In early November, Gabrielle Union and her husband, NBA star Dwyane Wade, welcomed their daughter, Kaavia James, via surrogate. The Being Mary Jane actress has been open about her fertility struggles, telling Oprah Winfrey in December 2018 it was hard to let go of the idea of carrying her child. “Am I defective in some kind of way? Am I less than in some kind of way? Am I less worthy in some kind of way?” she said at the time. Ultimately, though, Union embraced surrogacy and came to the conclusion there are “all different ways you can become parents.”
Unfortunately, our culture still shames women who can’t conceive or deliver naturally—so much so that Union feared she wouldn’t be accepted by other moms because she used a surrogate. “People want to see the bump, hear that you got hemorrhoids—they want to know you’re like them,” Union said in a new interview with Women’s Health. “I was like, ‘This is going to seem like the most Hollywood sh*t ever. Will I be embraced as a mom?’ It’s terrifying.”
At first, the idea of surrogacy seemed like “surrendering to failure” Union said, but she adjusted her mindset to focus on finding the right woman for the job. “Some people care about the race, religion, or food habits of their surrogate. I was like, ‘I want a reader,'” she tells Women’s Health. When a potential surrogate told Union she “loved the smell of pages” in books, she knew she found the one.
Union’s candor about the complicated emotions surrounding surrogacy struck a nerve online. “Please, stop making women feel like not being able to have a baby makes them a failure,” tweeted one person. “Kaavia is as much your daughter as she would have been through a natural conception + birth or through adoption. Congrats,” wrote another.
Union said she’s at a point in her life where she’s in the “right mindset and mental space” to be a mom. “I’m open to being the best mom I can be,” she said. Read more of her Women’s Health interview here.
For almost a week after the midterm elections, Senator Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) built her diet on the unimpeachable foundation of “a lot of pasta and a lot of wine.” In a sense, the meals were a metaphor. Who cared if she was undisciplined now? She had lost.
McCaskill served two terms in the Senate and is now, in her last week, one of its few ardent centrists. She also comes from a state that voted for Donald Trump (with a 19-point margin) in 2016. In the months since the election, McCaskill has chalked up her defeat both to the almost insurmountable numbers (19 points!) and to how the debate over now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh several weeks before the midterms galvanized conservative voters. (“That got people lit up,” she told Glamour.) In a recent interview with the New York Times she blamed progressive women, too, whom she feels criticized her for her more moderate approach when in fact what she needed was their help to beat a far more conservative opponent.
But no matter what contributed to her loss, the fact remains that she leaves her office in an unusual moment. For centuries it’s been unremarkable to see a women out of power. So few ever gained it to later lose it. But in 2018, the tides turned.
Whatever the initial sputters about the size or momentum of the blue wave (or was it a rosier shade?) the midterms communicated one absolute truth: The women who’d electrified the resistance didn’t just want to take to the streets; these women wanted seats.
It feels grand, but not quite like an overstatement to declare that a new era will kick off in our nation’s governance next month when this class is sworn in. A record number of women will now serve in the House of Representatives and the Senate. A woman will be Speaker of the House, superlative outerwear in tow. Women make up over 50 percent of the Nevada State Legislature. And nine women won gubernatorial races.
PHOTO: Bloomberg
Heidi Heitkamp (R) and Elizabeth Warren (L) in the United States Senate.
But the wave didn’t just sweep women into positions of influence; it also carried a few out. In the House, Mia Love, a Republican from Utah, and Barbara Comstock, a Republican from Virginia, lost their seats. And in the Senate, it wasn’t just Claire McCaskill; Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.) was also defeated.
After decades of service, both leave the capital this week and prepare to return to districts that rejected their leadership. To some extent, the women are now in unchartered waters. So few women have ever won statewide offices and served in the Senate (a grand total of 52) that there’s not much of a model for what happens next.
For Heitkamp, the first order of business is acceptance. Her race had been an uphill climb from the start, given that Donald Trump remains popular in North Dakota and won that state with ease in 2016. But Heitkamp insists she was not at all prepared for to be beat, not because she was delusional about the odds, but because she had made it a point to remain optimistic.
“Don’t anticipate the blow. Don’t anticipate failure. Push all the way through with the idea that this is going to work out.”
She’s worked with countless women in her political career; ambitious, smart women whom she’s seen “gird themselves for defeat” before they’ve even exhausted their opportunities. “‘Well, if it doesn’t work out that’s OK,’ or, ‘I’m not going to let it devastate me if I don’t get this job,’ and I think that’s a mistake,” Heitkamp says. If she has advice to offer anyone in a similar situation, it’s this: “Don’t anticipate the blow. Don’t anticipate failure. Push all the way through with the idea that this is going to work out.”
Heitkamp admits that her tactics can make disappointment “a little harder” to endure, but the work itself is easier when a loss doesn’t feel inevitable. The world is hard enough on women who want to succeed, as Heitkamp puts it, and scores of people in positions of power who want women to doubt themselves. Don’t make it easier on them.
Now of course Heitkamp has all the time she could ever want to dwell and to recover and, much to her amazement, to clean. Immediately following the election, she watched such mindless television she can’t remember even what network it was on. “I was so tired. I had worked so hard,” she says. When she regained some sense of equilibrium, she decided to take out her sorrow on…her closets. “It’s cathartic,” she says. “It’s like, OK, all of this stuff that you’ve collected now and haven’t paid attention to and just stored somewhere—it’s time clean that out. It’s time to get rid of stuff.”
McCaskill, too, has decided to toss whatever she’s collected that she doesn’t need, although in not quite so literally. After she licked her wounds (pasta, wine, repeat), she tried to remind herself that, as she sees it, “it’s impossible to be a victim and a leader at the same time.” She could complain (and some would suggest that she has, at least in her most recent interview with the New York Times‘ The Daily), but she insists she’d rather hunker down and get back to work. She wants to mentor women who want to run for office. Her goal, she says, is to teach them “how to be better fundraisers, how to use a sense of humor, how to see themselves as winners.” And she wants to dispense with the niceties.
“When you’re in public life you always have to live defensively and be careful about how things appear,” McCaskill says. “But now I can kind of go for it. Now I can offend with reckless abandon.” To serve Missouri, she wasn’t in a position to speak out as much as she might have liked against President Trump, for example, and what she now deems his “tortured relationship with the truth.” Now she doesn’t need to hold back—when it comes to Trump or even Democrats whom she thinks haven’t well-served rural white voters. “That was no fun, being disciplined,” she says. “I am going to be so undisciplined now it’s going to be a hoot.”
PHOTO: Scott Olson
Claire McCaskill in November 2018.
Even over the phone, McCaskill sounds light and unburdened. But rejection is rejection. And both she and Heitkamp have had to narrate in public and in real time what that’s like.
Heitkamp has lost elections before. The first was when she was 28 and ran for state auditor. “It was a long-shot campaign,” she remembers. “I did it because I wanted young women to see that we had opportunities to run statewide races. I came really close, and so it didn’t feel like a loss.” Supporters told her she exceeded expectations and had a bright future ahead in politics. It was for Heitkamp a kind of “first introduction” to the people of North Dakota, and it felt good. She lost her bid for governor too, much later. It was 2000 and she was diagnosed with cancer in the middle of the race. When she didn’t win, she didn’t have time to dwell. Her aides had spent the last few months of that campaign watching her hair fall out, watching her get weaker and sicker. Less than 24 hours after the results came in, she had her head shaved. (As now, so too then—it was time to get rid of stuff.) Her children were little, and they didn’t care if their mother was a governor or not.
The point was, she recalls, “OK, you tried this. It didn’t work, but you’ve got kids to.” She wasn’t focused on win or lose. She was focused on live or die.
Heitkamp did survive and the disease gave her perspective on the drama of politics, and this recent loss. But her wince is almost audible as she thinks back to how the results were plastered across the front page of newspapers nationwide. “That level of public exposure—it makes the failure tougher,” she says. Not as a woman, but as a person.
It’s not harder to lose in the Year of the Woman than it was in 2000, they both agree. It’s not much easier, either, but perhaps it’s more peaceable. Heitkamp has watched women stream into Washington over the past few weeks, full of ideas and ambition. When she wanted to run for office, conventional wisdom held that women could either be unmarried and have a career in federal politics or would have to wait until their children were grown up to enter the arena. This election, despite the outcome for her and McCaskill, undid that rule. “What excites me is that when [girls] look at these women who have come up in this election, they can see themselves in 10 years or themselves in five years or themselves now,” Heitkamp says. “The bottom line is that’s exactly the message we need to be sending.”
Heitkamp is 63, and doesn’t plan to disappear from public view. She has more to contribute, and she knows it. But as a citizen and as a woman who was encouraged in her twenties to see a future for herself in politics, she can muster up some excitement for what the capital will look like without her: “I am so excited to see what these women bring.”
There’s no real plan and no more rules and no more staff or schedules. Heitkamp feels sad and a liberated too. Her to-do list is short. “There are issues I know I’m going to continue to have a voice on; it’s just not going to be from inside the United States Senate,” she says. And in the meantime? “Time to binge-watch HGTV, baby.”
Last night’s Emmys received a much-needed dose of electricity when Jonathan Van Ness, Tan France, Bobby Berk, Antoni Porowski, and Karamo Brown (a.k.a Queer Eye’s Fab Five) hit the stage to present the award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series. No one was more excited to be there than Van Ness, though, who spent basically all of Emmys weekend geeking out over his favorite celebrities—so, in other words, doing exactly what you or I would do.
It all started at the Annual Netflix Emmy Nominee Toast on September 15 in Los Angeles. In between chatting up his Queer Eye co-stars, Van Ness found some time to kick it with Diane Keaton. Just look at his smile in the pic, below. He’s very aware he’s in the presence of royalty and no doubt asked Keaton, “Where the hell is your Oscar for Something’s Gotta Give?“
PHOTO: Getty Images
Van Ness posted the same photo to his Instagram account and captioned it, “The defining moment of my life, like you guys. When I looked up and saw none other than Miss Diane Keaton, I clutched my pearls and gasped in a silently audible way from my heart chakra I’ve never heard. My fashion icon, my First Wives Club icon, my world. Omg.” Don’t tell me you wouldn’t post literally the same caption verbatim if you were in this situation. We all would. We all love First Wives Club.
At the same party, Van Ness also posed for a pic with Stranger Things star Millie Bobby Brown, writing on Instagram, “Eleven degrees of OMFG.” Relatable content.
The actual Emmys were just as exciting. Here, Van Ness is pictured laughing with Mandy Moore and (in my mind) thinking, “Please let me style your grandma Rebecca wig on This Is Us.”
PHOTO: Getty Images
It’s almost a given he’d pose for a group selfie with Will & Grace star Megan Mullally. Gay legends supporting gay legends!
PHOTO: Getty Images
Tina Fey would make a great addition to the Queer Eye squad, don’t you think? She could be tasked with making people funnier. (See her photo with the Fab Five, below.)
PHOTO: Getty Images
Van Ness later snapped a pic with The Crown star Claire Foy and called her “mom” on Instagram. Spoken like a true super-fan!
And he essentially wrote the same thing about his photo with Game of Thrones star Emilia Clarke: “Found my dragon mum.” (Van Ness created a known parody series of GoT called Gay of Thrones).
I’ve never felt more seen! Thank you, Jonathan Van Ness, for letting me know it’s OK I haven’t stopped crying about A Star Is Born since the trailer dropped. Deep down, we’re all just a bunch of stans.
Kate Moss has become one of the most well-known names in fashion, and her artistic editorials rank among the most iconic images in the industry. Many of them involve the supermodel posing topless—and, in retrospect, the model feels she wasn’t always comfortable with them.
In a recent interview on Megyn Kelly Today, Moss was asked if she ever felt pressure to pose with no top on, particularly when she was starting her career. The model immediately answered, “There was pressure.”
Moss continued: “I worked with a woman photographer called Corinne Day, and she always liked me with no top on. And I did not like it at all when I first started.”
Day was behind the lens for Moss’s infamous 1993 Calvin Klein campaign, in which she posed nude with then-boyfriend Mario Sorrenti. Moss reflected on the shoot: “And then I suppose—Mario was my boyfriend so I was kind of used to it but I was still always like, ‘Can I just put some clothes on?’ But that was the job, so I kind of just did it.”
Moss’ comments are particularly poignant in the wake of the #MeToo movement, particularly as it pertains to the modeling world. Last year, there were a number of sexual assault allegations made against some high-powered photographers, which led to several new regulations and programs to protect models.
Moss offered some advice for anyone who, like her, has felt pressured to pose without their clothes on: “They don’t have to do it if they don’t want to do it I wouldn’t let my daughter [15-year-old Lila Grace Moss-Hack] do it—I look at her now and she’s 15, and to think that I was going topless at her age is crazy.”
That doesn’t mean she isn’t supportive of her daughter’s burgeoning modeling career, though. “I will support her, obviously. I’ll be her manager,” she said. “Her momager?” Megyn Kelly asked. “Yes, I’ll be her momager,” Moss said. “If she wants to, I’ll support her in anything she wants to do.”
There are two years of my life where I wholeheartedly felt like I was unworthy and not enough. I call these two years hell, but to others they’re called middle school. I was born in Tokyo but moved in the fourth grade to the States—so by the time I got to middle school, I was still adjusting to life in America. In Japan what made me stand out was that I was American. In my new home in Alaska, I stood out for two new reasons: I was fat and mixed race.
In Tokyo people pointed and stared but never in a negative way. Japan is obsessed with Western culture, so walking down the street with my family—my 6’4″ black father, my 5’0″ blond-haired, blue-eyed mother, and my curly-headed siblings—was gawk city. But the staring never bothered me until we moved to Alaska, where curiosity turned to cruelty, admiration to abuse. The pointing was now accompanied by hurtful laughter and taunting.
My school days were filled with kids telling me I was a fat pig, that I was lazy and disgusting. I’d hear “moo” sounds behind me while I was running in gym. Any time there was a slight movement in the school floor someone immediately would crack a joke saying I must have jumped. If I wasn’t being bullied about my weight, I’d get heckled about being biracial. I was constantly told I was the “whitest black girl” or the “blackest white girl” my friends knew because my personality, likes, and dislikes didn’t fall within stereotypical black/white constructs. People would be shocked when I told them I was mixed and comment that they finally saw the black in me because of the wideness of my nose, huge lips, and frizzy curly hair.
PHOTO: Courtesy of Britney Young
Britney Young as a child
For two years I let people treat me this way. I always tried to shrug it off and show that it didn’t affect me, but in truth it did. I would cry every day when I got home, and I’d barely sleep at night because I was so anxious to go to school the next day. I begged my parents to buy me Slimfast or get me a personal trainer so I could lose weight. Worse than that, I started to believe the things the kids were saying.
To distract myself from all the negativity, I’d retreat to my happy place: movies and TV. Watching Raiders of the Lost Ark one day while home sick started my fascination with filmmaking, and I dreamed of being an actress. But during this time, when I was being bullied, I realized that my happy place was also telling me my body wasn’t acceptable.
I noticed that larger actors were barely present in the movies and shows I was watching. If there was a plus-size character, they were depicted as lazy, gluttonous, bullies, or aggressive or were only utilized as the comedic relief or the best friend. Usually these character’s storylines were about the struggles of being overweight, which was the source of their lack of confidence, depression, and undesirability. Characters of mixed ethnicity were just as few and far between—only prevalent in stories discussing slavery, often as the children of the white slave master and one of his black slaves, or in stories of segregation as the fruits of forbidden love.
It felt like Hollywood was already determining what roles I could play, and I hadn’t even gotten there yet.
It felt like Hollywood was already determining what roles I could play, and I hadn’t even gotten there yet. It had an impact: Viewers are influenced by the things they see on their screens, and I too was letting these movies and shows dictate the way I thought about myself, just like I let my bullies tell me my self-worth.
I grappled internally with this feeling of misrepresentation for a while, until one day it all spilled out. While at my locker I saw my bullies gathered around a piece of paper, laughing. As I was getting my books, I heard one of them singing the same number over and over again. My stomach dropped, my heart started racing. That number, insignificant to anyone else, meant a lot to me because it was my exact weight. They had stolen my physical from the nurse’s office and were showing the entire school how much I weighed, even making a little song to the tune of “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall.”
Crushed and hysterical, I called my mom from a pay phone, and she told me to report it. I refused, giving her every excuse in the book, until she said, “Britney Marie, this isn’t you.” She was right. My refusal to stand up for myself was my bullies telling me I wasn’t worthy of self-respect. It was Hollywood telling me that because of my body the plot line of my life would only revolve around my size. So I changed the narrative: I did report it. I got people suspended and lost friends, but I found my confidence and my own opinion of myself. I’m kind, smart, funny, with great eyes, an amazing smile, killer calves, and am a member of two great cultures coming together as one. I am worthy, and I am enough for the only person who matters: me.
PHOTO: Courtesy of Britney Young
Britney Young with her family
With this new self-esteem, I went on to accomplish many things in the next few years that I previously thought weren’t possible. I was varsity cheer captain, class president, on the homecoming and prom courts, and I was happy and could confidentially say I love who I am. But most amazing of all: I became close friends with my former bullies. Once I showed them who I really was and knocked down their preconceived notions, we got along.
My new outlook also further ignited my passion to be an actress. I love acting and filmmaking, but I also want to provide a positive image of full-figured and biracial women that would challenge the stereotypical representations that have long existed onscreen. That motivation was a major factor in my desire to be a part of GLOW.
But it was a long road to get there: Coming into this business, I understood I’d have to audition for the typecast big-girl roles at first. I knew what opportunities were being provided for women of my size. I also understood you need to get yourself in front of as many casting directors as possible, so they can consider you for future parts. So I expected to be reading for prison inmates, bullies, and slobs. I anticipated getting casting breakdowns that would describe the character as fat, overweight, and heavyset with maybe only one or two personality traits. I expected that. What I didn’t expect was to only be reading for those parts.
That’s why, after years of “Mad Dogs” and “Berthas,” receiving the casting breakdown for Carmen on GLOW was a breath of fresh air. It described a woman who is sweet, kind, a bit naive, the daughter of a wrestling family. I knew GLOW was going to have a character who represented me regardless if I was chosen as the actress to portray her. A character whose size wasn’t her main selling point or the reason for her existence was something I hadn’t had the chance to audition for previously. The fact that she had actual personality traits beyond her physicality—and that those attributes were positive—let me know the writers were interested in presenting a complex, layered individual that would go beyond a caricature.
PHOTO: Netflix
Britney Young on Netflix’s Glow
After booking the role, I met with creators Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch. They told me as Carmen I should be prepared to do a lot of wrestling (she is the group’s wrestling savant, after all). I was up for the task, but I wasn’t fully aware how empowering it would be. Not only was I getting the chance to learn a new skill and show my strength, but I was literally slamming the Hollywood and societal trope that bigger people are lazy and unfit into the mat. Those “moo” sounds of yesteryear were now replaced with chants of “Machu, Machu” as I lifted my castmates over my shoulders and brought them down to the ground. My physical prowess was no longer something people doubted but a trait that writers wrote for, audiences cheered for, and that I personally was honored to showcase.
From the very beginning Liz and Carly made it clear they wanted GLOW to be a show about bodies. They wanted us 15 women to be our natural selves—even asking us to come to our auditions without makeup—and nobody had to lose or gain weight. In a world of Photoshop, I was immensely proud to see Netflix had also taken the same approach to marketing the show. For example, the first round of posters were pictures of isolated body parts of different cast members, and I was chosen to pose for a flexed bicep picture. While shooting, I cracked jokes that Netflix could alter the image if they didn’t like how it looked, consciously preparing myself to see an image on billboards of a skinny, perfect arm. But when I saw the final poster, I cried. There was my stretch mark, uneven skin tone, powerful ham hock of an arm in all its glory. By leaving my image untouched, it showed me that I was with a network and on a production that valued and accepted my body exactly the way it is.
That wasn’t the only way GLOW made me feel represented. My race on my acting résumé is listed as white and black, but I was rarely called in to audition for white roles. When I was called in for black roles, I was told I didn’t look black enough. I was indisputably white and black, but not enough for me to play characters of those ethnicities. Those same casting directors decided I would be believable playing Hispanic characters. Throughout my career I’ve received more auditions for characters of Hispanic decent than I have for characters of my own ethnicity. But there are so few roles for women of color that it doesn’t sit right with me to audition for characters whose ethnicity differs from my own. It doesn’t feel right to demand that Hollywood portray authentic representations of my own physical and racial features, and then go play a character whose cultural experiences I can’t draw from.
That’s why I initially had a tough time taking the audition for Carmen because she was written as a woman of Mexican descent. I told my agent I wasn’t comfortable auditioning for the part, but as I read her character description and the sides for the audition I optimistically assumed her ethnicity bore no weight upon her narrative within the world of GLOW. I auditioned with the intent to make our producers see beyond Carmen’s ethnicity and see the energy I could bring to the character. When I booked the part, I asked Liz and Carly if they’d be comfortable changing Carmen’s ethnicity to my own, or I would have to respectfully ask them to cast someone else. I was elated when they said they love who I am and what I bring to the character, so, yes, they were willing to change her ethnicity to reflect mine.
I want to show that every fat story is not a weight loss story, and that every black story is not a slavery story.
I am incredibly aware of how lucky I am to be working on a show where our writers, cast, and network care about the authentic and positive representation of all body types, ethnicities, genders, and ages. I understand how rare a character like Carmen is. I’m playing a character that I wish I had seen in movies and television when I was younger, a character I would’ve looked to for inspiration during times when I was bullied.
People often tell me not to let Hollywood change me, but it already did. In middle school I looked to screen and let the prejudiced depictions of fat and mixed raced characters tell me how I should think and feel about myself. Now I want to change Hollywood. I want to develop, produce, and star in projects that celebrate underrepresented people in a meaningful and authentic way. I want to show that every fat story is not a weight loss story, and that every black story is not a slavery story. These people have great lives, wonderful careers, and have found love. We are part of this world, and we should be part of this industry narrative. Our stories are important and valid, because we are worthy and enough.
Three years ago Rebecca Scheinkman, then 32, was having a prebirthday brunch with a group of friends when one of them asked her a bold but important question: “Can I feel your lump?”
Just days before, Rebecca, a licensing manager in New York City, had received a devastating diagnosis: triple positive breast cancer, which she later found out was metastatic. Her friends wanted to know what it felt like, so they’d be better able to detect their own lumps. “I took off my shirt and bra and let them go to second base,” Scheinkman says with a laugh. “That was the moment I became a breast cancer advocate.”
But that wasn’t the first time Rebecca had come up against cancer. At 14, the native New Yorker was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), a cancer of the blood and bone marrow. She needed repeated bouts of chemotherapy and painful spinal taps over the course of two years. Unfortunately, new research shows that adult survivors of childhood cancers are at a greater risk for breast cancer, and Rebecca is living proof. Weeks before that birthday brunch, she found a lump in her breast while putting on her bra. It was hard and immovable. “Instead of taking the ‘Let’s wait and see’ approach, I called my gyno right away,” says Scheinkman.
When she first received her breast cancer diagnosis, Rebecca felt surprisingly optimistic. “I thought, I did this once, I can do it again,” she says. But she also admits to being daunted by the severity of her disease—stage IV means the cancer is a chronic illness she must fight for the rest of her life. It spread to her brain last year, though she’s been able to manage her symptoms by taking up to 22 pills each day. That hasn’t stopped the 36-year-old from thinking about her future and even starting to plan an epic, wedding-style party for her fortieth birthday. “Instead of gifts, I want to donations to breast cancer research,” she says. “It’s going to be a fund-raiser to end all fund-raisers.”
She also volunteers with the Breast Cancer Research Foundation and tells every woman to do what her friends did after that brunch. “They were feeling their own breasts right there in front of me,” she says. She loves seeing women take charge of their own health: “If you feel like something is wrong in your body, get it checked out. You are your own best advocate.”
