It was 1963.
New York City.
A twenty-eight-year-old freelance journalist was trying to get a serious assignment. She wanted to write about politics. She wanted to write about the growing civil rights movement.
But the male editors at the major magazines just laughed at her. They told her she was too pretty to be a serious reporter. They handed her assignments about nylon stockings, dating tips, and how to cook for a husband.
She realized that the media establishment was never going to give her a seat at the table. So, she decided to blow up the table.
She shoved her feet into three-inch stiletto heels. She strapped herself into a suffocatingly tight satin bodice. She pinned a fluffy white tail to her back and put on a pair of fake ears.
Her name was Gloria Steinem.
She went undercover as a "Bunny" at Hugh Hefner's wildly popular Playboy Club in Manhattan.
The media had spent years selling the Playboy Club as the ultimate symbol of glamorous, liberated, modern sexuality. Gloria didn't buy it. She suspected it was just the same old exploitation wrapped in a shiny new bow.
She was right.
She spent weeks working inside the club, taking meticulous notes. She documented the grueling physical demands, the rampant, normalized sexual harassment from customers, and the mathematically rigged wage system that kept the women broke and dependent on the club.
She published her two-part exposé, "A Bunny's Tale." It was a sensation. It completely shattered the glamorous facade of Hefner's empire.
But exposing the Playboy Club wasn't her endgame. It was just her opening act.
Gloria realized that as long as she was writing for magazines owned and edited by men, she would always be playing by their rules. The stories that actually mattered to women domestic violence, workplace discrimination, the fight for reproductive rights were considered "unprintable" by the mainstream press.
So, in 1971, she joined forces with a group of fierce, radical women to do something unprecedented.
They launched their own magazine.
They called it Ms. The title itself was a rebellion. At the time, women were defined entirely by their marital status Miss if you were single, Mrs. if you belonged to a man. Ms. was a declaration of independence.
The male publishing executives predicted the magazine would be a catastrophic failure. They gave it a month.
The preview issue sold out of its 300,000-copy run in just eight days.
Ms. magazine gave an entire generation of women the vocabulary to articulate their oppression. It became the beating heart of the second-wave feminist movement.
Gloria became the most famous feminist in the world. With her signature aviator glasses and streaked hair, she weaponized the very same conventional attractiveness that the media had tried to use to dismiss her. She forced the television cameras to pay attention, and when they rolled, she hit them with razor-sharp, unapologetic political demands.
She spent decades traveling the globe, organizing strikes, marching for the Equal Rights Amendment, and building a movement that spanned class and racial lines.
She is now in her nineties, and she has never stopped fighting.
As she famously warned: "The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off."
She taught us that if the establishment refuses to let you tell your story, you don't lower your voice. You build your own printing press.
She was the brilliant political journalist who went undercover in a bunny suit to expose an exploitative empire, and then forged a publishing revolution that fundamentally changed what it meant to be a woman in America."
SOURCE: Giggle Grid FB page
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"As a woman I am extremely aware that the reason I have my rights is because a woman somewhere got up, got MOUTHY, organised, raged, made herself INCREDIBLY inconvenient until things changed for the better for all of us. Which is precisely why I see women who uphold the patriarchy as traitors to all women. It's wild how some women are so quick to benefit from the sacrifices of others, yet they won't lift a finger to challenge the system.
These women are complicit in their own oppression, and it's heartbreaking. They're perpetuating the same toxic ideologies that have held us back for centuries. Newsflash: if you're not actively working to dismantle the patriarchy, you're contributing to it.
We need to call out these women, not celebrate them. We need to recognize the harm they're causing and encourage them to do better. The women who fought for our rights didn't do it so we could be silent accomplices to the system.
How do you think we can hold women accountable for upholding the patriarchy?
SOURCE: FB page Real Point
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