Miley Cyrus compared having a baby to having a makeup line
Plus: 😇 Good Girls Gossip 🎬 LOLLIPOP 😬 'likeability labour'
Miley Cyrus isn’t launching a makeup line - or having kids - and she’s totally fine with that.
In a refreshingly honest interview, Cyrus said that having a baby doesn’t feel like something for her. She explained that, in the same way that lots of celebrity women launch makeup ranges, she might be expected to do this same thing, but children aren’t something she feels passionate about, so why do it just because it’s expected? We agree. In a world that still ties womanhood to motherhood, her words are a quiet act of rebellion.
Scroll down to read the whole story.
Welcome back to Take The Lead, the fortnightly newsletter from The Female Lead.
Here’s your roundup of our most-read and most-subscribed-to articles of the last month.
Filmmaker Daisy-May Hudson wrote about why her new film LOLLIPOP has no speaking roles for men. The movie is a raw, powerful story of motherhood after prison, built on lived experience and a cast of women doing their best in a broken UK system.
We’ve also been discussing the emotional labour of being “likeable”, and the unspoken pressure women feel to stay soft, small or smiling.
Until recently, women in England and Wales could be criminally investigated after a miscarriage or pregnancy loss. Heidi Stewart of BPAS called for an end to this ‘Victorian’ law and urged MPs to vote for decriminalisation.
And in 1967, Kathrine Switzer made history as the first woman to officially run the Boston Marathon - defying the belief that women were too “fragile” for long-distance races. Her iconic story is one of 67 from our book The Female Lead (Vol II): We Rise By Lifting Others, available here.
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The Female Lead Team
Miley Cyrus compared having a baby to having a makeup line – and honestly, fair play
With Selena Gomez’s Rare Beauty and Rihanna’s Fenty empire leading the way, we’ve grown pre…
The exhaustion of being ‘likeable’ falls mainly on women
Smiling when you don’t want to. Apologising for nothing. Softening your opinion to avoid seeming “difficult”.
Police can search women’s homes and phones after pregnancy loss - we need to finally decriminalise abortion
Update: this story was published before politicians voted to decriminalise abortion in England and Wales.
They said her uterus would fall out. She ran the marathon anyway.
In the 1960s, women were not allowed to compete officially in marathons in the US because of m…
Good Girls Gossip: the word’s feminist history shows people will do anything to stop women talking
By Tova Leigh, author of Good Girls Gossip
Jade Thirlwall: “I didn’t feel White enough, Black enough or Arab enough”
Singer and songwriter Jade Thirlwall has opened up about her mixed-race identity and the struggle to fi…
'Dad groups' are on the rise, and everyone wins
When Col Bignell became a father in 2022, he watched his wife thrive in groups for new parents - making …
Jodie Whittaker: I was 'representing women' as the first female Doctor Who - it had political meaning for me
When Billie Piper was recently revealed as the new Doctor Who, she became only the second woman in the show’s 60-ye…
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