to other women, in the late 1960s, when I was in my mid-30s. So your daughter’s going to do much more than I did, because she’s smart and independent younger.’
Then Gloria said: ‘See you somewhere in the world again, I hope.’
To this day I wear 2 beaded bracelets Gloria designed that read ‘Imagine’ and ‘We are linked not ranked’”
IMAGES Caitlin Ochs/New York Times & Richard Saker/Observer Magazine
EXTRA CREDIT! Read our blog post Gloria Steinem and parent tips on that F word – feminism (8/3/22) and Leah’s piece Emma Watson, Gloria Steinem, and My 10-year-old Daughter (HuffPost 13/6/16)
Top Chef host & ex-supermodel Padma Lakshmi, age 52, on her daughter Krishna Thea Lakshmi-Dell, age 13…
“I always tried to give my daughter the language to defend herself so she’s got 2 or 3 sentences in her pocket.
When she went to preschool, right away I said: ‘If anybody touches you, or makes you feel uncomfortable, or makes you touch them, just say “no” really loud.’
I think most of us are so unaware that we’re kind of shocked that it’s even happening to us”
About having been raped at 16, and not being diagnosed with endometriosis until 2006:
“Nobody wants to stand in front of a room and talk about their vagina. But I was so angry about what had happened to me”
WORDS Padma Lakshmi: “Nobody wants to talk about their vagina. But I was so angry” (Guardian, 15/3/23) IMAGE @padmalakshmi Instagram
Singer Rihanna, age 35, marvels at the connection that rapper A$AP Rocky, age 34, has with their 9-month-old son…
“I’m just sitting on the sidelines when they’re together. I’m literally the girl trying to get into the boys club, waiting for my turn.
He is obsessed with his father. And I’m like: ‘Didn’t I give birth to you? What is going on?’
Their connection is undeniable. The second Rocky makes eye contact with him, he is on fire.
The whole thing they say about sons and moms, it’s a myth.
Sons and fathers is crazy. I realised that the validation you really need as a boy is from your father”
WORDS Rihanna Reborn: How A Megastar Became A Mother (Vogue, 1/3/23) IMAGE Inez & Vinoodh
🌈 Bestselling YA (young adult) fiction & LGBT+ issues writer Juno Dawson, age 41, on consent and being body positive…
“We need to have conversations with young people – and instil the idea of consent in even the youngest kids – by saying: ‘You’re allowed to make choices about your body.’
Autonomy is paramount.
My body can’t belong to the patriarchy – it has to be mine.
Patriarchy is noisy and insidious. How do we filter it and get rid of it?
Pressure about looks is crippling, and it’s getting harder for boys. It’s concerning when I see 13- and 14-year-olds at the gym…”
We were excited to hear the self-possessed Juno on the panel Feminist with Fillers? at the WOW (Women of the World) 2023 festival!
In Vogue Juno had written about the gender dysphoria, as a child, of wanting girls’ toys and being fixated with having long hair: “I never thought I was a boy. Boys were rubbish! Their clothes were dull and their toys didn’t even have hair to brush. But people told me I was a boy and, as I had never seen or heard of a trans person, I just accepted it. It didn’t stop me daydreaming, though. As I’d schlep around Tammy Girl or C&A with my mum and sister, I’d pick out a fantasy wardrobe and wonder how I’d wear my hair if I were a girl.”
And she told the Guardian:“It was not OK for a boy to like the Spice Girls as much as I did, but I couldn’t keep it in. In fact, the day I first told anyone I thought I was gay was the day I bought the single Stop in 1998. Barbie, Girls World Styling Heads and My Little Ponies were my catnip”
🌈 IMAGE Simone Padovani
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Actor Emily Watson, age 56 – mother of Juliet, 17, and Dylan, 14 – on #MeToo & being a mum…
“The conversation on sexual assault has become louder and clearer over the last few years. You really have to pay due to those women who were the first ones who stood up and went: ‘This happened, join me.’ That was incredibly brave to start that ball rolling.
The conversation has been big, but has there been any change? It feels like this is a systemic problem that is baked into the way all our institutions are structured.
A lot of the [TV and film] audience are women, and a lot of those women are above the age of 25.
They want to see their lives reflected. They want to see the issues that they are interested in examined.
When my husband’s ill, chaos descends.
Trying to be a mum and work and meet everybody’s needs and make everything add up, that’s really hard. I’m not brilliant at it. But we’re wobbling on”
WORDS “There was cruelty and unpleasantness”: Emily Watson on school, stardom and sex scenes in her 50s (Guardian, 20/3/23) IMAGE Radio Times
🌈 NBA basketball All-Star Dwyane Wade, age 41, in accepting an NAACP award, addresses his trans daughter Zaya, age 15…
“As your father, all I’ve wanted to do is get it right.
I have sat back and watched how graceful you have taken on the public scrutiny and even though it’s not easy, I watched you walk out of the house every morning as yourself.
I admire how you have handled the ignorance in our world. I admire that you face it every day. To say that your village is proud of you is an understatement.
Thank you for showing me that there is more than just one way to communicate effectively.
You taught me that communication with my mouth isn’t enough. I have to also communicate with my 2 ears and my 2 eyes.
As your father, my job isn’t to create a version of myself or direct your future. My role is to be a facilitator to your hopes, your wishes, your dreams.
Zaya, you have made me a better human just simply by being who you were born to be. Our baby girl, Zaya Wade.
Thank you for showing the world what courage looks like”
WORDS “She’s arrived”: Parents Dwyane Wade and Gabrielle Union celebrate 15-year-old trans daughter Zaya’s catwalk debut weeks after she finally had her name and gender legally changed after first coming out as trans aged 12 (Daily Mail, 8/3/23) IMAGE John Salangsang for US Weekly
Though we don’t endorse her stance on trans issues, these are interesting reflections from Harry Potter author JK Rowling, age 57, on her mindset as a young person…
“I didn’t feel like I fitted in. Aged 11 or 12 I looked very androgynous with short hair, and I was acutely anxious about my changing body and became aware it was attracting attention that I didn’t welcome, particularly from boys at school.
As an adolescent I questioned my sexuality, thinking: ‘Well, I can tell my friends are pretty. Does that mean I’m gay?’
I grew up to be a straight woman, but I’ve never forgotten that feeling of anxiety around my body”
WORDS JK Rowling questioned her sexuality as a teen as she continues to weigh in on transgender rights (Evening Standard, 10/3/23) IMAGE Sam Hussein / Getty
EXTRA CREDIT! JK Rowling: I knew views on trans issues would make Potter fans deeply unhappy (Evening Standard, 15/3/23)
🌈 Close film director Lukas Dhont, age 31, “grew up gay and sensitive in Dikkelvenne, near Ghent, and dreamed of becoming a dancer. At his school’s talent show at the age of 12, he performed an extravagant routine to Christina Aguilera’s Fighter. The bullying that followed was vicious and relentless…
The traumatic dance contest, the bullying, the sense of growing up queer, his father off on fictitious swashbuckling escapades – small wonder Dhont keeps returning to childhood in his work when his own was such a source of drama.
‘In the film we address violence: the wars on the inside, not on the battlefield,’ he says. ‘For me it’s necessary to talk about that loss of tenderness in a way that shows the full impact.
When we meet the characters Léo and Rémi, they are at the age when so many things can go wrong in that masculine universe.In puberty, there is this confrontation with a society that has norms and expectations around what it means to be a man – and it’s so much about not clinging, about being stoic.
Society ruptures something essential in these young men as they grow up. We tell them not to listen to what they truly desire. For many people, that moment is the start of loneliness and of struggles with mental health. It’s when suicide rates go up’”
🌈 WORDS & IMAGE “I’d love to do a queer Titanic. Well, a queerer one!” Director and Oscar contender Lukas Dhont (Guardian, 1/3/23)
A Barbie doll of space scientist Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock, 54 – the BBC Sky At Night presenter and University of Leicester chancellor known for her work with the James Webb Space Telescope – is one of 7 custom dolls created to celebrate women blazing trails in Stem (science technology engineering maths) subjects. The dolls aren’t going on sale.
“When I was little, Barbie didn’t look like me, so to have one created in my likeness is mind-boggling,” says Dr Aderin-Pocock, who hopes the expanded range of Barbie dolls will help smash stereotypes.
“Since falling in love with the idea of space travel as a young girl, I have spent my career trying to show girls how fascinating space science can be.
I hope my doll will remind girls that when you reach for the stars, anything is possible.I want to inspire the next generation of scientists, and especially girls, and let them know that Stem is for them.
It’s such an honour to receive this doll that is celebrating my achievements. My daughter and I danced around the living room when we heard!”
Her daughter! We’ll never forget how Dr Aderin-Pocock at the 2014 WOW (Women of the World festival) gave the talk Women And Power with Baroness Shirley Williams with her young daughter at first asleep in a pushchair and then climbing on to her lap. It felt revolutionary that an acclaimed scientist talking about feminism would proudly have her girl onstage alongside her!
WORDS “Reach for the stars”: British scientist Maggie Aderin-Pocock honoured with her own Barbie doll (Sky, 7/3/23) IMAGES Mattel/PA & Sarah Jeynes
Happy International Women’s Day on 8 March 2023 – a day to recognise women’s social, economic, cultural and political achievements!
This year’s theme: #EmbraceEquity.
Equity and equality are both about fairness.
But this quick analogy explains the difference: equality means giving everyone the same-sized shoes. Equity means giving everyone shoes that fit them.
Equity is a way to get to equality. And equality is good for everyone!
Talk with your child about…
= What does equality means to you?
= What gender stereotypes do you see online, in films and books, at school, in life?
= How do gender stereotypes affect what girls & boys do and feel?
= What words are used most about girls (eg pretty, bossy) vs boys (eg strong)?
= Why do women need a special day?
= Is there an International Men’s Day?
= What female role models do you find inspiring?
= How have women helped to progress society?
= What’s changing for girls & boys, women & men, mothers & fathers in terms of school, work, politics, relationships with each other?
And #PowerOn, says UN Women, to give women & girls equal access to technology, end online violence and close the digital gender gap #DigitALL
IMAGE Alasdair McClellan for Vogue
Recently divorced doctor and dad-of-2 Toby Fleishman (Jesse Eisenberg) is told that his daughter Hannah (Meara Mahoney-Gross), age 11, sent a suggestive photo of herself to a boy at camp…
Camp leader: Your daughter Hannah took, uh, an unfortunate picture with her phone, and she shared it with a young man.
Toby (father): What? What kind of picture?
Camp leader: Well, it was a very suggestive picture. Um, the boy shared it with his friends.
Toby: He shared it with his friends. And what does “suggestive” mean?
Camp leader: Well, it was, uh… It wasn’t appropriate. I’ll let you discuss it with Hannah. But suffice it to say, it violated our camper code of conduct.
Toby: Yeah, I’m not really interested in the camper code of conduct. Is she OK?Camp leader: Yeah.
Toby: … And what’s happening to him? To the kid.
Camp leader: … Well, he’s not the one that took the photo, so…
Toby: Right. So nothing’s happening to him. He didn’t violate any of your policies or any of your rules?
[Later, to his daughter] I know there’s so little I can say to make this better, but…Listen to me. Honey, it won’t always feel this bad, OK?
WORDS & IMAGE Fleishman Is In Trouble (season 1, episode 5: Vantablack)
Recently divorced doctor and dad-of-2 Toby Fleishman (Jesse Eisenberg) realises that his son Solly (Maxim Swinton), age 9, watched porn on the family computer…
Solly (son): I-I don’t know why those things came up. They just came up.
Toby (father): It’s OK. Come sit down for a minute. Listen, there is nothing to be ashamed of or afraid of. Are you curious about girls?
Solly: I just wanted to know what it looked like underneath.
Toby: Yeah, no, I understand. Should I maybe get you a book for kids? Like, maybe with pictures?
Solly: No. I don’t want to see it ever again.
Toby: Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense. Of course not. Hey, it’s OK, buddy.
Solly: It’s not OK. I hate it.
Toby: I know. I know. Listen, um, I-I just want you to know that that’s not really what it’s like, OK? That’s like someone’s fantasy of what people might want. That’s not what it’s really like for two people to have sеx, OK?
Solly: Don’t say that word!Toby: Yeah. OK. I won’t say it
WORDS & IMAGE Fleishman Is In Trouble (season 1, episode 2: Welcome to Paniquil)
A new consent and rape storyline on the UK soap opera Coronation Street…
“After a night of drinking between friends and flatmates Aaron (James Craven) and Amy (Elle Mulvaney), he had sex with her while she was so drunk she was in no state to consent. Later she realised that what happened to her was rape.
Elle said: ‘Even though they were friends that doesn’t mean it’s OK for him to do what he wants – this shouldn’t be a grey area.’
James agrees: ‘Aaron’s biggest mistake is he doesn’t check in with himself and importantly with her that she’s OK with all of this. Initially there’s no sort of thought in his mind that he’s done anything wrong. He’s also trying to piece together what happened. He’s got this thing going on of:
did that really happen? It was so out of nowhere for him. He believes he hasn’t done anything wrong in this moment so if someone told him that, he’d be shocked.
Maybe if he’d had the education and he’d been spoken to about it and he was thinking about it a bit more he would have made a different decision. Because he’s had the alcohol and all the emotions are heightened to the max, it makes him vulnerable to getting himself in this situation.’
The show worked with the Schools Consent Project, a charity that educates young people to engage with issues around consent and sexual assault”
WORDS & IMAGE Coronation Street star James Craven reveals Aaron’s initial reactions and behaviour after raping Amy (Metro, 3/3/23)
THEN & NOW Actor Tracy-Ann Oberman, age 56:
“This is me aged two and a half. There was a fancy-dress party in the hotel [where we were staying] but my mum had forgotten to pack me anything to wear, so I had to put on my friend Antony’s cowboy outfit.
I’m doing a polite smile but I was really pissed off and thinking: ‘What the hell is this? I just wanted to be a princess!’
Now I love the costume, because it’s unusual to see a little girl as a cowboy; it looks like an emblem of my early doors feminism.
When I look at [the girl in] this photo, I want to put my arms around her and tell her that it is going to be all right, and: ‘You will happily put on a cowboy costume in 50 years’ time’”
WORDS Tracy-Ann Oberman looks back: “I’m thinking, What’s this? I want to be a princess!” (Guardian, 25/2/23) IMAGE Pål Hansen for The Guardian
Actor Michelle Williams, age 42, on #MeToo…
“I was raised in the 80s. Selfhood wasn’t put into young women. And now it is. I get to see it in my own daughter and I can’t take my eyes off her. It is a glorious miracle to behold that I never thought I would witness in my lifetime.
I thought I would have to teach my daughter how to subvert herself and crawl underneath the system to keep herself safe.
And instead the system has exploded and these young people act with compassion, integrity and righteousness.
I have the chills talking about it. These girls aren’t prey. These girls are already victorious.
I love to sit back and watch them in the world and know that it is safer and more inclined in their direction than it was for me”
WORDS “Girls today aren’t prey. They are victorious”: Michelle Williams on #MeToo, money and playing Spielberg’s mum (Guardian, 28/1/23) IMAGE Sofia Sanchez & Mauro Mongiello / Trunk Archive
Ironically the actor Paul Mescal, age 27, who became a heartthrob after starring in Normal People – with its great emphasis on consent – had a non-consensual experience with a fan. First he says:
“A woman said she had a naked picture of me, a screenshot from the show, as the wallpaper on her phone… It just felt very weird. I didn’t like it.
I can be pissed off with every person who has a naked picture of me stashed somewhere or I can just let it go.
Women have been objectified by men throughout history – and still are.
Nudity and sexuality in art and film and theatre are beautiful and important.”
Then about his recent experience with a fan who had asked him for a photo:
“As we posed for it, she put her hand on my ass. I thought it was an accident, so I like [moved away] but the hand followed.
I remember tensing up and feeling just, like, fury. I turned to her and said: ‘What’re you doing? Take your hand off my ass.’
The last thing I want to do is call somebody out in front of the theatre – it’s uncomfortable for everyone involved – but it was really not OK. It was so gross, creepy.
97% of fame is really nice – then 3% is somebody, like, grabbing your ass”
WORDS Paul Mescal: “I don’t want my life to change any more than it already has” (Evening Standard, 23/2/23) IMAGE Little White Lies
🌈 Planet Sex presenter and supermodel Cara Delevingne, age 30…
“Any person who’s queer has gone through a period of shame, or at least not understanding who they are and feeling like they don’t belong. That was something I’ve always felt. Doing Planet Sex brought back a lot of memories of how that was so prevalent in my childhood, my teenage years and my 20s.
Growing up, I didn’t really have an understanding of true, unconditional self-love. What stopped me from coming out was the shame I put on myself.
I was always queer, yes, but I lived a very straight lifestyle. I kind of started as bisexual, then I was pansexual. [About being LGBTQ+] I felt like: ‘I don’t know what letter I am!’
I am a ‘she’ right now. But I also like dressing up as a man and being a ‘he’. You don’t have to put so much pressure on yourself about what you are, who you are. Whether it’s masculine and feminine, it’s just who I am.
The constructs and binaries that are given are stupid. I’m proud to be a woman but I don’t have to sit in a box.
I’m definitely genderfluid. I love playing with what we’ve been given as those gender constructs. Being super femme, being super masc, mixing it all up in one big cauldron.
I want people to have the sort of conversations that are in the show. Hate and fear come from things that are not spoken about, or fears about questions”
🌈 WORDS Cara Delevingne on How Planet Sex Changed Her Life: “I Was Always Queer, but I Lived a Straight Lifestyle” (Variety, 14/2/23) and Cara Delevingne: “Being queer felt fluid and free” (BBC, 2/12/22) IMAGE BBC
🌈 “Stranger Things star Noah Schnapp, age 18, came out in a TikTok clip last month by lip-syncing a popular viral sound – ‘You know what it never was? That serious. It was never that serious. Quite frankly, it will never be that serious’ – with the caption:
‘When I finally told my friends and family I was gay after being scared in the closet for 18 years and all they said was “we know”’
His family has got his back. He revealed the heartwarming text he received from his grandfather: ‘Hey noah I became aware today of your public announcement that you are gay. I just want you to know that I love you the same and I’m happy for you to be open and to be yourself. Just be proud of who and what you are. Iris and I are supportive of your honestly and ability to express your true self! Love you to the moon and back.’
In his TikTok video, Schnapp referenced his Stranger Things character Will Byers – who in the latest season is hinted at having feelings for his best friend Mike – writing: ‘I guess I’m more like Will than I thought’”
WORDS Noah Schnapp Shares Text From His Grandpa After Coming Out as Gay (E! Online, 9/2/23)
IMAGE Aleksandar Tomovic for Vulkan magazine
“It’s so much harder to be alive now than in the 90s. That was a gentler time.
We didn’t know what hardcore porn was.
We had puberty without access to the internet”
WORDS Comedian Sara Pascoe – our iconic Advisory Board member! – in her show Success Story (12/2/23)
IMAGE Pål Hansen for The Observer Magazine
Olympic cyclist Bradley Wiggins, 42, was groomed by a cycling coach between ages 13 and 16 but “swept it under the carpet”.
He said: “Abuse becomes very normalised by the perpetrators and [you are] very, very unaware that is happening.
It’s not until later in life and particularly when I had my own children… [that] I suddenly realised what I’d been subjected to as a child.
We all have a responsibility as adults, parents, onlookers, coaches, teachers to recognise the signs… Rather than worrying [if] you’re intruding or intervening or the consequences of that… if you’re right, wouldn’t you rather just go in and take that risk? It’s OK to approach victims of abuse and speak to them.”
Wiggins warned that children can fear violence if they speak out and described how his need to escape his childhood problems drove him to train harder and “contributed to why I was so great at cycling”. He also “suffered violence from his stepfather”.“Lots of people that are great at something have a drive that kind of stems from adversity,” Wiggins said. “What we can do is change and accept it, learn to stop running away from it and help others”
WORDS Bradley Wiggins backs NSPCC child abuse plan as he reveals impact of own experience (Guardian, 10/1/23) IMAGE On the Champs-Elysées in 2012 with his son Ben, then aged 7