Women and Girls

Subterms

    Latest story

    138 Shares84 Views

    Cassie’s Lawyer and Women’s Groups React to Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Verdict

    by

    Douglas Wigdor, a lawyer for Ms. Ventura, said, “He’s finally been held responsible for two federal crimes, something that he’s never faced in his life.”A lawyer for Casandra Ventura, the star witness in the federal trial against Sean Combs, said he was “pleased” that Mr. Combs had been “held accountable for something.”The jury in the case handed down a mixed verdict on Wednesday, finding Mr. Combs not guilty of federal sex trafficking and racketeering charges, the most serious charges against him, both of which carry a possible life sentence. But it convicted him of two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution — violations of the Mann Act — after an eight-week trial. Mr. Combs, who will be sentenced at a later date, and his lawyers were elated in court when the verdict was read.Outside the courthouse, Douglas Wigdor, a lawyer for Ms. Ventura, said: “He’s finally been held responsible for two federal crimes, something that he’s never faced in his life.”Women’s advocacy groups and organizations that fight sexual violence praised the women who came forward to testify in the Sean Combs trial but expressed disappointment in the verdict.Advocacy groups had been closely following the deliberations, and they swiftly reacted to the verdict. Most expressed disappointment while praising the two former girlfriends of Mr. Combs’s — Ms. Ventura and a woman known in court as “Jane” — who came forward to tell their stories in often excruciating and lurid detail. Both testified that Mr. Combs had used violence and financial leverage to coerce them into having sex with male escorts.Arisha Hatch, the interim executive director of the women’s advocacy group UltraViolet, condemned the verdict as “a stain on a criminal justice system that for decades has failed to hold accountable abusers like Diddy.” She called it “an indictment of a culture in which not believing women and victims of sexual assault remains endemic.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    More stories

    • 100 Shares73 Views

      in Music

      8 Rising Pop Girls You Should Hear Now

      by

      Reneé Rapp, Ethel Cain, Suzy Clue and more from prospects experimenting with undeniably modern modes while recognizing their place in the Pop Girl lineage.Reneé RappMario Anzuoni/ReutersDear listeners,This is Joe from The Times’s music team, once again filling in for Lindsay, a.k.a. taking any opportunity to foist my taste onto all of you.I’ve been thinking, as I often do, about the nature of stardom and whether its essential ingredients are becoming more scarce, or have long since dried up. Despite coalescing conventional wisdom, I’m invested, personally and professionally, in the idea that they have not, and that many of our most promising young musicians still possess an ineffable magnetism and some amazing hooks, even if they may never reach the heights of their monoculture forebears.Online, where music fandom gets messy but also meaty, the idea of the Pop Girls (and especially the Main Pop Girls) looms large. This constantly regenerating hierarchy includes — arguably; all of this is arguable and should be argued — the mostly emeritus legends (Madonna, Mariah, Britney), the modern imperialists (Beyoncé, Taylor, Ariana) and the lame duck in-betweeners (Katy, Gaga, Rihanna). Endless debates can be had about who fits where, and what that means for Billie, Cardi, Dua, Charli and anyone else who can get by with a single name.In the last few years especially, the field has blown open: Even the niches have niches and one person’s pop queen can be another’s “who?” (Justice for Rosalía, etc.) Even as Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan have solidified their footing, not just on the internet but also the radio, streaming and IRL in concert, there are infinite iterating tiers of singers who are alternately reverent, irreverent, brash, manufactured, original and otherwise.These eight new songs are my summer picks from the current class of hot prospects, all of whom are doing something I see as undeniably modern, while also recognizing their place in the Pop Girl lineage, defined most broadly.Your money’s not coming with you to heaven,JoeWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      Two Decades After Her Death, Celia Cruz Lives On for Her Fans

      by

      Celia Cruz reigned for decades as the “Queen of Salsa,” with her signature shout of “¡Azúúúcar!” expressing in Spanish her music’s brand of joy and optimism. Twenty-two years after her death, the Cuban powerhouse singer still captivates her fans.The petite woman with a raspy voice wore tight, glittering dresses and colorful wigs and danced in high heels while singing her hit Spanish-language songs such as “La negra tiene tumbao” and “Ríe y llora.”Born Oct. 21, 1925, Ms. Cruz began her career in Cuba in 1940 and continued it in exile, producing more than 70 international albums and winning multiple Grammy Awards and Latin Grammys.She moved to New York in 1961, and brought her musical Cuban roots and mixed them with Puerto Rican and later Dominican rhythms, helping to usher the birth of salsa as a popular Latino genre in the United States.“When people hear me sing,” she said in an interview with The New York Times in 1985, “I want them to be happy, happy, happy. I don’t want them thinking about when there’s not any money, or when there’s fighting at home. My message is always ‘felicidad’ — happiness.”Ms. Cruz died in 2003 at her longtime home in Fort Lee, N.J., from complications after a surgery for a brain tumor. She was 77. Following a tour of her coffin in Miami, masses of fans honored her at a public viewing in New York City.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 100 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      After ‘Another Simple Favor,’ Watch These Female-Centered Movies

      by

      The filmmaker behind “Another Simple Favor” likes when things get “really, really extra” onscreen.Across outrageous, often scatological comedies like “Bridesmaids,” “Spy” and “A Simple Favor,” the director Paul Feig, 62, has cemented his unlikely cinematic reputation as a girl’s guy.“I hate to say ‘strong female characters,’ because I don’t like that term,” he said in a video call from Los Angeles. “I just love seeing men and women as equals on the screen, so that’s what I’m always trying to do.”Feig, a Royal Oak, Mich., native whose latest film, “Another Simple Favor,” is streaming on Amazon Prime Video, reflected on some of his favorite moments in movie parity.‘Bringing Up Baby’ (1938)Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in “Bringing Up Baby.”John Springer Collection/Corbis, via Getty ImagesIn Howard Hawks’s classic screwball comedy, Cary Grant plays a fussy paleontologist and Katharine Hepburn a madcap heiress with a pet leopard (the titular “Baby”) and a penchant for trouble. (Rent or buy it on major platforms.)“Honestly, I didn’t really discover these movies until I went to film school at USC. But over the years of watching comedy I had seen it become completely male-dominated, where women were just sort of props around the men to make fun of or to get in their way.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 100 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      Dea Kulumbegashvili’s ‘April’ Wont Be Shown in Georgia

      by

      The director Dea Kulumbegashvili’s new movie, “April,” shines a light on the complicated situation for women seeking abortions in Georgia.Dea Kulumbegashvili may be the most celebrated filmmaker to emerge in the past decade from Georgia, a nation of about 3.6 million people that was once part of the Soviet Union. Her debut, “Beginning” (2020), was her country’s submission for the best international feature Oscar in 2021, and her latest, “April,” which opens in U.S. theaters on Friday, won the special jury prize at the 2024 Venice Film Festival.Yet Kulumbegashvili, who lives in Berlin, doesn’t feel particularly welcome back home.“April,” which follows an obstetrician who performs abortions illegally, has not been screened in Georgia. “It has no distribution potential because no one wants to deal with something that would cause a problem with the authorities,” Kulumbegashvili said in a video interview. Though abortion is legal in Georgia for pregnancies under 12 weeks, the reality for women — especially those living outside the major cities — is complicated. A vast majority of Georgians are Orthodox Christians, and traditional ideas about gender roles and domesticity hold sway in most families.The film was “essentially shot in secret,” Kulumbegashvili said. She did not seek domestic funding, instead relying on her producers — who included Luca Guadagnino, the Italian director of “Challengers” and “Call Me by Your Name” — to raise money from international sources.Kulumbegashvili’s grew up in Lagodekhi, a small town at the foot of the Caucasus Mountains, near the border with Azerbaijan; both “Beginning” and “April” were shot there. Underage marriage is a continuing issue in the town, Kulumbegashvili said — as it is in the rest of the country. Ia Sukhitashvili as Nina, an obstetrician who performs illegal abortions, in “April.”Metrograph PicturesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Girls to the Front: Punk Pioneers Are Coming to Lincoln Center

      by

      The institution’s annual American Songbook series honors “singer outsiders” including Fanny and Poly Styrene in events curated by Kathleen Hanna and Tamar-kali.For more than 65 years, Lincoln Center has hosted virtuoso concert musicians, opera singers and ballet stars.But a noise queen with ripped tights and a screeching guitar?Enter Kathleen Hanna and Tamar-kali, musicians with big bootprints in the punk scene, and curators of the latest iteration of Lincoln Center’s venerable American Songbook series. Their version honors “singer outsiders,” which includes a series of concerts and tributes to acts like the Slits, Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex and more, this month and next. It’s the first time Lincoln Center has celebrated the raw, propulsive D.I.Y. genre of punk, let alone the women who kicked their way through.The idea was to introduce an uptown audience to “our canon,” as Hanna, the Bikini Kill and Le Tigre frontwoman, and riot grrrl originator, put it. They booked contemporary artists to showcase punk’s elasticity, and to highlight styles that have historically been overlooked.“As a songwriter, there’s a lot of delegitimizing of aggressive music,” Tamar-kali said. But curating for Lincoln Center offered validation: “It just feels like I’m real musician now,” Hanna said, and they both laughed.Tamar-kali, a Brooklyn singer and composer (born Tamar-kali Brown), helped found the New York collective Sista Grrrl Riot, an outlet for feminist Afropunk, in the late ’90s; she and Hanna met in the early aughts and have been seeking ways to work together since.“As a songwriter, there’s a lot of delegitimizing of aggressive music,” said Tamar-kali, one of the series’ curators.Jack Vartoogian/Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 88 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      There’s Always Room in the Clown Car

      by

      For centuries, clowns have mostly been men. A new group of talent is changing that.AS A YOUNG woman in Mexico City, Gaby Muñoz, a 43-year-old performer known onstage as Chula the Clown, recalls, putting on makeup with her friends was always a fraught experience. “There was this whole idea of how to be a woman. They had this beautiful hair and these divine bodies, and I would look in the mirror and think, ‘Well, I guess not in this life.’ That made me laugh,” she says. As Chula — her round face washed white, her lips a tiny red heart, her eyebrows painted into inquisitive asymmetry — Muñoz, who this spring will begin touring through Europe and Central and South America, has played a jilted bride and a doddering old lady. She’s used her open, expressive face and antic physicality to joke wordlessly about loss, aging in a woman’s body and other concepts that have long been overlooked in the male-dominated world of clowns. For Muñoz, laughter isn’t an end in itself but rather, she says, “a way to connect.”Clowns, jesters, harlequins and fools have, of course, played a similar role throughout history. In ancient Greece, they served as ribald choristers in epic dramas, while emperors in Han dynasty China delighted in the buffoonish exertions of the court paiyou. Shakespeare’s world-weary wags spoke truth to King Lear and other royals, while the heyoka, the holy fool of many Sioux tribes, inverted day-to-day logic to provoke healing laughter. The emblematic sad clown that we know today evolved from the melancholic, talc-dusted Pedrolino of 16th-century Italian commedia dell’arte, while the contemporary circus clown, with his exaggerated face paint and physical wit, debuted on a London stage around 1800. (The one dressed in an ill-fitting suit and oversize shoes emerged as his clumsy foil seven decades later.) Though ritually and physically distinct, clowns have always been, as the heyoka John Fire Lame Deer writes with Richard Erdoes in their 1972 book, “Lame Deer Seeker of Visions,” “sacred, funny, powerful, ridiculous, holy, shameful, visionary.” They were also almost always men.During her childhood in Estonia, the 29-year-old London-based clown Julia Masli dreamed of acting in tragedies for exactly that reason: comedy, she assumed, was a man’s game. When, in 2017, she watched the legendary English clown Lucy Hopkins perform in Brighton for the first time, “seeing a woman do something so absurd and free felt like a revolution,” she says. In Masli’s show “Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha,” which debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2023 and has since toured internationally, she appears onstage as a doe-eyed Victorian vagabond who asks audience members to share their problems. As she offers solutions both genuine and absurd — enlisting a bored office worker to record the show’s minutes; duct-taping a lonely young woman to a group of strangers onstage — she transforms the emotional labor so often foisted on women into a source of laughter and catharsis.OTHER RISING FEMALE clowns, like the 26-year-old English actress Frankie Thompson and the 32-year-old Swiss Mexican theater artist Paulina Lenoir, use womanhood itself as a source of humor. In the former’s “Body Show,” performed with her collaborator the 29-year-old trans masculine anarchist clown Liv Ello, Thompson forgoes exaggerated makeup and costume, combining lip-syncing and confrontational bouffon (an approach to clowning that emphasizes absurdity and shock) to discuss her history with anorexia. Small and blond — “people treat me like this tiny-angel special little bird to be protected,” she says — Thompson makes herself grotesque by, say, licking the stage or choking down Marmite, eliciting laughter that implicates the audience in the humiliations of body dysmorphia. Meanwhile, Lenoir’s persona Puella Eterna feminizes the physical exaggeration of the classic male clown by wearing a corset, a flamenco skirt and a giant Minnie Mouse bow in lieu of a bulging nose. As master of ceremonies at her Fool’s Moon cabaret, Puella displays the kind of unearned self-assurance that usually wins praise for men and scorn for women.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Television

      Helly vs. Helena the Most Brutal Battle on ‘Severance’

      by

      Contains spoilers about past episodes.About halfway through Season 2 of “Severance,” Helly R. is rocked by a stunning betrayal: Helena Eagan, masquerading as Helly, has deceived Mark S. into having sex with her, believing he was sleeping with Helly.The grift was not terribly difficult to pull off. Helly and Helena are the same person after all, albeit with a consciousness split in two by the “severance” procedure. That technology, meant to compartmentalize memories and — in theory — alleviate the painful or boring parts of life, is the foundation on which the hit show’s universe is built. The many ethical, moral and physical consequences that accompany it have helped make “Severance” one of the most dissected TV shows in years.Helena is the “outie,” a fully realized human above ground; Helly is the “innie,” a “severed” employee essentially being held prisoner below ground in an office run by the mysterious Lumon Industries.Helena’s sexual betrayal was just one in a series of tit-for-tat expressions of disgust, disrespect and resentment between the two women who are one woman (played by Britt Lower, who walks the fraught line between the characters with tremendous nuance).In Season 1, Helly attempted to kill Helena in what would have amounted to a murder-suicide by hanging herself in an elevator that serves as a psychic breaker switch between the consciousness of innies and outies.Before that, Helly tried to appeal to Helena, asking to resign from her post at Lumon. When management told her that Helena had declined, Helly didn’t believe her outie would allow her to suffer against her will. So as a warning to Lumon leaders — whom Helly believed must be responsible for holding her captive — she threatened to guillotine her own (and therefore Helena’s) fingers with a paper cutter.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 88 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      ‘The Interview’: Lady Gaga’s Latest Experiment? Happiness.

      by

      Over the course of her long career, Lady Gaga has proved herself to be one of music’s great shape-shifters. She has gone from the dance pop of her earliest albums, like “The Fame” (2008), to the rockier “Born This Way” (2011), to country-inflected sounds on “Joanne” (2016), to singing American Songbook standards alongside her friend Tony Bennett. Despite surely making her record label nervous a few times, the mercurial nature of Lady Gaga’s gift has come at no discernible cost to her career. She is one of only three solo artists — Michael and Janet Jackson being the others — to have hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart multiple times across three different decades. She has also earned 14 Grammy Awards, including one earlier this year for her duet with Bruno Mars, “Die With a Smile.”All that success made it especially intriguing to learn that her new album, “Mayhem,” which arrived this week, would be a return to the pop sounds of her early work. A step into familiar territory is a curious one for someone so steadfastly set on surprise. Was she hoping to capture some nostalgia? Looking for back-to-basics rejuvenation? Or could it be that making a “classic-sounding” Lady Gaga album was going to be some sort of meta examination of her own music and image?As she explained it when we spoke in February, the answer is, in a way, all of the above. At 38 years old, and after some time lost to fibromyalgia and personal trauma, Gaga finally felt ready to reclaim a sound that belonged to her. She also, thanks in no small part to her fiancé, the entrepreneur Michael Polansky, felt supported enough to do it. Which is proof that, for a world-famous pop star anyway, a little normalcy can be the most productive change of all.Listen to the Conversation With Lady GagaThe pop superstar reflects on her struggles with mental health, the pressures of the music industry and why she’s returned to the sound that made her famous.Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Amazon | iHeart | NYT Audio AppIn an announcement for “Mayhem,” you referred to your “fear” of going back to the pop music that your earliest fans loved. Why were you scared of that? You know, I made my artistic way living on the Lower East Side starting around 17 years old, and worked the New York music scene as much as I could. Ultimately that landed me into making “The Fame,” my first studio album. That music came out of the culture of people that I was living with at the time. I was surrounded by musicians, photographers, club promoters, people that lived and breathed art. It was a community of support, and one of the reasons I was afraid was I was so far away now from that community. It also felt like maybe I would just be recycling something that I had done before. But ultimately I decided that I really wanted to do it and that this sonic style and aesthetic really did belong to me.How do you characterize that sound? My sound is an amalgamation of the music that helped me fall in love with music. So it’s got classic rock in it, disco, electronic music, ’80s synth. It’s sort of like picking and choosing my favorite fragments of songs that I loved throughout my childhood. It is everything I love about music but all in one place. I didn’t always do that. Sometimes, in my records, I decided, OK, I’m going to make my version of a country record. More