Yes, there is still good news in the world in the time of coronavirus. We may be in the middle of a global health crisis the likes of which none of us has ever experienced, but every day inspiring stories of hope, help, and recovery are emerging and for that we’re so grateful.
Take Yanira Soriano, a woman who contracted COVID-19 while she was also 34 weeks pregnant in Long Island, New York. CNN’s Jake Tapper told her incredible story in a Twitter thread and the ending is a very happy one—but it didn’t begin that way.
Soriano became so ill doctors had to put her in a medically induced coma while also hooking her up to a ventilator to help her breathe. They were concerned she would not survive and delivered her baby via an emergency C-section. The infant was transferred to another hospital for monitoring. Miraculously, after 11 days, Soriano began to recover from the coronavirus. On April 15, she was released from the hospital to cheers from doctors and nurses.
But even more importantly, she was finally able to meet her son Walter for the very first time, with cameras recording her husband putting the newborn into her arms as she sat in her wheelchair surrounded by the hospital’s staff. Warning: It’s incredibly emotional—but the rare happy ending that we all need to see so much right now.
The online response to the story shows just how much the world is hungry for happy news during a really tough time. “I’ve sent this to my son who is an ER doctor,” one person tweeted. “These people do so much work to save lives and it’s easy to forget that they’re humans with emotions too. This is a lovely thread which portrays that very well.”
“That’s the sweetest thing, I’ve seen in awhile! I’m crying happy tears! Thank you for sharing. So many heros! [sic],” another wrote.
We hope Walter and his mom had a very wonderful first night together at home. Now, we’ll just be watching this video on a loop to keep our mood lifted.
Carlin Ross spreads her legs and moves the lamp deeper between her thighs.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” a voice just over her shoulder says.
“It is,” Ross agrees, staring at herself in a mirror, transfixed. She drops her hands, delicately, smoothing them over the outline of her vulva.
For just $12.99 a month, you can join the millions of people who’ve watched Ross touch herself on camera whenever you want. But if you’ve devoured Love Is Blind or Tiger King, you’ve already shelled out for Ross’s show-and-tell. She’s on Netflix.
Carlin Ross is the woman who was filmed having an orgasm on The Goop Lab, Netflix’s TV show with Gwyneth Paltrow about her lifestyle empire, Goop. Ross and her coconspirator, the famed 90-year-old sex educator Betty Dodson, school Paltrow and her Goop employees on human biology, sexism, and self-doubt, and then Ross demonstrates as Dodson coaches her to an orgasm, using a special technique. The camera crew—and anyone who has a Netflix password—has full permission to look on.
How did a fast-talking New Jersey mom who was raised a Christian fundamentalist wind up teaching Gwyneth Paltrow the difference between a vulva and vagina? How did a former property lawyer help Goop—a women’s lifestyle brand famous for dubious claims about women’s genitals—create a revolutionary piece of sex education? What was she doing last month at a Walgreens in suburban Jersey ringing up a carton of cigarettes, a packet of condoms, and a box of hearing aids?
Ross is a nice lady from the suburbs who has a serious sweater collection, a kid, and a dog. Still, the answer to all of these questions is that she does what she wants and doesn’t take any shit. (Also, the condoms were for sex toys that she hands out during workshops; the cigarettes and hearing aids were for Dodson, who has taken to smoking and drinking Champagne in her 90s.)
Ross spits facts and talks about sex education like a rapper—because she can and because she feels she has to.
“I really believe that not telling young women about their bodies or giving them access to health care is systematic abuse at the level of genocide,” Ross says, a few minutes into our interview.
“You have to love your body to have an orgasm,” she says. “You have to feel entitled. The most unattractive man in the world still feels entitled to an orgasm. But women, we always feel like, ‘Maybe if I’m skinnier?’”
And: “If you’ve had an orgasm, you’re not a virgin.”
And: “Sexual freedom for women is a life goal, my reason for being.”
And on the controversies surrounding Goop: “There are so many controversies out there; it just seemed like a pimple on the ass of controversy.”
She has to be this succinct. In her decades as a sex educator, she has answered thousands of questions on her and Dodson’s site. “There are only really 10 to 15 questions, and they all boil down to the same thing,” Ross says. “‘Am I normal?’”
Rest easy—the answer is yes.
Ross grew up on the South Shore of Long Island with religious Christian parents who didn’t believe in TV, but did believe in a somewhat radical message of body acceptance—though raised almost a half-century apart, both Ross and Dodson credit their openness around sex in part to their parents walking around their homes naked. It was an abstinence-only education, but one that also involved her mother calmly explaining that the purpose of the clitoris is for sexual pleasure. It was a loving, “Amish-lite” life. And then she went through puberty.
“When you’re a girl, right, everyone listens to you in your family, and your family friends, everyone is nice to you,” Ross says. “And then you get your breasts, and all of a sudden your standing changes, and you become something else. You’re supposed to regulate male sexuality, and your dad’s friends are saying fresh things to you, and groping on mass transit happens.”
Much to the disappointment of activists and those who hoped to elect the first woman president, the Democratic race has narrowed down to two white men in their seventies—former Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Bernie Sanders.
But Biden made news at the latest CNN debate on March 15 with a new commitment to choose a woman as his vice president, if he wins the nomination. (Sanders came close, responding to the question with: “In all likelihood, I will.”)
While Biden has hinted in the past that he’d like to run with a woman, this was the first time he articulated it as a firm pledge. (He also reiterated his promise to nominate the first black woman to the Supreme Court.) “I commit that I will, in fact, appoint a woman to be vice president,” Biden told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “There are a number of women qualified to be president tomorrow.”
A number of those women are, of course, Biden’s former competition. Senators Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, and Elizabeth Warren have all dropped out of the presidential contest, increasing the pressure on the men who remain to choose a woman for what some call the race’s “consolation prize.”
The women’s activist group Supermajority has circulated a petition calling on both Biden and Sanders to commit to a woman with them on the ticket. Hillary Clinton said she would “love” to see a woman in the position. But it is now official: If Joe Biden is the nominee, a woman will appear on the presidential ticket.
The news made instant waves on Twitter—a lone bit of unexpected news in a stressful time. “@ewarren @staceyabrams and @KamalaHarris please sleep next to your phones. Let’s go!” tweeted the investor Arlan Hamilton. Even former presidential candidate Andrew Yang weighed in, tweeting: “Wow Joe just committed to a woman as VP. I like it.” He went on to note in a follow-up tweet that Harris and Klobuchar are obvious choices to sit “at or near the top of the shortlist.” (Some were less positive, criticizing the pledge as a form of “tokenism” and comparing Biden’s spottier record on issues like abortion access and civil rights to Sanders’ more progressive positions.)
Choo, whose work centers on the intersection of race and gender discrimination, says that the criticism of white feminism in elections is warranted. “When it comes to movements for women, we’ll often see the nod to diversity often happens with a token white woman, and that token white woman generally doesn’t change things fundamentally,” she says. But she rejects the notion that Warren let the historic nature of her campaign stand in for more progressive ideals. “I thought she had such a thoughtful agenda when it came to incorporating issues of racial justice across her platform, and really was one of the campaigns that really listened to a wide variety of people when it came to informing her agenda.” Choo says, with a sigh. “You can’t help but feel a punch in the gut.”
Elizabeth Warren and a supporter do a pinky-promise at the Iowa State Fair in August 2019
Melina Mara/The Washington Post via Getty Images
The language that many Warren fans—or women disappointed that the presidential race will boil down to two men—use often borrows from the lexicon of physical pain—”punch in the gut,” “hurt,” “weeping,” even “trauma.”
After Katzen tweeted that she “sobbed” on the way home from voting for Warren, she says she was flooded with messages from like-minded women, and also from MAGA fans “making fun of me and mocking my appearance and telling me I’m mentally ill and should take [psychiatric] drugs.” (Katzen says she saw “very little evidence” that the harassment was coming from Sanders supporters, despite the “Bernie Bro” reputation.) She was troubled, she says, by the idea that expressing emotion over a candidate—and over sexism—is dismissed as having a mental illness.
Williams, who noted the number of white women who cast their votes for Trump despite dozens of documented sexist comments and sexual assault allegations, reasoned that after 2016, “We really need to spend the next four years discussing sexism and misogyny if the next election’s female candidates have any chance of being taken seriously.” Male allies, she thought, should lead the charge. But four years passed. “That just didn’t happen,” she says.
At 6:30 p.m. in Florida, the night before Warren suspended her campaign, Williams was still in the volunteer office. Acknowledging that Warren would probably soon drop out, she said, she believes this can be “an opportunity, another moment to have a discussion about sexism in America.”
“I don’t have the luxury to stay in doom and gloom,” Williams said. “I have to keep persisting.”
Jenny Singer is a staff writer for Glamour. You can follow her on Twitter.
When a woman succeeded, we took notice. It didn’t affect how we did our jobs, but we paid attention to that and we knew it was unique. I now am close to former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who was the first woman to hold that position. But even when she was first appointed, it left an impression on me. When she became Secretary of State in 1996, I was covering her swearing in, and I remember so well wanting to get an interview with her. I got to her on the street corner outside her house that morning before she went into the White House to be sworn in, and I got just a few words with her, but it helped the piece I was working on so much.
In the piece I wrote that night, I wrote that one of her commitments was going to be to increase the number of women at the State Department, which had been for generations a male-dominated institution. There was even a rule that a woman could not become an ambassador if her husband was an ambassador elsewhere; she was expected to follow him. It was just startling.
She was well aware of those dynamics, and I wrote about it and about how women in the foreign service were thinking about her appointment. That night, right after Nightly News, there was a reception in her honor. She invited the press, which was unusual, but she made it a point to have us there. And I ran into a very high level official who is still active in government and outside of government. And he said, “Where did you get that information? That’s just totally wrong. There’s no problem of sexism at the State Department. Who could have told you that?” And I just looked at him and thought to myself, “You are in for a really big shock.” And of course I was right, because that was the beginning of affirmative steps to improve gender equality at the State Department.
After Madeleine Albright, of course, there have since been more women at the State Department, and I have learned a lot from all of them. Condoleezza Rice was another remarkable woman and a great musician, which is something that I loved. She’s a wonderful pianist. We talked a lot about music, and she would have these little musical evenings at her apartment, and her friends would perform it. Later, Hillary Clinton held that position, and she came with the experience of having lived in the White House and worked to further women’s rights around the globe. For all the horrible things that happened with the war in Afghanistan, I saw something similar with Laura Bush. She worked with the State Department and the White House to help create the first co-ed institution of higher education—the American University in Kabul.
Just last week, I interviewed Anita McBride, Laura Bush’s former chief of staff, to talk about the new agreement between the Taliban and the Afghan government, which the United States has blessed. The fear is that it will undo the constitutional protections that the United States fought for under the Bush and Obama administrations, and it will put women in Afghanistan back in the Middle Ages, in terms of their rights.
Often, these stories are interconnected—the stories of female leadership and the conditions on the ground for women for women around the world. And I know that because I’ve seen it. I went with then-First Lady Hillary Clinton to Beijing in 1995 when she gave that famous speech and said, “Women’s rights are human rights and human rights are women’s rights.” I reported from Afghanistan under Taliban rule in 1998 and understood what women were dealing with there. In a crisis, women and girls are often the first to suffer. In Darfur, when I went there with Condoleezza Rice to a refugee camp, we met with all of these women who had been terrorized and raped and abused in refugee camps by the militias. You see it in Syria now with our withdrawal, what’s happening to women and children. And of course, we’ve seen it with the women and children on our own southern border, who’ve been separated and left unaccounted for and not reunited. I don’t think women have all the answers, but I do think that women leaders can often respond more affirmatively than men do. One of the few virtues of having been at this for as long as I have been is that I’ve gotten to experience these incredible social movements and transitions, for women in particular.
Lingerie is one of the most important wardrobe essentials—after all, it’s the first thing you put on and the last thing you take off. But even if you’re the only one enjoying it, the best lingerie brands today are designing bras and underwear that anyone can appreciate: Simple yet sexy styles that support and come in a wide range of sizes.
A handful of direct-to-consumer brands, like Cuup and Lively, are leading by example. Both are using technology—and real women’s measurements—to re-engineer lingerie that’s more size-inclusive and representative of women’s bodies. Others, like Lonely Label, Yasmin Eslami, and Savage x Fenty, hone in on the experience of wearing lingerie with fabrics and cuts that are sexy but also comfortable.
On this list, you’ll find the best places to buy lingerie across all occasions, sizes, and budgets. Whether you’re looking for cute everyday separates or want to go all-out for date night with a strappy satin set, we rounded up 21 of the best lingerie brands to shop right now.
All products featured on Glamour are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.
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