For the past six months, we’ve been watching Shawn Mendes and Camila Cabello get flirty on Instagram, kiss in public, and basically steam up the stage anytime they perform “Senorita” together. There have been many whispers of coupledom but nary a confirmation from the two, despite mounting evidence. That is until this weekend, when Mendes, during a concert in Connecticut last week, decided to confirm whether or not there was a capital-T Thing going on in his life.
During his tour, a fan asked Mendes about a fateful sentence the singer had once said. About two years ago, Mendes had declared he’d never been in love. In an interview with Clash published in September 2017, the singer had said that he thought his music might change when he finally fell in love: “The day I can actually write a song about my girlfriend who I am truly in love with—because I’ve never actually truly been in love, I don’t know what type of music’s going to come out of me when I am. That might be a whole new wave of music that I never thought I could write,” he told the magazine.
Now, with all the rumors about Mendes and Cabello swirling, the fan apparently wanted to know where things might stand—but posed the question in a pretty tactful way. “You’ve said you’ve never been in love. Has that changed recently?” the fan asked Mendes, according to ET Canada.
“Honestly, I wanna say I wanna talk to you guys about this stuff, but it’s not just me in the relationship,” Mendes answered, equally tactfully. “There’s another person involved, and I can’t say things that I feel. It’s not just me deciding, you know?”
Of course, Mendes doesn’t name any names here, so we still have to take it with a grain of salt. But he’s in a relationship, which is something that was not confirmed until now. Until we hear more, we’ll just leave the brand-new video of Camila Cabello ruminating on the nature of love here.
Almost all the men I spoke with about DE talked about feeling nervous, dealing with anxiety or combatting shame—not a single one said that their inability to finish had anything to do with how attracted they were to their partner. One dude I spoke with said it always takes him forever to finish. In the process he gets so worried about hurting his partner that he gets too much into his head, which then made it even more impossible for him to finish. “Sex is absolutely impacted by mindset for men,” Gallop says. “Just the way women are impacted by it.”
I couldn’t have orgasms well into my 30s because I had a trauma I hadn’t dealt with. “Orgasm is about surrendering,” Skyler says. “With women, the vaginal walls will close down. Sometimes it’s guarding and protecting her from either the person in the room or from someone in her past.” I get this: I never trusted men enough to surrender, so it wasn’t until I dealt with my issues head on with specialists that I could finally let down both my vaginal and metaphoric walls.
It’s not just about some hidden sexual trauma or deep-seated phobia, however, Skyler adds. Something as commonplace as a fear of commitment can create a roadblock to orgasm. I was terrified of commitment until my 30s, which might explain why I never had a problem orgasming with a one-night stand but couldn’t seem to finish once a fling showed signs of turning into a relationship. It never occured to me that the men in my life might be having the same issue. With one old hookup, I used to have marathon sex (the kind that left me barely able to walk the next day), but once we became closer, he started to have issues with ejaculating inside me. At the time it baffled me, and I blamed myself. But now it makes sense—his body, like mine years ago, was saying a hard no to surrendering.
So What Do We Do About It?
All of the specialists I spoke with, as well as the men I interviewed, made one thing clear: A dude’s inability to finish is much more likely to be about him than it is about you.
So what’s to be done? Most men who struggle with delayed ejaculation can benefit from talking to a pro, Skyler says. “This is one of those issues they could explore on their own and if it’s a light issue, that can work. But I find that delayed ejaculation is one of the trickiest,” she says. “The body has to be retrained.”
When I told her about my striptease, she said my hookup’s behavior wasn’t all that strange. ”With DE, the [treatment] protocol is for a man to have sex, and when he’s close to having an orgasm, to pull out, then keep at it.” Eventually, she says, he’ll pair the two actions, making it easier for him to finish the old fashioned way.
When you’re in this situation with a partner, don’t internalize it or blame yourself: This is not a negative performance review. Instead, stop focusing on orgasm as the goal, Skyler says. “If we don’t make sex a performance and orgasm the goal, and instead enjoy it for the experience that it is,” she says, “then we don’t have the pressure and anxiety.”
In my last several years on Tinder, I have realized that a lot of men avoid in-person hookups. If I send them a sexy picture or engage in sexting, they’ll almost always stay home and masturbate instead of meeting up. I thought this was because they’re lazy (and some are!) or because my vagina can’t compete with their death grips, but that’s far too simplistic. Men are dealing with a lot of pressure, self-doubt, shame, fear and insecurities that get in their way—just like the rest of us.
Rashida Jones is no newcomer to social justice. She attended her first-ever protest as a teenager and, to this day, remembers what she was opposing (the Gulf War), what she felt (a sense of unity with other demonstrators), and even what she wore (her cheerleading uniform, having come straight from practice). Since then, she’s directed a Time’s Up-related video on sexual harassment in the workplace, launched a line of eyeglasses to raise money for the ACLU, and worked with the International Rescue Committee to help Syrian refugees.
Now, the actress, 42, is putting her skills to familiar use in front of (and behind) the camera with “The Last Weekend” project, a progressive coalition’s push to get people to the polls in the November midterms—and she’s doing it in a way that pokes fun at traditional celebrity PSAs that demand viewers take action.
“Hopefully we created something that people will share with each other,” Jones told Glamour in an interview ahead of Tuesday’s national “Last Weekend” kickoff. “People are fatigued. And I’m certainly fatigued of celebrity PSAs, so the joke was sort of [that] we ourselves are fatigued with our own PSA-ness.”
A still from “The Last Weekend” promo featuring Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda, and Rashida Jones.
“The Last Weekend” is exactly what it sounds like: In the days before the November 6 midterms, it’s an attempt to mobilize a volunteer army to hit the phones—and the pavement—to make sure people actually show up to vote that Tuesday.
Jones, known for comic turns on Parks and Recreation, The Office, and I Love You, Man, is part of a team that’s using humor to send a message about a dead-serious subject: An election that will determine who controls Congress and what happens to women’s rights.
Working with the organization Swing Left, which wants Democrats to wrest control of the House from the GOP, Jones helped write and direct a lighthearted call to action video co-starring Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda—two women with their own history of both funny film roles and serious political engagement.
“They’ve managed to take things that can be heavy and super political and difficult to understand and create levity around it so that people can really digest it and see it,” she said in praise of Fonda and Tomlin, whose teamwork spans projects from the 1980 hit 9 to 5 to the modern-day series Grace and Frankie.
The video features the three women urging viewers to avoid becoming complacent and to not only vote, but get others to do the same by volunteering in the run-up to the election. But, there’s a comic twist.
A promo video for “The Last Weekend” project.
“I just think [that’s] how you really get people—you make them laugh… You make them see themselves in something you’re talking about. You don’t treat it with a heavy hand. You don’t make it a chore.”
That’s a point worth remembering: Non-presidential election years don’t typically get Americans voters fired up; 2014 was particularly bad when it came to turnout. Despite the marches and the hashtags, some early analyses suggested a significant percentage of voters, including the young, might not show up.
Jones knows the history of underwhelming midterm turnout, but says this year could be different: “We’ve never lived in a time like this before, where we’ve all been kind of forced into civic engagement in a really kind of new and visceral way, where every single day, [we’re] seeing the kind of deconstruction of our democracy,” she said.
“I think people now understand more about how American democracy has been set up to function — because it’s not functioning in that way.”
Rashida Jones promotes “The Last Weekend” drive.
“The Last Weekend” coalition includes groups ranging from MoveOn, Indivisible, and the Democratic Attorneys General Association to the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Latino Victory, and Resistbot. Depending on who you ask, their work might fall into the category of making “good trouble,” a phrase Jones borrows from Congressman and civil rights icon John Lewis.
“The first thing with making ‘good trouble’ is exercising your right to vote,” Jones said.
“Listen, there’s a lot of reasons to be disillusioned. The country’s divided. There’s evidence of interference in our voting process. There’s so much voter suppression. There’s a lot of reasons to feel like you can’t be heard,” she said. “But there’s not enough reasons not to encourage people to push through.”
In case there were any last holdouts for the “Are Priyanka Chopra and Nick Jonas a couple or nah?” debate for the ages, the two are in India together right now reportedly meeting up with Chopra’s mom. So let’s unpack this!
On Friday, the 25-year-old singer and 35-year-old actress stepped out for dinner together in Mumbai, India, where they’re reportedly vacationing together. What’s more, the rumored twosome was apparently joined at dinner by Chopra’s mother, according to People.
Speculation that the actress and singer were dating first started when the pair showed up to Vogue‘s Met Gala together in May. (The Met Gala, by the way, is infamous for new-couple debuts; see Hailey Baldwin and Shawn Mendes’ 2018 joint attendance for proof.) It was the pair’s first public appearance together and sparked romance rumors almost immediately, with fans wondering whether the two were couple or just really good friends?
It’s worth mentioning that neither half of the couple has confirmed that they’re dating—and we can’t say whether they’re official or not until they do. But posting to his Instagram Stories on Friday, Jonas shared a sweet video of Chopra laughing, captioning it, simply, “Her”—along with an ever-suggestive heart-eyes emoji.
Prepare yourself for a rollercoaster of emotion. First, the good news: Kat Von D‘s Studded Kiss lipsticks are cheap now. Like, super cheap—drugstore-level cheap at $12, down from their usual $21. And this isn’t just the selective good news of a few shades being phased out, every single one of the bullet lipsticks is marked down 40 percent right now. Not to give you whiplash, but here comes the bad news: the lipsticks are on deep-cut sale because they’re about to be gone for good.
Did your heart drop? Mine plummeted just writing that, but I said rollercoaster, and I meant rollercoaster. So here’s the upswing: according to the clues KVD has posted on Instagram, the Studded Kiss collection will soon be back in a new and improved way. Nothing is confirmed yet, but KVD captioned a photo of the lipsticks with, “Our Studded Kiss army is getting a makeover! All 39 shades are 40% off at katvondbeauty.com! But don’t worry, we’re keeping the kick-ass component #makingroomfornewness #vegan.” From those two hashtags, we can draw hope that the lipsticks will soon be back in our hands, in a freshly vegan way.
The lipstick is one of Kat Von D’s signature items and comes in a range of finishes and colors that broke down barriers of what mainstream lipstick could look like. Green, copper, pitch black—these days those options are normal (or at least, more so), but KVD was one of the very first to have them available beyond Halloween season.
As a committed vegan and animal rights activist, she’s also one of the first already mainstream lines to pivot and commit to making an entirely vegan collection, so the move’s not entirely out of the blue. This summer she replaced her makeup brush line with all vegan ones, and they stayed as soft as ever (the bar was at “absentmindedly stroke them while you do other things” soft, so the stakes were high). So, when you consider the net positive, this is a good thing. We get lipstick for slashed prices, and less animals are affected in the long run. Ration your Studded Kiss for a few months (hopefully it’ll just be a few months), and life will return to normal. Maybe with one more $12 lipstick.
They say three’s a trend—and screw it—I don’t care if it’s trend or the majority of the world still “wouldn’t be caught dead” wearing a scrunchie (squeaked in a Carrie Bradshaw voice). I want one in my hair.
I’m not exactly sure at what point I decided not to die on the hill that no self-respecting New York woman would wear a scrunchie. I think it first started when I read Harling Ross’s delightful piece for Man Repeller that chronicled her sudden, unexpected desire to stack rings of fabric around her ponytail. (This, too, was also to her dismay.) Then, this summer, I saw two girls (one from Brooklyn, the other went to NYU) wearing them at a party at Penn State, of all places. And then that was followed by two celebrity scrunchie spottings: one on Bella Hadid, the other on Ariana Grande. My reactions quite honestly surprised me: I did not hate them! Any of them.
The one thing holding me back, though, was that in all these cases scrunchies still felt a bit…young. I’m 28. I’m not, like, dead inside, but I also no longer feel a desire to be “cool” for cool’s sake. I once tried space buns and felt very much like when Lenny on 30 Rock poses as a high schooler—which is to say, wildly out of place.
But no longer. Yesterday, scrunchies got the ultimate stamp of approval: Mansur Gavriel—the brand behind the decidedly “it” bucket bag—launched its first-ever clothing collection, along with a line of absurdly chic scrunchies.
Even in the fashion world, the accessory is still polarizing. “When I heard scrunchie, I was like, ‘Ahhh!’ It is my nightmare,” Bumble and bumble lead hairstylist Laurent Philippon said of his reaction to the designers’ request. “But actually no, it’s done in a very cool way.”
And cool it was. To go along with the delicate shirting- and floral-patterned scrunchies Rachel Mansur and Floriana Gavriel designed, Philippon whipped up what he calls “nothing” hair, a look that’s supposed to seem like you didn’t put any effort into—but, of course, did. That said, the legwork did seem pretty easy. Every model’s hair at the show was washed and then air-dried. The finishing touch was a little styling product based on their hair type.
For fine hair, Philippon spritzed in Bumble and bumble’s Prep to give the end result some sheen. He also recommended a hydrating styler like Bumble’s Bb. Don’t Blow It Fine (H)air Styler or Don’t Blow It Thick (H)air Styler depending on how much moisture your hair needs. After that, you shove your hair behind your shoulders, wrap the scrunchie “loosely” (this is key) at the base of your neck so it’s still slightly messy, and—bam—you’ve got fashion-girl hair.
I get that it sounds ridiculous, but look at this hair and tell me you don’t want it. Please, I dare you.
I might not work at W, and I might not live on Perry Street—but I do live in Brooklyn and often frequent “hip downtown restaurants.” Moral of this story: Maybe Berger was just ahead of his time. And you better believe I’ll be buying one of these the second they drop.
