It’s not exactly a secret that This Is Us is notorious for bringing on the tears—and so far, the show’s third season hasn’t disappointed in the tear-jerker department.
One of the more emotionally wringing plot lines thus far this season is centered around Kate and Toby, who are trying to get pregnant. In the show’s latest episode, “Katie Girls,” Randall (Kate’s brother) flies to California to be by Kate’s side as she undergoes a egg-retrieval surgery as a part of her in vitro fertilization process. It also gives him the chance to bond with her husband, Toby, who’s also there for the procedure.
After the episode aired Tuesday night, fans of the show discovered a hilarious but unfortunately deleted scene from the episode featuring Toby and Randall. The extra glimpse comes courtesy of the Twitter account of Sterling K. Brown, who plays Randall:
“Please enjoy a deleted scene from tonight’s episode of #ThisIsUs. One might say that Randall and Toby get close…” Brown wrote.
It all happens while Kate is in surgery under anesthesia. A nurse asks Toby for some of his sperm and an awkward, but delightful, exchange between Toby and Randall ensues. A nervous Toby exits the bathroom and tells his brother-in-law that he just can’t do it with everything going on. But Randall, as loyal as he is, asks Toby to think of a situation where he’s the most relaxed.
Toby’s response? “Sitting on the couch watching Chopped eating a frozen-yogurt pop.”
Although This Is Us viewers on Twitter thoroughly enjoyed the almost-two minute long clip, some seriously questioned why it couldn’t possibly make the final cut.
The guy who left the voicemail didn’t address Beth Fukumoto by name.
“Hey, C*nt,” he said.
Fukumoto, a member of the Hawaii legislature, was in an airport when she heard the message and its warning: “We know where you live. We know what you drive. We’re on you,” the caller said. “Just wait. We can’t wait.”
As a lawmaker, Fukumoto, 35, had gotten used to fielding (and ignoring) angry messages and threats—particularly after leaving the Republican Party and becoming a Democrat. But when she heard that voicemail, “I just immediately started shaking,” she says.
“I definitely spent some time before running for Congress [this year] deciding if it was worth it, deciding if elevating my profile was a good idea, because of this kind of stuff—and because how easy it would be to just walk away.”
After weighing her options, Fukumoto did end up waging an unsuccessful Democratic primary bid for a U.S. House seat. She shared the unsettling voicemail with Glamour to highlight the toxicity that can plague women officials and candidates—and even make them think twice about getting in the ring.
Fukumoto says she’s seen plenty of crassness and creepiness as a young woman in politics, like donors who hint they expect a little side action for cutting a check. And yes, even threats.
She’s not alone.
In a record year for female political contenders—and in the era of #MeToo—women on the trail are besieged by comments that go from sexist to scary almost daily.
Cynthia Nixon, the actress and activist who just lost her primary challenge to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, says she found herself the target of a kaleidoscope of slurs. “This kind of misogyny is hardly limited to political candidates. Running for office just makes it that much more visible. The reality is this is what women have to deal with every single day,” Nixon told Glamour via email ahead of the Sept. 13 vote.
“In a strange way, I think my family was probably more prepared than most for the ugliness that comes with a political campaign. The fact is, when you’re a woman on television, and a queer woman no less, people say some pretty nasty things about you. So this isn’t entirely new to us,” said Nixon, who wed longtime partner Christine Marinoni in 2012.
PHOTO: Getty Images
Cynthia Nixon rallies before the Sept. 13 New York primary election.
A few graphic examples—and there are plenty to choose from—show Nixon’s policy tweets on healthcare and immigration drawing uncouth, ungrammatical responses like, “Oh shut up you ugly Dike,” “FUK YOU SCUM BAG FAG SLUT,” and “rabid despicable bitch.”
But the trolls, she told Glamour, didn’t win: “For every person who’s insulted me online, there have been countless more women who have come up to me on the street or on the subway to say, ‘Thank you for running. I believe in you. I know you can do it.’“
Responding or confronting a commenter engaging in verbal sexual harassment and hurling insults can be tempting, but Jessica Proud, a New York-based Republican strategist, says how she would advise a candidate to handle a misogynistic attack can depend on the source.
“You shouldn’t punch down. If it’s an isolated incident [involving] a voter, I don’t think it’s politically useful to engage,” she said, but there are occasions that merit a witty response—ideally “served with a smile.” (Case in point: Michigan gubernatorial hopeful Gretchen Whitmer, who mocked her hecklers in her own version of Jimmy Kimmel’s “Mean Tweets.”)
If the attack comes from “someone of prominence” or a direct opponent, however, Proud said it may be necessary to call it out sternly or have an ally do so.
Fair or not, she added, women have traditionally risked looking “weak” for making an issue of sexism on the trail—and that risk extends well beyond the campaign trail.
Tennis superstar Serena Williams, for example, got denigrated after arguing with, and demanding an apology from, a U.S. Open umpire who issued her a series of violations. (Williams lost the competition, but won some accolades for speaking up after an incident some observers said grossly entwined sexism and racism in the sport.) In business, women have long paid a price for objecting to verbal abuse from male bosses and colleagues.
Even the highest-profile female figures, elected or not, have to deal with sexist slurs: After a male Congressional candidate called Melania Trump a “hoebag” who “works by the hour,” the first lady’s office told Glamour the remarks were “disturbing and despicable.”
Christine Jahnke, a political communication expert who has advised former First Lady Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, has seen some head-spinning stuff while working with Democrats and progressive groups. The author of “The Well-Spoken Woman,” Jahnke recalls an incident in Indiana, where a candidate she advised arrived to campaign at a veterans’ hall and “some old guy comes up to her, looks her in the eye, and says, ‘Are you the stripper?'”
The best thing a woman can do, according to Jahnke, is have a cool-headed, practiced response ready to go when someone does take that cheap shot: “What you don’t want to do [is] lash out in a way that will be perceived as ‘angry’ or out of control,” she said—and that’s not always easy, because attacks rooted in gender can be distracting and distressing.
In some cases, the vitriol even crosses continents.
Cristina Osmeña, a Republican House candidate challenging incumbent Democratic Rep. Jackie Speier in California’s 14th District, came to the U.S. at age six when her family left the Philippines to escape the Marcos regime. When a newspaper there profiled her in February, noting her deep political roots, she was appalled to see a commenter dismiss her as a “little brown fvcking machine.”
“Since this is the first time I have run for office, and this happened early in my campaign, I really wondered what I had gotten myself into,” Osmeña, 49, told Glamour. “I stopped reading the comments sections of articles for awhile. I spent about half a day seething over the comment, regretting putting myself in the limelight, [and] then I let it go and moved on… I did not respond publicly. I internalized it.”
As to any future woman-bashing she may encounter, “If delivered to me anonymously, as mean comments often are, there is not much recourse,” Osmeña said, but “if in person, I would call them out pretty quickly.”
Vermont’s Christine Hallquist also made international headlines this season as the first transgender candidate to secure a major-party nomination for governor.
Christine Hallquist
In a phone conversation with Glamour shortly after the primary, Hallquist said she’s mainly gotten a warm reception from Vermonters on the trail. She mixed humor with a bit of pity in discussing the people “with issues” who go to the trouble of sending her hate mail.
“It comes from men, and here’s the most common thing that I believe a woman hears: It says, ‘You’re ugly.’ I get so many of these ‘you’re ugly’ things: ‘You’re ugly as a dog,’ blah, blah, blah,” Hallquist sighed. “I’m like, ‘First of all, I’m 62 years old. I get to be ugly!’ … What the hell do you expect? I’m not 20.”
Hallquist said she warned her campaign team that “the more we win, the more we’re going to get attacked. The more successful you are, the greater the threat you are. Read that as success, not failure.” But despite trying to frame even negative attention as a good sign, Hallquist, as the Associated Pressrecently noted, has started taking precautions after receiving death threats.
Violence, threatened or otherwise, aside, the rules of engagement in politics can be blurry.
When Gov. Cuomo used Cynthia Nixon’s stage career to suggest she wasn’t qualified for real-life leadership, was that inherently sexist? Could he—or would he—have attacked a male rival that way? Or when President Donald Trump mocked Nevada Rep. Jacky Rosen as “Wacky Jacky,” how did that measure up to his jabs at male critics like “Crazy” Bernie Sanders or “Cryin’” Chuck Schumer?
In the #MeToo era, women are frequently heard saying they feel more empowered to call out misogynist talk. But are they dealing with more of it? Are things worse this year, with record numbers of women running—and winning nominations—for federal and state office? Are more people making gender-based remarks or threats? Are they more violent?
Tough to say, per Kelly Dittmar of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers.
Past female candidates certainly got told, implicitly if not literally, to get back in the kitchen, and “that represented only a fraction of the bias and sexism you might hear in more private spaces and, of course, that might have been in voters’ minds,” Dittmar told Glamour.
Now, “all that stuff that may have been said in bars, at dinner tables, or even just in someone’s head can be said [online] without much consequence,” she said. “Measuring frequency of attacks would be near impossible because of the scope of what we’d be counting.”
As to intensity, it’s also hard to judge, since threats also aren’t new to women in politics: “I think most about an interview with Shirley Chisholm where she talks about how close one man came to stabbing her in the back,” Dittmar said, referring to the first black woman elected to Congress.
Strategically, Dittmar said, “there had [been] a concern in past elections that if women called out sexism they were ‘playing the gender card’ and trying to garner sympathy.” Today, “I think it is harder to make that case (not that people will not…) without some backlash.”
When it comes to issues of sexism and misogyny on the trail, Dittmar said, “the positive note about this year is we are talking about it and, importantly, not accepting that it is just the cost of being a woman or a person of color in American politics.”
For Fukumoto, looking back on her experience in electoral politics, she says it “helped me a lot to have other women sort of come alongside me and just say, ‘That’s happened. I don’t talk about it, but yes, it’s happened.’ [That] kind of whisper network has been supportive. So knowing that you’re not alone, and knowing that other people are dealing with it, too, is very helpful to remember.”
After the ugliness, the threats, the drama she’s seen in politics… What’s next? Right now, working on a podcast and processing what she’s seen and heard.
“I’m going to wait to see what the opportunities are,” Fukumoto says. “I think I’m going to maybe run for City Council.”
In a pivotal election year, Glamour is keeping track of the historic number of women running (and voting) in the midterm elections. For more on our latest midterm coverage, visit www.glamour.com/midterms.
Celeste Katz is senior politics reporter for Glamour. Send news tips, questions, and comments to celeste_katz@condenast.com.
Activist and actress-turned-gubernatorial candidateCynthia Nixon lost her highly publicized bid for New York governor on Thursday night, with her opponent and incumbent governor Andrew Cuomo cinching about 65 percent of votes.
Despite the defeat, Nixon left her supporters with a rousing concession speech, in which she urged progressives to continue fighting for change and pushing for equality in New York and across the rest of the country.
“This is not a time to settle for the way things are, or sit back and hope for things to change,” she said. “This is a time to fight. As long as New York remains the single most unequal state in the country, we will keep fighting.”
Nixon had positioned herself as a progressive alternative to Cuomo and promised to change the status quo. Had she won, the former Sex and The City star would have been the state’s first female and openly gay governor, and her platform included championing LGBTQ causes, as well as solutions for racial and economic injustice.
In a statement to Glamour after announcing her candidacy, she explained how the election of Donald Trump was a “wake-up” call to women who have launched political campaigns this year in unprecedented numbers.
“I’ve been humbled and inspired by the thousands of women who are running for office for the first time. And today, I am honored to join their ranks,” she said.
Nixon, like recent progressive candidates such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, had pledged not to take any corporate campaign money and eventually secured a record number of small donors that helped her pull 30 percent of votes. She ended up raising about $2.5 million—just a fraction of the $25 million Cuomo reportedly spent on television ads and mailers, according to the New York Times. Buzzfeed reported that Cuomo’s spending per day was almost the same amount of Nixon’s total.
In her speech on Thursday, Nixon praised the gains her campaign had made despite being up against Cuomo’s hefty budget, and said she was inspired rather than discouraged.
“Before a single vote was cast, we have already won. We have fundamentally changed the political landscape in this state,” she said. “This campaign changed expectations about what is possible in New York state.”
She also evoked the achievements of recent progressive candidates, such as Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley, who have toppled long-standing incumbents and represent a new era of progressive politics. She urged Democrats to “stand for something” and take back the party while encouraging a new generation to keep pushing forward.
“This is an incredible moment for progressives, but it is not just a moment. it is a movement, and this movement is only growing stronger… To all the young people. To all the young women. To all the young queer people who reject the gender binary. Soon you’ll be standing here, and when it’s your turn, you’ll win,” she said.
Beyoncé and Jay Z dropped a surprise (though long-rumored) joint album together on Saturday night, June 16, ringing the alarm for the Beyhive to collectively lose its mind. As if that’s not exciting enough, there’s a new feature track and a corresponding music video—filmed at the freaking Louvre—to go with the album news. Called “Apes**t,” it’s a visual masterpiece. But what else did you expect from Bey?
And while Beyoncé had been posting cryptic images to Instagram all afternoon, leading some curious fans to think she might be dropping something, it’s safe to say no one expected Christmas to come this early—and definitely not in the form of a joint album with Jay Z. The couple are, after all, very busy on their current On the Run II tour. Still, in traditional Bey fashion, all was kept under wraps until the appointed date and time.
Of course, Twitter had a lot of reactions to share as news of the album dropped. Some people immediately canceled their Saturday plans, while others joked about finding ways to listen without signing up for Tidal. One user even made this point, “I don’t wanna listen to an album where some MAN keeps interrupting Beyoncé.”
RELATED: (Beyoncé and Jay Z Just Dropped a New Album, Everything Is Love—and the First Music Video From It)[/story/beyonce-jay-z-new-album-everything-is-love]
Today truly is a day for rejoicing, because Ashley Iaconetti and Jared Haibon from The Bachelor, The Bachelorette, Bachelor in Paradise, and The Bachelor Winter Games—so, yes, every iteration in the franchise—are finally dating.
This will come as a shock to anyone who watched Haibon friend zone Iaconetti, who’s best known for being the biggest crier in the Bachelor franchise (a mix of her own behavior and show producing, no doubt), over the course of seasons two and three of Bachelor in Paradise. Iaconetti seemed to finally move on during Bachelor Winter Games, when she fell for Canadian Kevin Wendt, but it seems that spurred Haibon to realize what he was missing.
Because now Haibon and Iaconetti are officially a thing. More than a thing, really: The couple announced their relationship with a splashy photo shoot for People magazine and an episode of Iaconetti’s web series The Story of Us, where they gushed about their love for each other for 44 straight minutes. That’s the 2018 equivalent of opening up a joint account, to be honest.
Iaconetti has never seemed happier. And Haibon looks happy, too, though it’s a little hard to discern because the patchiness of his beard is so distracting. Make a decision: go clean-cut or grow it out! Troubling facial hair aside, their episode of The Story of Us is quite sweet. “I’m living proof that you should listen to your gut, and that it’s not too late. The person I wanted to be with most was right in front of my eyes,” Haibon said, according to People.
“He’s written me other letters and filled my apartment with flowers. He tells me every day that he’s the luckiest man alive,” Iaconetti added. So happy! So blissful! And no crying! Just kidding: There’s definitely crying in the video.
Anyway, check out Iaconetti and Haibon’s Story of Us episode, below:
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And you know these two had something to say on social media about all of this. “I love my boyfriend,” Iaconetti posted last night, alongside of pic of Haibon kissing her. In his own post, Haibon stole a line from When Harry Met Sally, “I came here tonight because when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.”
Bachelor Nation’s going bananas over Haibon and Iaconetti’s relationship, naturally. Below, the best responses we found:
The dresses were whites and creams, lacy and chiffon, and a stranger stood beside me, zipping me into gown after gown. “How exciting,” the stranger said. “The happiest day of your life!”
I cringed.
“Oh, beautiful,” my aunts said, clapping, as I walked out to model the dresses. I spun and sashayed, blew kisses. My aunts were lovely, as were the gowns. But I already knew I’d never buy one of these things everyone had traveled so far to see me try on.
My partner and I had decided to get hitched. That was the good news: the love! But there was a lot about weddings that I didn’t understand. Changing your name to your husband’s, wearing white to mark your virginity, being “given away” to another man by your father—many of the traditions seemed more like market transactions. I told my stepdad the only way I was comfortable being given away was if he also included a herd of goats. He thought I was kidding.
In our wedding, everything will be different, I thought. All new traditions! Everything equal! All about us! We began planning. How could we avoid the wedding industrial complex? How could we remain unwaveringly clear about our core values?
I did a bunch of online research. “For a feminist wedding, give your bridesmaids different style dresses!” the advice said. Have the bride stand to the right of the altar while the groom stands to the left! Wear a cream dress instead of white! I was baffled. The suggestions seemed just one degree off of a completely traditional wedding.
I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for, though I had an idea that maintaining a rigid set of principles was a cornerstone. I tried to start somewhere small. When my partner’s sister asked what her 3-year-old son, who would be in the ceremony, should wear, I said, “Let him wear anything he wants.”
“You’re going to regret that,” she said. I could hear the stress in her voice. Maybe the kind of feminism I wanted had to do with individual strength of character. “This is your day,” the internet told me. “Stick with your gut.”
I learned about feminism from my mom. I only know a few things about her wedding to my dad. I know she wore an antique kimono that she found in a vintage shop somewhere in Seattle.
And then I got a call from my future mother-in-love (her term, and how sweet). She wanted help figuring out what to wear. She sent over pictures. And did I tell her I was a feminist and she should decide her own outfit depending upon whatever values she held dearest? I did not. I told her we were thinking coastal colors, and that her dress was very, very pretty.
But I’m still a feminist, I thought. And then I thought: I’m not sure what being a feminist actually means to me.
I learned about feminism from my mom. I only know a few things about her wedding to my dad. I know she wore an antique kimono that she found in a vintage shop somewhere in Seattle. I know it was December, that they passed a giant chalice of wine between the guests. Everyone took a sip to bind the love together.
I know a bit more about my mom’s second wedding to my stepdad. I was three, so remember little, but there’s a VHS tape. It took place in a small clearing in a Redwood forest, the enormous trunks four times the width of any person. The officiant was a woman who did not follow any religious or traditional text. My mom had sewn her own dress out of the fabric she hand-painted for her business, ribbons of it, in pale pinks and purples, overlapping to the ground. She wore a crown of dried flowers.
There’s so much more I want to know about her weddings, but I can’t ask. My mom has been dead ten months.
A ritual becomes meaningful through intention and repetition. The book a father reads to his kid on Christmas. A walk in the park with your lover every Saturday. I didn’t understand for a long time that one reason the rituals used in most wedding traditions felt so meaningless to me is that they weren’t part of my family. My mom’s two funky weddings were the legacies I knew. Her sensibility was what I believed to be true. Her values. Like girl power. Rejecting the word “bitch” entirely. Never being beholden to a man for financial stability. These were the lessons my mom taught me.
As I’d begun planning, my mom’s two sisters, my lovely aunts, said they’d like to be with me while we went wedding dress shopping. I considered this, what it would signify to them if I said no. I didn’t especially want to wear a wedding dress, and the shopping tradition wasn’t important to me, but maybe it was to them. Maybe a feminist wedding included not just the things my partner and I wanted for ourselves, but a careful consideration of others as well?
I wanted a cheap dress because I wanted it to come from a thrift store after a day gallivanting around with my mom
We went to the mall. A very nice mall. Expensive. Not exactly what I’d classify as feminist or anti-wedding-industrial-complex, but hey. I tried on stunning dresses that cost between eight hundred and two thousand bucks. What I said to my aunts when I was done, what felt true, was that I couldn’t morally square spending that kind of money on a piece of clothing to wear once. They were baffled. Why had we come, then, to this store? Why had they driven hours to meet me here?
I couldn’t finish the second half of my desire: I wanted a cheap dress because I wanted it to come from a thrift store after a day gallivanting around with my mom. How could I say that? What I wanted was a ghost of a memory from years before. I wanted us to wander through vintage shops, picking up dolls with matted hair and missing eyeballs while we browsed, making them tell jokes to one another. I wanted to be trying on ugly hats with my mom and using rusted metal pokers to tap each other on the shoulder. I imagined her best parts, her funny, wild self, sauntering down crammed aisle after crammed aisle.
In my dress shopping fantasy, the dress was beside the point.
My aunts and I left the store empty-handed. None of this was their fault. They tried to be what they thought I wanted, and I tried to be what I thought they wanted. Without my mom around, they were trying to fill in. I loved them for that. What was a feminist to do?
One night, my aunt confessed that she and her mom, my grandmother, had never really known what to do with my mom. She was always so different than they were, a painter, a non-sorority-sister, a weirdo, an adventurer.
Maybe they thought I could be a more understandable stand-in for the daughter and sister they lost. On the surface, I was. I’d tried to blend in while my mom tried to stand out. Encouraging me to have a more traditional wedding might be a way to make me someone they could connect to.
But leaning into the weird, into the invitations we painted and Trader Joe’s flowers we wanted to use—that’s who I was. My mother’s daughter.
The months leading up to the wedding were rough, full of holes and shadows and my inability to tell anyone what I actually wanted or, really, to understand it myself. My partner was loving and flexible, willing to talk through whatever came up, eager to forego any traditions that didn’t feel good. Still, I was nervous for the actual day. I thought I may hide beneath the bathroom sink, weeping.
I told a few friends this. I was so consumed by who wasn’t present that I didn’t really pay attention to the five or six very good friends who checked on me often, asked if I needed help planning. I wish I’d paid better attention to them. Let their love through my cracks. There’s no right way to be sad, but my head was buried so deep in the sand of grief, I forgot sometimes to even tell my partner how glad I was to be committing to him. No other person has brought me more joy, even through what felt like a desert of loss.
We had pie for dessert and no champagne toast. I kept my name. Our mixed gendered wedding crews wore coastal colors, and my new adorable nephew donned a bowtie. Our officiant was a tree scientist.
When the day arrived, my partner and I walked down the aisle hand in hand. I made bouquets from Trader Joe’s flowers with girlfriends I adored, drank boxed wine.
We had pie for dessert and no champagne toast. I kept my name. Our mixed gendered wedding crews wore coastal colors, and my new adorable nephew donned a bowtie. Our officiant was a tree scientist. I wore one of those beautiful off-white lacy dresses I tried on—purchased once it went on super sale.
One aunt arranged a string of bay leaves and yellow-orange roses on a little altar we’d made, and built table centerpieces in old silver pitchers. They were stunning. The other aunt led us in a women’s prayer. Just before the ceremony, twenty-five women, friends and family, stood with me in a circle. They offered advice and love and jokes and wisdom. Look around, my aunt said. I did. The faces of so many people I loved shone back. I could feel something physical, tangible, like taking a deep breath in the mountains after a long hike. I don’t know exactly what it was, but I think it had to do with the power of so many incredible women bound together, however temporary. We are here to support you. If you ever forget that, we will remind you.
In the end, the wedding was wholly us in a wild, expansive, compromised hootenanny of love and hilarity. What feminism meant to me changed. It began as hard-lined abstract principles with me in the center, and came to mean something bigger, more complicated, something about strength with flexibility. Of doing whatever felt right for us, while still remembering that no matter what, we were lucky enough to be within the circles of incredible women and men in our lives. I smiled the whole damn day.
I’m still not sure what kind of feminist I am—a mediocre one, probably. But I’m trying. My mom taught me that. Even though she wasn’t there, she was everywhere.
Tessa Fontaine is the author of The Electric Woman: A Memoir In Death-Defying Acts, which chronicles the season she spent in a circus sideshow as well as her memories of the mother who taught her how to live fearlessly and on her own terms.
