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"Tarana Burke, thank you. It's pretty amazing, the impact that one person can have on another. It matters to be heard." Boldly BuzzFeedYellow has changed its name to Boldly. It's the same content you know and love just Bolder.

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For me, this is one of the first big moves of feminist praxis.  Inez Milholland became a familiar face in households

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Chimamanda going around and spreading the word that we should all be feminists, and fight for equal rights for all.

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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: We should all be feminists

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We teach girls that they can have ambition, but not too much ... to be successful, but not too successful, or they'll threaten men, says author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. In this classic talk that started a worldwide conversation about feminism, Adichie asks that we begin to dream about and plan for a different, fairer world -- of happier men and women who are truer to themselves.

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Women going out and marching to draw attention to their human rights. And not just women as you can clearly see in the picture.

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Norma McCorvey went to the supreme court to fight for her ability to make a decision for her own body.

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Facts:
January 22, 1973 - The US Supreme Court, in a 7-2 decision, affirms the legality of a woman's right to have an abortion under the Fourteenth amendment to the Constitution.

1971 - The case is filed by Norma McCorvey, known in court documents as Jane ROE against Henry WADE, the district attorney of Dallas County from 1951 to 1987, who enforced a Texas law that prohibited abortion, except to save a woman's life.

The Constitutional Question: Does the Constitution embrace the right of a woman to obtain an abortion, nullifying the Texas prohibition?

The ruling allows for legal abortions during the entire pregnancy, but set up conditions to allow states to regulate abortion during the second and third trimesters.

The Decision:
The Court held that a woman's right to an abortion fell within the right to privacy (recognized in Griswold v. Connecticut) protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. The decision gave a woman a right to abortion during the entirety of the pregnancy and defined different levels of state interest for regulating abortion in the second and third trimesters.

The ruling affected laws in 46 states.

Legal Timeline:The Supreme Court agrees to hear the case filed by Norma McCorvey, known in court documents as Jane ROE, against Henry WADE, the district attorney of Dallas County from 1951 to 1987, who enforced a Texas law that prohibited abortion, except to save a woman's life. The Texas law had been declared unconstitutional in an earlier federal district court case (United States v. Vuitch, 1971). Wade ignored the decision and both sides appealed.

December 13, 1971 - The case is argued before the US Supreme Court.

October 11, 1972 - The case is argued before the US Supreme Court.

January 22, 1973 - The US Supreme Court, in a 7-2 decision, affirms the legality of a woman's right to have an abortion under the Fourteenth amendment to the Constitution.

June 17, 2003 - Norma McCorvey (Jane Roe) files a motion with the US District Court in Dallas to have the case overturned and asks the court to consider new evidence that abortion hurts women. Included are 1,000 affidavits from women who say they regret their abortions.

September 14, 2004 - A three-judge panel of the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans dismisses a motion from the original plaintiff in Roe v. Wade to have the case overturned, a court clerk tells CNN. McCorvey's motion claimed she had new information that would affect the 1973 case.

The Players:
Norma McCorvey, who was known as Jane Roe, was a Texas resident who sought to obtain an abortion. Texas law prohibited abortions except to save the pregnant mother's life. McCorvey was pregnant when she became the lead plaintiff in the case. She gave up the baby for adoption.

Norma McCorvey has since come forward and changed sides on the abortion debate. In 1997, McCorvey started Roe No More, a pro-life outreach organization that was dissolved in 2008. McCorvey died on February 18, 2017.

Henry Wade - District Attorney of Dallas County from 1951 to 1987. Norma McCorvey sued him because he enforced a law that prohibited abortion, except to save a woman's life. He died on March 1, 2001.

Sarah Weddington - Lawyer for Norma McCorvey.

Linda Coffee - Lawyer for Norma McCorvey.

Jay Floyd - Argued the cause for Texas in the first argument.

Robert C. Flowers - Argued the cause for Texas in the second argument.

Supreme Court Justice Opinions:
Majority: Harry A. Blackmun (for The Court), William J. Brennan, Lewis F. Powell Jr., Thurgood Marshall

Concurring: Warren Burger, William Orville Douglas, Potter Stewart

Dissenting: William H. Rehnquist, Byron White

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Facts: January 22, 1973 - The US Supreme Court, in a 7-2 decision, affirms the legality of a woman's right to have an abortion under the Fourteenth amendment to the Constitution.

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#metoo movement

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Movie stars are supposedly nothing like you and me. They're svelte, glamorous, self-possessed. They wear dresses we can't afford and live in houses we can only dream of. Yet it turns out that-in the most painful and personal ways-movie stars are more like you and me than we ever knew.

In 1997, just before Ashley Judd's career took off, she was invited to a meeting with Harvey Weinstein, head of the starmaking studio Miramax, at a Beverly Hills hotel. Astounded and offended by Weinstein's attempt to coerce her into bed, Judd managed to escape. But instead of keeping quiet about the kind of encounter that could easily shame a woman into silence, she began spreading the word.

"I started talking about Harvey the minute that it happened," Judd says in an interview with TIME. "Literally, I exited that hotel room at the Peninsula Hotel in 1997 and came straight downstairs to the lobby, where my dad was waiting for me, because he happened to be in Los Angeles from Kentucky, visiting me on the set. And he could tell by my face-to use his words-that something devastating had happened to me. I told him. I told everyone."

She recalls one screenwriter friend telling her that Weinstein's behavior was an open secret passed around on the whisper network that had been furrowing through Hollywood for years. It allowed for people to warn others to some degree, but there was no route to stop the abuse. "Were we supposed to call some fantasy attorney general of moviedom?" Judd asks. "There wasn't a place for us to report these experiences."

Finally, in October-when Judd went on the record about Weinstein's behavior in the New York Times, the first star to do so-the world listened. (Weinstein said he "never laid a glove" on Judd and denies having had nonconsensual sex with other accusers.)

When movie stars don't know where to go, what hope is there for the rest of us? What hope is there for the janitor who's being harassed by a co-worker but remains silent out of fear she'll lose the job she needs to support her children? For the administrative assistant who repeatedly fends off a superior who won't take no for an answer? For the hotel housekeeper who never knows, as she goes about replacing towels and cleaning toilets, if a guest is going to corner her in a room she can't escape?

Like the "problem that has no name," the disquieting malaise of frustration and repression among postwar wives and homemakers identified by Betty Friedan more than 50 years ago, this moment is born of a very real and potent sense of unrest. Yet it doesn't have a leader, or a single, unifying tenet. The hashtag #MeToo (swiftly adapted into #BalanceTonPorc, #YoTambien, #Ana_kaman and many others), which to date has provided an umbrella of solidarity for millions of people to come forward with their stories, is part of the picture, but not all of it.

This reckoning appears to have sprung up overnight. But it has actually been simmering for years, decades, centuries. Women have had it with bosses and co-workers who not only cross boundaries but don't even seem to know that boundaries exist. They've had it with the fear of retaliation, of being blackballed, of being fired from a job they can't afford to lose. They've had it with the code of going along to get along. They've had it with men who use their power to take what they want from women. These silence breakers have started a revolution of refusal, gathering strength by the day, and in the past two months alone, their collective anger has spurred immediate and shocking results: nearly every day, CEOs have been fired, moguls toppled, icons disgraced. In some cases, criminal charges have been brought.

Emboldened by Judd, Rose McGowan and a host of other prominent accusers, women everywhere have begun to speak out about the inappropriate, abusive and in some cases illegal behavior they've faced. When multiple harassment claims bring down a charmer like former Today show host Matt Lauer, women who thought they had no recourse see a new, wide-open door. When a movie star says #MeToo, it becomes easier to believe the cook who's been quietly enduring for years.

The women and men who have broken their silence span all races, all income classes, all occupations and virtually all corners of the globe. They might labor in California fields, or behind the front desk at New York City's regal Plaza Hotel, or in the European Parliament. They're part of a movement that has no formal name. But now they have a voice.

II

In a windowless room at a two-story soundstage in San Francisco's Mission District, a group of women from different worlds met for the first time. Judd, every bit the movie star in towering heels, leaned in to shake hands with Isabel Pascual, a woman from Mexico who works picking strawberries and asked to use a pseudonym to protect her family. Beside her, Susan Fowler, a former Uber engineer, eight months pregnant, spoke softly with Adama Iwu, a corporate lobbyist in Sacramento. A young hospital worker who had flown in from Texas completed the circle. She too is a victim of sexual harassment but was there anonymously, she said, as an act of solidarity to represent all those who could not speak out.

From a distance, these women could not have looked more different. Their ages, their families, their religions and their ethnicities were all a world apart. Their incomes differed not by degree but by universe: Iwu pays more in rent each month than Pascual makes in two months.

But on that November morning, what separated them was less important than what brought them together: a shared experience. Over the course of six weeks, TIME interviewed dozens of people representing at least as many industries, all of whom had summoned extraordinary personal courage to speak out about sexual harassment at their jobs. They often had eerily similar stories to share.

In almost every case, they described not only the vulgarity of the harassment itself-years of lewd comments, forced kisses, opportunistic gropes-but also the emotional and psychological fallout from those advances. Almost everybody described wrestling with a palpable sense of shame. Had she somehow asked for it? Could she have deflected it? Was she making a big deal out of nothing?

"I thought, What just happened? Why didn't I react?" says the anonymous hospital worker who fears for her family's livelihood should her story come out in her small community. "I kept thinking, Did I do something, did I say something, did I look a certain way to make him think that was O.K.?" It's a poisonous, useless thought, she adds, but how do you avoid it? She remembers the shirt she was wearing that day. She can still feel the heat of her harasser's hands on her body.

Nearly all of the people TIME interviewed about their experiences expressed a crushing fear of what would happen to them personally, to their families or to their jobs if they spoke up.

For some, the fear was born of a threat of physical violence. Pascual felt trapped and terrified when her harasser began to stalk her at home, but felt she was powerless to stop him. If she told anyone, the abuser warned her, he would come after her or her children.

Those who are often most vulnerable in society-immigrants, people of color, people with disabilities, low-income workers and LGBTQ people-described many types of dread. If they raised their voices, would they be fired? Would their communities turn against them? Would they be killed? According to a 2015 survey by the National Center for Transgender Equality, 47% of transgender people report being sexually assaulted at some point in their lives, both in and out of the workplace.

Juana Melara, who has worked as a hotel housekeeper for decades, says she and her fellow housekeepers didn't complain about guests who exposed themselves or masturbated in front of them for fear of losing the paycheck they needed to support their families. Melara recalls "feeling the pressure of someone's eyes" on her as she cleaned a guest's room. When she turned around, she remembers, a man was standing in the doorway, blocked by the cleaning cart, with his erect penis exposed. She yelled at the top of her lungs and scared him into leaving, then locked the door behind him. "Nothing happened to me that time, thank God," she recalls.

While guests come and go, some employees must continue to work side by side with their harassers. Crystal Washington was thrilled when she was hired as a hospitality coordinator at the Plaza, a storied hotel whose allure is as strong for people who want to work there as it is for those who can afford a suite. "Walking in, it's breathtaking," she says.

But then, she says, a co-worker began making crude remarks to her like "I can tell you had sex last night" and groping her. One of those encounters was even caught on camera, but the management did not properly respond, her lawyers say.

Washington has joined with six other female employees to file a sexual-harassment suit against the hotel. But she cannot afford to leave the job and says she must force herself out of bed every day to face the man she's accused. "It's a dream to be an employee there," Washington says. "And then you find out what it really is, and it's a nightmare." (Fairmont Hotels & Resorts, which owns the Plaza, said in a statement to TIME that it takes remedial action against harassment when warranted.)

Other women, like the actor Selma Blair, weathered excruciating threats. Blair says she arrived at a hotel restaurant for a meeting with the independent film director James Toback in 1999 only to be told that he would like to see her in his room. There, she says, Toback told her that she had to learn to be more vulnerable in her craft and asked her to strip down. She took her top off. She says he then propositioned her for sex, and when she refused, he blocked the door and forced her to watch him masturbate against her leg. Afterward, she recalls him telling her that if she said anything, he would stab her eyes out with a Bic pen and throw her in the Hudson River.

Blair says Toback lorded the encounter over her for decades. "I had heard from others that he was slandering me, saying these sexual things about me, and it just made me even more afraid of him," Blair says in an interview with TIME. "I genuinely thought for almost 20 years, He's going to kill me." ( Toback has denied the allegations, saying he never met his accusers or doesn't remember them.)

Many of the people who have come forward also mentioned a different fear, one less visceral but no less real, as a reason for not speaking out: if you do, your complaint becomes your identity. "'Susan Fowler, the famous victim of sexual harassment,'" says the woman whose blog post ultimately led Uber CEO Travis Kalanick to resign and the multibillion-dollar startup to oust at least 20 other employees. "Nobody wants to be the buzzkill," adds Lindsey Reynolds, one of the women who blew the whistle on a culture of harassment at the restaurant group run by the celebrity chef John Besh. (The Besh Group says it is implementing new policies to create a culture of respect. Besh apologized for "unacceptable behavior" and "moral failings," and resigned from the company. )

Iwu, the lobbyist, says she considered the same risks after she was groped in front of several colleagues at an event. She was shocked when none of her male co-workers stepped in to stop the assault. The next week, she organized 147 women to sign an open letter exposing harassment in California government. When she told people about the campaign, she says they were wary. "Are you sure you want to do this?" they warned her. "Remember Anita Hill."

Taylor Swift says she was made to feel bad about the consequences that her harasser faced. After she complained about a Denver radio DJ named David Mueller, who reached under her skirt and grabbed her rear end, Mueller was fired. He sued Swift for millions in damages. She countersued for a symbolic $1 and then testified about the incident in August. Mueller's lawyer asked her, on the witness stand, whether she felt bad that she'd gotten him fired.

"I'm not going to let you or your client make me feel in any way that this is my fault," she told the lawyer. "I'm being blamed for the unfortunate events of his life that are a product of his decisions. Not mine." (Mueller said he would appeal.)

In an interview with TIME, Swift says that moment on the stand fueled her indignation. "I figured that if he would be brazen enough to assault me under these risky circumstances," she says, "imagine what he might do to a vulnerable, young artist if given the chance." Like the five women gathered at that echoing soundstage in San Francisco, and like all of the dozens, then hundreds, then millions of women who came forward with their own stories of harassment, she was done feeling intimidated. Actors and writers and journalists and dishwashers and fruit pickers alike: they'd had enough. What had manifested as shame exploded into outrage. Fear became fury.

This was the great unleashing that turned the #MeToo hashtag into a rallying cry. The phrase was first used more than a decade ago by social activist Tarana Burke as part of her work building solidarity among young survivors of harassment and assault. A friend of the actor Alyssa Milano sent her a screenshot of the phrase, and Milano, almost on a whim, tweeted it out on Oct. 15. "If you've been sexually harassed or assaulted write 'me too' as a reply to this tweet," she wrote, and then went to sleep. She woke up the next day to find that more than 30,000 people had used #MeToo. Milano burst into tears.

At first, those speaking out were mostly from the worlds of media and entertainment, but the hashtag quickly spread. "We have to keep our focus on people of different class and race and gender," says Burke, who has developed a friendship with Milano via text messages. By November, California farmworkers, Pascual among them, were marching on the streets of Hollywood to express their solidarity with the stars.

Women were no longer alone. "There's something really empowering about standing up for what's right," says Fowler, who has grown comfortable with her new reputation as a whistle-blower. "It's a badge of honor."

III

Discussions of sexual harassment in polite company tend to rely on euphemisms: harassment becomes "inappropriate behavior," assault becomes "misconduct," rape becomes "abuse." We're accustomed to hearing those softened words, which downplay the pain of the experience. That's one of the reasons why the Access Hollywood tape that surfaced in October 2016 was such a jolt. The language used by the man who would become America's 45th President, captured on a 2005 recording, was, by any standard, vulgar. He didn't just say that he'd made a pass; he "moved on her like a bitch." He didn't just talk about fondling women; he bragged that he could "grab 'em by the pussy."

That Donald Trump could express himself that way and still be elected President is part of what stoked the rage that fueled the Women's March the day after his Inauguration. It's why women seized on that crude word as the emblem of the protest that dwarfed Trump's Inauguration crowd size. "All social movements have highly visible precipitating factors," says Aldon Morris, a professor of sociology at Northwestern University. "In this case, you had Harvey Weinstein, and before that you had Trump."

Megyn Kelly, the NBC anchor who revealed in October that she had complained to Fox News executives about Bill O'Reilly's treatment of women, and who was a target of Trump's ire during the campaign, says the tape as well as the tenor of the election turned the political into the personal. "I have real doubts about whether we'd be going through this if Hillary Clinton had won, because I think that President Trump's election in many ways was a setback for women," says Kelly, who noted that not all women at the march were Clinton supporters. "But the overall message to us was that we don't really matter."

So it was not entirely surprising that 2017 began with women donning "pussy hats" and marching on the nation's capital in a show of unity and fury. What was startling was the size of the protest. It was one of the largest in U.S. history and spawned satellite marches in all 50 states and more than 50 other countries.

Summer Zervos, a former contestant on The Apprentice, was one of roughly 20 women to accuse the President of sexual harassment. She filed a defamation suit against Trump days before his Inauguration after he disputed her claims by calling her a liar. A New York judge is expected to decide soon if the President is immune to civil suits while in office. No matter the outcome, the allegations added fuel to a growing fire.

By February, the movement had made its way to the billionaire dream factories of Silicon Valley, when Fowler spoke out about her "weird year" as an engineer at Uber. "I remember feeling powerless and like there was no one looking out for us because we had an admitted harasser in the White House," Fowler says. "I felt like I had to take action."

Barely two months later, Fox News cut ties with O'Reilly after the New York Times reported that he and the company had spent $13 million to settle claims against him from five women. In October, the Times revealed a sixth settlement, bringing that total to more than $45 million. Wendy Walsh, a psychologist and former guest on the network, was one of the first women to share her story about the star anchor-but she was initially reluctant to go on the record. "I was afraid for my kids, I was afraid of the retaliation," she says. "I know what men can do when they're angry."

Eventually she allowed her name to be used. "I felt it was my duty," Walsh says, "as a mother of daughters, as an act of love for women everywhere and the women who are silenced, to be brave."

The downfall of O'Reilly, who has denied all allegations of harassment, would prove to be just the beginning of the reckoning in media and entertainment. In June, Bill Cosby was brought to trial on charges that he had drugged and sexually assaulted a woman named Andrea Constand, one of nearly 50 women who have accused Cosby of sexual assault over several decades. Although the case ended in a mistrial-it is scheduled to be retried in April-the fact that it happened at all signaled a shift in the culture, a willingness to hold even beloved and powerful men accountable for past misdeeds.

Complaints at the University of Rochester helped expose harassment in academia. The chief executive of SoFi, the $4 billion lending firm, resigned following a lawsuit over claims of sexual harassment. Then, in early October, the dam finally broke.

On Oct. 5, the New York Times published the first story to expose Weinstein, one of the most powerful men in Hollywood and a leading Democratic political fundraiser, as a serial sexual predator. The revelation was quickly followed by New Yorker investigations that widened Weinstein's list of accusers and showed the incredible lengths he went to cover his tracks. Weinstein denied the allegations, but the levers that he had long pulled to exert his influence suddenly were jammed. Fellow chieftains refused to defend him. Politicians who once courted him gave away his donations. His company's board fired him.

Within days, the head of Amazon Studios, an influential art publisher and employees at the financial-services firm Fidelity had all left their jobs over harassment claims. By the end of the month, the list of the accused had grown to include political analyst Mark Halperin, a former TIME employee; opinion-shaping literary critic Leon Wieseltier; and numerous politicians and journalists. The Oscar-winning actor Kevin Spacey was scrubbed from a completed movie.

The response to the Weinstein allegations has shaped the way people view women who come forward. In a TIME/SurveyMonkey online poll of American adults conducted Nov. 28-30, 82% of respondents said women are more likely to speak out about harassment since the Weinstein allegations. Meanwhile, 85% say they believe the women making allegations of sexual harassment.

The movement-and fallout-quickly spread around the world. Michael Fallon, Britain's Defense Secretary, quit the Cabinet after journalist Jane Merrick revealed that he had "lunged" at her in 2003, when she was a 29-year-old reporter. In France, women took to the streets chanting not only "Me too" but also " Balance ton porc," which translates roughly to "Expose your pig," a hashtag conceived by French journalist Sandra Muller. In the week after #MeToo first surfaced, versions of it swept through 85 countries, from India, where the struggle against harassment and assault had already become a national debate in recent years, to the Middle East, Asia and parts in between.

"Suddenly," says Terry Reintke, a German member of the European Parliament, who discussed her own harassment in a speech on Oct. 25, "friends from primary school or women that I know from completely different surroundings that would never call themselves feminists were starting to share their stories."

By November, the spotlight was back on American politicians. A woman named Leigh Corfman told the Washington Post that Roy Moore, the Alabama Republican nominee for the Senate, abused her when she was 14 and he was a 32-year-old assistant district attorney. Nine women have come forward to describe inappropriate encounters with Roy Moore, including several who say he pursued them when they were teenagers. Moore has called the allegations "false" and "malicious." "Specifically, I do not know any of these women nor have I ever engaged in sexual misconduct with any woman," he said in late November.

The following week, radio host Leeann Tweeden wrote that Minnesota Democratic Senator Al Franken groped her on a USO tour in 2006, before he was in office. Several other women have since come forward with similar harassment allegations against Franken, who has called on the Senate Ethics Committee to investigate his own behavior. On Dec. 5, Michigan Democratic Representative John Conyers resigned amid allegations that he had made sexual advances toward the women on his staff. He has said that the allegations "are not accurate; they are not true."

Texas Republican Representative Blake Farenthold has also found himself in the crosshairs after media reports that he used $84,000 in taxpayer dollars to settle a sexual-harassment lawsuit with a former aide in 2014. Farenthold denies that he engaged in any wrongdoing and has vowed to repay the settlement.

The accused were both Democrats and Republicans, but the consequences thus far have been limited-and often filtered through a partisan lens. In politics, at least, what constitutes disqualifying behavior seemed to depend not on your actions but on the allegiance of your tribe. In the 1990s, feminists stood up for accused abuser Bill Clinton instead of his accusers-a move many are belatedly regretting as the national conversation prompts a re-evaluation of the claims against the former President. And despite the allegations against Moore, both President Trump and the Republican National Committee support him.

That political divide was revealed in the TIME/SurveyMonkey poll, which found that Republicans were significantly more likely to excuse sexual misdeeds in their own party. The survey found that while a majority of Republicans and Democrats agree that a Democratic Congressman accused of sexual harassment should resign (71% and 74% respectively), when the accused offender was in the GOP, only 54% of Republicans would demand a resignation (compared to 82% of Democrats).

As another election cycle approaches, Americans find themselves trying to weigh one ugly act against another in a painful calculus of transgression. Is a grope caught on camera more disqualifying than a years-ago assault that was credibly reported? What are we willing to forgive or ignore or deny if the violator shares our politics?

IV

It wasn't so long ago that the boss chasing his secretary around the desk was a comic trope, a staple from vaudeville to prime-time sitcoms. There wasn't even a name for sexual harassment until just over 40 years ago; the term was coined in 1975 by a group of women at Cornell University after an employee there, Carmita Wood, filed for unemployment benefits after she had resigned because a supervisor touched her. The university denied her claim, arguing that she left the job for "personal reasons."

Wood, joined by activists from the university's human-affairs program, formed a group called Working Women United that hosted an event for workers from various fields, from mail-room clerks and servers to factory workers and administrative assistants, to talk about their own harassment experiences.

It was a proto-version of the social-media explosion we're seeing today, encouraging unity and reminding women that they were not alone. But even as public awareness about the problem of sexual harassment began to grow, legal and policy protections were almost nonexistent. In the 1970s, most businesses and institutions had no policies on sexual harassment whatsoever, and even egregious complaints were regularly dismissed.

In 1980 the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the federal agency tasked with enforcing civil rights laws in the workplace, issued guidelines declaring sexual harassment a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. It was a victory, but with caveats: even after sexual harassment became explicitly illegal, it remained difficult to lodge a complaint that stuck-in part because acts of harassment are often difficult to define. What separates an illegal act of sexual harassment from a merely annoying interaction between a boss and his subordinate? When does a boss stop just being a jerk and become a criminal? Because the Civil Rights Act offered no solid legal definition, interpretation has evolved slowly, shaped by judges and the EEOC over the past 37 years.

In 1991, Anita Hill testified before the Senate committee confirming Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, accusing him of sexual harassment and bringing national attention to the issue. But, she says, "The conversation was not about the problems in the workplace. It was about the fallout in politics."

Even now, the contours of what constitutes sexual harassment remain murky. Some of the recent stories clearly cross the line, like a boss exposing himself to a subordinate or requiring that his researcher sit on his lap. But others feel more ambiguous. Under what circumstances can you ask a colleague about their marriage? When is an invite to drinks alone a bridge too far?

Jonathan Segal, a partner at the Philadelphia law firm Duane Morris, who specializes in workplace training, says he hears that confusion in the conversations men are now having among themselves. "It's more like, 'I wonder if I should tell someone they look nice, I wonder when it's O.K. to give a hug, I wonder when I should be alone with someone in a room,'" he says.

This uncertainty can be corrosive. While everyone wants to smoke out the serial predators and rapists, there is a risk that the net may be cast too far. What happens when someone who makes a sexist joke winds up lumped into the same bucket as a boss who gropes an employee? Neither should be encouraged, but nor should they be equated.

Companies, meanwhile, are scrambling to keep up. Most large U.S.-based corporations now have fairly complete policies on sexual harassment, and many have anti-sexual harassment training programs and claim to be "zero-tolerance workplaces." A 2016 EEOC report found that a company's willingness to protect so-called rainmakers-high-performing men like Kalanick, Weinstein and O'Reilly-to be one of the most pernicious reasons C-suites and corporate boards overlooked harassment. It doesn't matter how good a company's policy is if its systems are ignored or don't work. "So much harassment training is like an episode of The Office," says Victoria Lipnic, the acting chair of the EEOC.

In some instances, sexual-harassment training has even been shown to backfire. In a 2001 study, Lisa Scherer, an associate professor of industrial-organizational psychology at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, found that while training increased knowledge about what constituted sexual harassment, it also sometimes had a corrosive effect on workplace culture. "What was disturbing was that the males who had gone through training showed a backlash effect," she says. "They said they were less willing to report sexual harassment than the males who had not gone through the training."

Employers are also girding for future allegations and lawsuits. The insurance company Nationwide reported a 15% increase in sales of employment practices liability insurances between 2016 and 2017. And Advisen, which tracks insurance trends, says that EPLI insurance price has increased 30% since 2011, which indicates that more companies are reporting losses.

Corporate boards, wary of alienating female employees and customers and of drawing bad press, have been among the quickest to make changes. Uber, for example, which built its reputation on a willingness to flout norms, used to be a guiding light for small startups. Now nobody is pitching their company as the next Uber, says Fowler. "There's a shift to, 'We're not disrupting anymore. We're trying to build something that's good for consumers and treats employees fairly.'" It's a start.

State and local governments have also taken some concrete steps. In October, the Chicago city council passed an ordinance requiring hotels to provide panic buttons to employees who work alone in hotel rooms. In Springfield, Ill., lawmakers passed a measure that will allow an investigation into a backlog of sexual-harassment complaints in the statehouse. In Arizona, pending legislation would void nondisclosure agreements signed by victims of harassment to keep them silent.

At the federal level, the House and Senate have passed new rules requiring members of Congress and their staff to complete mandatory sexual-harassment training. A handful of Senators have also introduced legislation to rein in what are known as mandatory arbitration agreements-legal clauses that can appear in employee contracts that prevent workers from suing their employers in court for any reason, including sexual harassment. Some 60 million American workers are currently bound by them.

V

We're still at the bomb-throwing point of this revolution, a reactive stage at which nuance can go into hiding. But while anger can start a revolution, in its most raw and feral form it can't negotiate the more delicate dance steps needed for true social change. Private conversations, which can't be legislated or enforced, are essential.

Norms evolve, and it's long past time for any culture to view harassment as acceptable. But there's a great deal at stake in how we assess these new boundaries-for women and men together. We can and should police criminal acts and discourage inappropriate, destructive behavior.

At least we've started asking the right questions. Ones that seem alarmingly basic in hindsight: "What if we did complain?" proposes Megyn Kelly. "What if we didn't whine, but we spoke our truth in our strongest voices and insisted that those around us did better? What if that worked to change reality right now?" Kelly acknowledges that this still feels more like a promise than a certainty. But for the moment, the world is listening.
-With reporting by Charlotte Alter and Susanna Schrobsdorff/New York, Sam Lansky/Los Angeles, Kate Samuelson/London, Maya Rhodan/Washington and Katy Steinmetz/San Francisco
Correction: The original version of this story misstated when the claims settled by Bill O'Reilly and Fox News were first disclosed. The New York Times reported in April that Fox and O'Reilly had settled five claims against him. O'Reilly left the network later that month.

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TIME Person of the Year 2017: The Silence Breakers

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Movie stars are supposedly nothing like you and me. They're svelte, glamorous, self-­possessed. They wear dresses we can't afford and live in houses we can only dream of. Yet it turns out that-in the most painful and personal ways-movie stars are more like you and me than we ever knew.

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A video with examples and how to best include everyone.

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All the different categories of intersectionality that separate people.

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In this video Pink and Channing Tatum are supposed to be playing the perfect wife and husband roles. Instead, they switch roles in an attempt to run away from the cookie cutter lifestyle of the 1950's.

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P!NK - Beautiful Trauma (Official Video)

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Ashley Graham has blazed the way for all plus size models and doesn't let anyone rip her down.

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She paved the way for a new generation of models when she broke onto the scene with her bombshell curves and body confident message.

And Ashley Graham was happy to flaunt her famous figure while teasing a glimpse of a smoldering new shoot for Vogue Italia on her Instagram account Wednesday.

Praising the fashion bible for not re-touching her physique, the supermodel, 30, slipped her incredible curves into a retro-style cheetah-print bustier in one stunning shot shared on her page.

Ashley looked breathtaking in a silky animal print one-piece designed by Dolce And Gabbana, paired with sheer hosiery.

The cover girl amped up the sex appeal with a dramatic cat eye and a full pout, courtesy of make-up artist Diane Kendal.

She let her light brown locks cascade down in a untamed yet romantic up-do.

The bombshell model later turned around to show off her derriere, which was clad in silky briefs with embroidery.

Ashley was the epitome of carefree cool in the look, tying her tresses back with a black scarf and covering her full chest in black.

In a close up, three rows of diamond earrings could be seen adorning the look, which was styled by George Cortina.

Ashley also turned heads in slinky black dresses from designers Brandon Maxwell and Marina Rinaldi as she treated her fans to snapshots of the shoot.

Ashley also embraced retro glamour at Monday night's British Fashion Awards in London.

The starlet showcased her envy-inducing body in a figure hugging Vivienne Westwood design with a flirty mermaid hem as she worked her magic on the red carpet at the Royal Albert Hall.

While there are no doubt many pining for the star's affections, Ashley is happily spoken for.

The model has been married to long-term sweetheart Justin Ervin, who she met through her church, since 2010.

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Busty Ashley Graham oozes retro glamour in stunning Vogue Italia shoot

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She paved the way for a new generation of models when she broke onto the scene with her bombshell curves and body confident message. And Ashley Graham was happy to flaunt her famous figure while teasing a glimpse of a smoldering new shoot for Vogue Italia on her Instagram account Wednesday.

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There is so much inclusion in Rihanna's Fenty Beauty line. She has 40 shades of foundation for every range of skin tone. She could have easily stuck to just 10 shades, but did not and included everybody. In her ads, she had 15 models all of different skin types. RiRi made a huge jump forward, and now everybody else is trying to catch up.

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Rihanna's New Makeup Line Celebrates Diversity

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Rihanna's hotly-anticipated makeup line, Fenty Beauty, is already being praised for its celebration of diversity online

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There are eleven news anchors listed in this line up. 10 out of the 11 anchors that were listed as being "TV's Sexiest News Anchors", were women. Are you kidding me? If I log onto CBS News website, I want to read news, not an article objectifying women who have worked very hard to get where they are.

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In this video Melissa Fabello goes over the many categories of body oppression. She discusses that when we focus on our body privilege, we forget about all the others who are oppressed in the ways we are privileged. Body oppression is not just shape, it involves how you look, dress, and much more.

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Let's have a chat, fellow thin, white, conventionally attractive women doing body acceptance work. Because often, when we have conversations about body-based oppression, we focus heavily on our own experiences and leave out a shit-ton of issues that often don't occur to us as having a place in this movement, too.

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Now former Minnesota Senator Al Franken used his white male privilege when he sexually assaulted many women. The women in congress came together to say that Franken should resign. The females in congress pushing for his resignation, is an example of women pushing back against oppression.

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If you've ever covered it or even sat in the visitor's gallery during a vote, you know what I am talking about. For years, the Senate seemed like an institution frozen in time: A group of largely old, largely white men backslapping and yukking it up -- all thrilled to be part of this most exclusive club in the world.

Sure, that has changed somewhat over the years. There are now 21 total female senators -- 16 Democrats and 5 Republicans. Washington Sen. Patty Murray of Washington is a member of the Democratic leadership.

But, for the most part, the Senate remains more "Mad Men" than "Girls."

That's what makes Wednesday's decision by a group of female Democratic Senators to come out en masse to call for the resignation of Minnesota Sen. Al Franken, a fellow Democrat, so important. They were reacting to a growing number of accusations from women that he had groped them or tried to kiss them without their consent.

"Our history, our culture is changing so dramatically in this country, so fast," Murray told CNN's Lauren Fox. "It's time for elected officials at all levels to stand up and take responsibility for who we are and what we stand for."

It began with a statement issued on Facebook by New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand just after noon. She wrote, in part:
"While Senator Franken is entitled to have the Ethics Committee conclude its review, I believe it would be better for our country if he sent a clear message that any kind of mistreatment of women in our society isn't acceptable by stepping aside to let someone else serve."
That statement was quickly followed by a series of tweets from other female Democratic senators. Mazie Hirono. Claire McCaskill. Maggie Hassan. Patty Murray. Kamala Harris.

Those coordinated calls for a Franken resignation set off an avalanche within the Democratic Party. Soon, more than a dozen of Franken's colleagues were calling on him to step aside immediately. And within an hour, Franken's office announced that he would make a statement tomorrow in Minnesota -- a statement virtually certain to be his resignation.

It was a stunning show of force by the Democratic women in the Senate. And while it came as a surprise to most people, the idea of moving in force against Franken had been percolating for some time now, one congressional aide familiar with the ongoing discussions among the female senators told CNN's Sunlen Serfaty. The source added to Serfaty that the group concluded that the allegations against Franken had reached a tipping point today. (On Wednesday, Politico reported about a new Franken accuser.)

Yes, there were politics involved here too.

Gillibrand, who was the first female Democratic senator to speak out, is regularly mentioned as a potential 2020 candidate against President Donald Trump. Ditto Harris. Same with Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who reportedly called Franken personally to tell him to quit. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, another 2020 possibility, held off on calling for Franken's resignation. But her reticence to do so is likely born of the fact that she and Franken are home-state colleagues.

Given the ongoing cultural awakening to the massive problem of men behaving inappropriately toward women and the fact that more than a dozen women during the 2016 campaign alleged that Trump had sexually harassed them, being seen as a champion for women and a leading voice of the #metoo movement is a very powerful place to be.

Then there is the fact that in six days' time, Alabama voters may well elect Roy Moore as their next senator despite the fact that the Republican nominee faces a series of allegations that he pursued relationships with teenage girls when he was in his 30s -- and, in two cases, they say he assaulted them.

The contradiction of Democrats holding their tongues on Franken -- particularly as the allegations mounted -- while condemning Republicans for failing to push Moore out of the Alabama race gave the GOP a foothold in the moral high ground argument.

"Let me tell you the hypocrisy we see at every turn," White House senior counselor Kellyanne Conway told CNN's Chris Cuomo on "New Day" Wednesday. "Al Franken is in the Senate right now. He has admitted this."

Calling for Franken's resignation clears the decks for Democrats somewhat. With Rep. John Conyers, who faces a number of sexual harassment charges, also now gone, Democrats can turn their full attention -- and outrage -- to Moore, and the Republicans who now seem resigned to the possibility he will join their ranks in six days.

But simply because there is political gain to be had from calling on Franken to resign doesn't eclipse what a handful of female Democratic senators accomplished in the space of an hour today.

They decided enough was enough. That no matter what Franken said about the allegations, there were too many women coming forward to accuse him of inappropriate behavior. That silence was no longer good enough.

This marks a seminal moment in the history of the Senate. Today is the day that female Democratic senators asserted their power in ways that we have seen women across other parts of society -- like Hollywood and media -- do in the last few months.

This is a big deal.

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what happened in the senate on wednesday is about a lot more than franken - cnnpolitics

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Analysis by Chris Cillizza, CNN Editor-at-large

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What happened in the Senate on Wednesday is about a lot more than Franken

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If you've ever covered it or even sat in the visitor's gallery during a vote, you know what I am talking about. For years, the Senate seemed like an institution frozen in time: A group of largely old, largely white men backslapping and yukking it up -- all thrilled to be part of this most exclusive club in the world.

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Women are oppressed when it comes to our menstrual cycles. It is something that we are taught to hide. Instead the Think company decided to put on a fashion to talk about periods and empowerment.

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You would have been forgiven for thinking that the crowd lining up outside a warehouse venue in Chelsea Thursday night was there for a mass wedding: everyone was dressed in white, radiantly young, and full of hope. The line wrapped around the block. A young woman in a white dress, heels, and a tan baseball cap that read MOIST walked briskly up and down, eyeballing outfits.

"If you're not wearing white on top, you're not going to be able to sit down," she said to the one person who wasn't wearing white. The crowd hushed. Everyone looked at me.

"OK," I said.

"You can stand, though," she said consolingly, and clicked away.

By now, particularly if you live in New York and have to look at subway ads every day, you know what Thinx are: underwear made of cotton, spandex, and "an application of silver," per their website. You're supposed to menstruate into them. Their public relations lady Chelsea sends incredibly wacky, cheerfully unhinged emails that, since we wrote about them, have only gotten weirder ("Hey lil potato dumplin," a recent one began, "Hope this heat hasn't made you french fried!... get it... omg that was so dumb kill me.")

And now, as New York Fashion Week got underway, they were branching out into that too, with a performance dubbed "Intersection 2016." They arrived at media offices around the city with invitations encased in concrete, which you had to break, in the way that one might smash the patriarchy or a ceiling made out of some other material. It turned out the smashing was for use in a promotional video, in which Jezebel features editor Joanna Rothkopf is now immortalized:

"This ain't your typical fashion show y'all!" an invitation added. "We can't say much because #mystery & #intrigue, but we can promise that this will be an unforgettable, truly unmissable night of feminism + performance art + rad party times , in a 12,000 sq. foot warehouse, no less."

As it turned out, the #intrigue was as follows: the white-wearing audience was led into the warehouse, seated on cubes, and asked to not get up. (The press were seated in a mezzanine area; an achy, rapidly aging woman wearing black was, in fact, able to have a seat.) The lights dimmed. Performers popped up from cubes in the audience and talked about menstruation and empowerment and Missy Elliott. They were varied: a model from South Sudan named Mari Malek, who was a refugee in Egypt before coming to the United States and becoming "a model, actress, DJ, and most important, a humanitarian," spoke before Sue Smith, a comedian who mused on her "white girl problems."

Sawyer Devuyst, a trans man and model who appears in some of Thinx's subway ads, was by turns cheeky and serious: "What do trans people want?" he mused. "I want a whole pizza from Speedy Romeo."

He paused. "I want to feel worthy of love," he added. Devuyst ended his monologue by leading the room in a chant: "My name is __ and I can do anything."

It took a while to notice that all the performers were wearing something white on top, tucked in or torn away to reveal Thinx on the bottom. It took even longer to realize the newspapers we were sitting on were actually programs, bearing a credo about what the period undies mean: "We are decidedly not a fashion brand. We create innovations in the period space that prioritize the needs of menstruating humans (for once, amirite)?" A smaller gray piece of paper fluttered out: it was a modified version of the wheel of privilege and oppression, something you might have seen a few times if you ever attended a liberal arts school or worked some hours at a food co-op.

The last speaker was Thinx's most visible founder, Miki Agrawal, who created the underwear with her twin sister Radha and their friend Antonia Saint Dunbar. She was freshly returned from Burning Man where, she noted in an essay on Medium, lots of women were wearing Thinx. She spoke with a white skirt around her knees, Thinx fully exposed, about her Japanese mom and Indian dad getting married, her own "beautifully middle class" upbringing in Montreal, and the realization that she was privileged on a family trip to India, when she saw a little boy with severe elephantiasis in his feet.

"I felt so powerfully lucky," she told the room. "It was that moment that I recognized I won the lottery of life."

Agrawal teared up as she talked about the need for "servant leadership" and "social entrepreneurship" that exists as "service to others." (For every pair of Thinx sold, the company sends an unspecified amount of money to Afripads, a Ugandan company that makes reusable sanitary napkins. Ugandan girls, particularly in rural areas, often miss school during their periods because of a lack of menstrual products, bathrooms, and shaming and bullying about menstruation.)

Agrawal congratulated the performers on "moving the narrative forward, so we can create unity." She had the crowd read a pledge written on the opposite side of the privilege wheel, excerpted from Dr. Maria Root's Multiracial Oath of Social Responsibility. It promises to fight "all forms of oppression, as the oppression of one is the oppression of all." Besides recognizing one's own prejudices, it adds, "I know that is it neither helpful nor productive to argue over who is more oppressed. I recognize that my life interconnects with all other lives. I will make a difference."

It was very earnest. It was a tiny bit disjointed. The urge to make fun was powerful, but it wasn't really fair. What, I asked myself, did I want from a period underwear brand, or indeed, a fashion show? Oppression wheels and discussions of privilege and showcasing a diverse group of writers and performers was surely better than watching Kanye's exhausted models keel over in the heat. The performers were paid, I learned from an email exchange with PR lady Chelsea, and the target audience - the pretty, 23-year-old, glowing people dressed in white - looked really, really moved. Many of their Instagram captions noted that they cried during the event.

"The bar is in the back corner by the musicians," an announcer chirped, as the performance ended and the audience folded up their white cube seats to take home. "And we're selling underwear!"

Bartenders served rosé and cocktails with punny names (To Queef at Sunrise). Somewhere, apparently, an artist was doing stick-and-poke tattoos. I found Allie Jones, a former Gawker writer now at The Cut. We collected some wine and lined up to get our photos taken at a photo booth. We don't know each other very well, so obviously we talked immediately, at length, and in great detail about our periods.

One more thing remained: I walked to the corner, shelled out $24, and bought a pair of Thinx. They felt very thin, and not unlike swimsuit material. There was a tiny bit of extra padding where you would expect it to be. I dragged them home very late that night and wished, for the first time in 18-ish years of menstruation, that I was bleeding so that I could test-drive them.

I put them on to write this piece, and I will tell you: My butt looks acceptable. My crotch feels lightly buffered, like it's wearing earmuffs.

I stuffed the panties in a drawer and put the oppression wheel in a pile of papers somewhere. I'm not sure what to do with any of it.

About the author

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At the Thinx Fashion Show, Period Underwear Tries to Absorb A Lot of Meaning

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You would have been forgiven for thinking that the crowd lining up outside a warehouse venue in Chelsea Thursday night was there for a mass wedding: everyone was dressed in white, radiantly young, and full of hope. The line wrapped around the block.

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Hermione Granger is really the first powerful female character I can remember from my childhood. When one of her first lines in the series was her fixing Harry's glasses, I was in awe. The character, how J.K. Rowling wrote her role, and how Emma Watson played her have all gone into the fact that Hermione still remains to be one of the few female characters that is powerful in being a feminist.

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The Women's March on Washington was littered with references to Hermione Granger.

"When Voldemort is president, we need a nation of Hermiones!" read one sign, which was posted on Twitter on Jan. 22, 2017, the day after more than 3.5 million people around the nation marched in solidarity with women's rights.

"Without Hermione, Harry would've died in book 1," read another.

In 1997, readers were first introduced to the brilliant and bookish character in Harry Potter And The Sorcerer's Stone ― a young witch born to Muggle (non-magical) parents, with lots of "bushy brown hair and rather large front teeth." In 2017, Hermione's face is on protest signs around the world. She's been reimagined as the center of the Harry Potter series, tasked with battling the patriarchy. You can even purchase posters, T-shirts and embroidered crafts on Etsy that ask "What Would Hermione Do?"

Over two decades, the young British witch from J.K. Rowling's beloved Harry Potter series has grown from a literary smart girl into a powerful feminist symbol.

To understand the enduring appeal of Hermione, take a look back at what made the character connect to readers in the first place. Before Emma Watson portrayed the literary character on the big screen, forever entwining her own image with that of Hermione, Hermione Granger was a description on a page ― one that millions of children (and adults) felt drawn to.

The first thing that makes Hermione so special is that the role she plays in the Harry Potter series defies certain literary tropes; tropes that articulate the role girls should play in boys' lives, both on and off the page.

"Usually when there are two boys and a girl, the girl is kind of the sidekick, and as they get older the boys fight over her attention," Dr. Cecilia Konchar Farr, a professor of English and Women's Studies at Saint Catherine University told HuffPost. "And what was very powerful was that Hermione was always so much a part of the trio. Hermione's not just a sidekick, she's a central character."

When The Smart Girl Gets To Save The Day

Instead of centering Hermione's beauty or male-approved desirability, J.K. Rowling always centered Hermione's brains, compassion and morality. There aren't very many references to Hermione's looks in the books, but readers of the Harry Potter series are constantly reminded that Hermione works harder and performs magic better than nearly everyone around her. This means that, not only is she consistently at the top of her class, but she is also an invaluable part of both the resistance against Voldemort and a key (and equal) member of the Harry-Ron-Hermione trio. After all, on more than one... or two... or three occasions, Hermione saves both Harry and Ron's lives.

Her contributions and equal standing with the two male protagonists provide readers ― both boys and girls ― with a way to understand and relate to feminism. And Hermione's "mudblood" status provides an avenue through which to explore deeper issues of racism and oppression.

"[Hermione ] displays a kind of feminism that is accessible to people for whom the term feminism has been sort of systematically demonized," said Dr. Christopher Bell, a professor of Communication at the University of Colorado and editor of Hermione Granger Saves the World: Essays on the Feminist Heroine of Hogwarts.

Hermione's appeal was always rooted in her ability to be a stand-in for smart, hard-working girls ― girls who yearned to see those qualities rewarded and valued in a world that still largely determines the worth of women and girls by their looks. As a girl who grew up being infinitely more confident in my academic and oratory abilities than my physical skills or looks, reading about Hermione was a form of wish fulfillment. What a world it would be if the smart girl got to save the day standing shoulder-to-shoulder with her male peers, and be celebrated for her accomplishments.

Rowling has been vocal about the real-life inspiration for Hermione, calling the witch a caricature of her younger self. ("I wasn't that clever. But I was that annoying on occasion," Rowling told TIME in October 2000.)

She has also said that putting her female protagonist's abilities and cleverness front and center was intentional.

"I know that Hermione is incredibly recognizable to a lot of readers and yet you don't see a lot of Hermiones in film or on TV except to be laughed at," Rowling told Wonderland Magazine in 2014. "I mean that the intense, clever, in some ways not terribly self-aware, girl is rarely the heroine and I really wanted her to be the heroine."

So the heroine she is. Hermione uses logic to solve Snape's riddle at the end of the first book, deploying skills that most wizards quite simply don't have. ("This isn't magic - it's logic - a puzzle. A lot of the greatest wizards haven't got an ounce of logic, they'd be stuck in here forever," she tells Harry and Ron.) She successfully uses a time-turner. She organizes a movement to free Hogwarts' enslaved labor force of house elves. She starts Dumbledore's Army. Without hesitation, she agrees to leave school to help Harry hunt down horcruxes. She does all of these things while maintaining her values and integrity.

The longevity of Hermione's appeal has dovetailed with the mainstreaming of feminism. In 2007, when Emma Watson told Scholastic she was "a bit of a feminist" during an interview ahead of the release of "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," most celebrities were still scared to even associate with the term. Today, celebrities are shamed if they reject the label.

So, What Would Hermione Do?

Perhaps the greatest lesson that Hermione teaches us is how valuable it can be to take risks. After all, saving or changing the world often requires some form of sacrifice, danger and facing down the forces of evil.

"What would Hermione Granger do? A lot," wrote HuffPost's Chloe Angyal, a week after the presidential election. "She'd take real risks, lots of them, and endure a great deal of uncertainty, fear and suffering. We're going to have to do the same."

When our own world begins to feel darker and in need of saving ― from terrorism, bigotry, or even the leaders of our own government ― it's only natural to turn to pop culture for inspiration. And who better to emulate than Hermione Granger, the clever, idealistic young woman who uses her brains rather than brawn to create lasting, widespread change? (The fact that Emma Watson has become an outspoken feminist, UN Women Goodwill Ambassador and HeForShe spokesperson since finishing the Harry Potter franchise makes the political associations we have today with Hermione even more potent.)

The 2016 presidential election created the perfect storm for Hermione Granger symbolism. Here was a smart, hyper-competent, over-achieving woman facing down a cartoonishly unqualified man who spewed hatred at women, Muslims, immigrants, refugees, and disabled people. She would surely triumph, right? That's how this story is supposed to end.

But we live in America, not the magical underbelly of England.

"When the woman who was so strong, who worked so hard, who colored inside the lines and did everything you were supposed to do, when she was defeated ― not by a really competent, wonderful man, but by a man that every feminist would object to and [many] who wouldn't even call themselves feminists ― that was really hard," said Dr. Farr. "So we go back to Hermione, because it's the fantasy world where the smart girl triumphs, where the smart girl wins."

In the wake of President Donald Trump's election and inauguration, women and men were activated, ready to make that fantasy world a reality. The first major action of what we now know as "the resistance" was the Women's March.

Dr. Bell recalls seeing a variety of female heroes being used to convey a message of political solidarity during the marches ― Princess Leia, Wonder Woman, Kamala Khan a.k.a. Miss Marvel, and Hermione Granger. But he believes that there's one thing that sets Hermione apart from the others.

" Kamala Khan, Wonder Woman, and even Princess Leia for the most part, are physical heroes," Dr. Bell told HuffPost. "Hermione is not a physical hero. Hermione wins because she's smart. And Hermione doesn't just win because she's smart, she wins because she works harder than everybody else... We sort of discount her labor and praise her innate qualities, which is what we do to girls and women all the time. I think all of those things combine to make Hermione sort of a perfect symbol for young American feminism."

Women don't need Hermione Granger to teach them to persist in the face of great challenges, but it's nice to have her around when we need some inspiration. After all, when times get tough, smart girls know there's only one thing to do: get to work.
From , HuffPost is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the very first "Harry Potter" book by reminiscing about all things Hogwarts. Accio childhood memories.

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How Hermione Granger Went From Literary Witch To Powerful Feminist Symbol

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The Women's March on Washington was littered with references to Hermione Granger. "When Voldemort is president, we need a nation of Hermiones!" read one sign, which was posted on Twitter on Jan. 22, 2017, the day after more than 3.5 million people around the nation marched in solidarity with women's rights.

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This example was also shown in class. This table shows the difference between if you are privileged or oppressed. The top portion being dominant and the bottom being "less".

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This is jaw dropping. I know what it is like to be told that I should smile and stop looking angry. Maybe I am not smiling because I am thinking of "Big Ideas".

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"We have too many Kims in this world, and not enough Ayesha's".  Women are always pitted against each other like this.  Everyone goes about doing whatever they want to do.  There is no need to compare anyone against someone else

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In the current digital age we live in, social media reigns over most of our lives. We convince our online following that we are the protagonists of a perfect life, and we subtly but voluntarily compete with each other through the way we portray ourselves on our personal online accounts.

But for some, especially girls and women, digital-era competition has become less voluntary, more imposed and primarily based on appearance. The Ayesha Curry versus Kim Kardashian comparison that recently swept the Internet serves as a pivotal example of how social media, and the media in general, pit women against each other.

Golden State Warrior and current NBA MVP Stephen Curry has been in the limelight the past few seasons and his "perfect" wife Ayesha and their children have also captured the attention of many. Last December, Curry tweeted about her personal preference of "keeping her stuff covered up for the one who matters" when she steps out of the house.

A few months later, in early March, Kardashian tweeted a naked full-frontal selfie where she placed black censor bars over her intimate parts. Neither one of them directly targeted the other, but the Internet was quick to compare the two posts and women involved.

Both of these women clearly present themselves very differently in public and statements along the lines of "we have too many Kims in this world, and not enough Ayesha's" bounce around from Twitter to Instagram accounts daily. Both women have become the standard of high and low, to which the average woman is compared on all major social media platforms.

This type of social media-instigated competition is not a new or strange phenomenon. In the music industry, Adele can hardly enjoy a certain level of success without the media bringing Taylor Swift 's album sales into the mix, under headlines that state that the success of one makes the other look like a "nobody." In the entertainment business, headlines often tell us how "jealous" Kylie Jenner is of big sister Kendall for her ongoing success in the modeling industry.

Just last week, two of our nation's current presidential candidates engaged in a "Twitter war" after Donald Trump retweeted a picture of an unflattering shot of Ted Cruz 's wife next to a glamour shot of his own wife, agreeing with the caption on the photo that read, "a picture is worth a thousand words."

For critics on social media, the degree to which Curry and Kardashian are being compared has very little to do with their personal success and very much to do with how they choose to dress - or not dress - in this particular case. This is the larger issue with this comparison game.

How these women choose to dress does not define them. How these women choose to raise their children does not make one better than the other. How these women choose to embrace their sexuality does not determine their worth or their value as females.

Both of these "types" of women can coexist without the world having to choose which one is better. Society shouldn't have to put one down in order to praise the other or lose its mind every time one makes a decision that others don't agree with.

In 2012, Time magazine reported that female bullies target other females in the workforce 70 percent of the time. It becomes harder to support our female colleagues and peers when we are constantly told that women are our biggest competition simply because of our shared anatomy. Workplace bullying or competition in relation to appearance may vary from place to place, but the need to compete with one another is born long before a woman enters the workplace.

Many girls and women have close friends that do things much differently than they do. They make different clothing and makeup choices and they have different role models. But just because one wears a longer skirt or shows less cleavage does not mean that one is more deserving of respect than the other. More importantly, a woman is not limited to identifying herself as an "Ayesha" or a "Kim." I am neither.

When social media tries to pit women against women, they are pitting women against their friends, coworkers and colleagues, among others, and it is tiresome. I never signed up for it and I am sure I can speak for most women when I say that unless I am competing with someone for a job, a promotion or in a soccer match, I want no part in it. There is enough success to go around for all.

There seems to be something about women empowering each other that bother many, but becoming aware of the division among us that is constantly being encouraged is a great place to start fighting back. Standing shoulder-to-shoulder in a male-dominated world is what has lead women to successfully create change in the past. Voting rights were not accomplished through catfights with one another, and our ongoing fight for equality in the workplace will not be either. We will always be stronger together than we will be apart.

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Elizabeth Avalos

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Stop pitting women against each other on social media

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In the current digital age we live in, social media reigns over most of our lives. We convince our online following that we are the protagonists of a perfect life, and we subtly but voluntarily compete with each other through the way we portray ourselves on our personal online accounts.

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When is Trump going to STOP with all of these comments? He is a prime example of fitting the stereotype that men are pigs and obnoxious.  Which is obviously not true for all men.

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Donald Trump sexism tracker: Every offensive comment in one place

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In this photo the little girl is upset because the Marvel Comics alarm clock is listed as a fun gift for boys. Why can't a girl use this type of alarm clock?

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These boys challenged the social construction of gender when they wore dresses to school to bring attention to the outrageous dress codes for girls.