‘Ms. Magazine’ Is Back and Still Fighting the Good Fight, As Long As You Ignore the Subscription Price
Remember when feminism was about burning bras and storming barricades, not about which celebrity’s assistant curated her “authentic” Instagram feed? Well, grab your sensible sandals and your vintage protest sign, because *Ms.* Magazine is apparently still a thing. Yes, the magazine that taught your grandma that the “M” in her name wasn’t a typo is still chugging along, presumably powered by sheer spite and the ghosts of Gloria Steinem’s past haircuts. But in a world where we get our hot takes from TikTok thirst traps and our news from Twitter threads that read like a coked-up Shakespeare, is a quarterly print publication about women’s rights as relevant as a fax machine in a Gen Z startup? Let’s dig into this fossil with a fresh coat of paint and see if it’s still got teeth or if it’s just a denture commercial waiting to happen.
The 50th-anniversary relaunch is here, and apparently, they’ve decided the best way to fight the patriarchy is with a $30-per-year subscription and a hefty dose of nostalgia. The new issue is hitting newsstands, which are apparently still a thing that exists, and it’s packed with the usual suspects: essays on reproductive rights, a deep dive into the wage gap that will make you want to chug a bottle of bleach, and a profile of some young activist who’s probably just doing it for the LinkedIn clout. It’s all very earnest, very well-intentioned, and about as edgy as a butter knife. The articles aren’t bad, per se, but they read like they were written by a committee of tenured professors who just discovered that kids these days are using something called “The TikTok” to organize walkouts. It’s a weird blend of timeless fury and boomer-grade cluelessness, like if your mom tried to explain why she’s mad about the overturning of Roe v. Wade by forwarding you a chain email from 1998.
But here’s the thing, fam: we’re in a cultural moment where the "personal is political" has devolved into "your unwashed armpits are a political statement," and everyone’s screaming into the void of their own echo chamber. The mainstream media is a dumpster fire of horse-race coverage and “both sides” nonsense, treating a fundamental assault on women’s bodily autonomy like it’s a football game where we need to be “fair” to the team that wants to strap us to kitchen appliances. So, is a magazine that literally takes its name from a refusal to be defined by marital status a needed bastion of sanity, or just a comforting relic for women who still think “networking” means passing out business cards at a League of Women Voters meeting?
Let’s be real: the content is a mixed bag. There’s a fantastic, rage-inducing piece on the maternal mortality crisis that will have you ready to riot, and then immediately following it, there’s an interview with some actress you’ve never heard of who’s “using her platform to amplify marginalized voices” (read: she posted a black square on Instagram in 2020 and hasn’t shut up about it since). It’s this jarring whiplash between fire-breathing feminist fury and the kind of celebrity fluff that you’d expect from *Cosmo*’s less horny, more politically conscious cousin. The magazine is trying to have it both ways: appealing to the old guard who remember when getting an abortion was a back-alley nightmare and to the new guard who think a “zine” is a digital newsletter you pay for on Substack. The result is a publication that often feels like it’s speaking two different languages at the same time, and neither audience is fully satisfied.
And let’s talk about the elephant in the room that no one wants to address: the price. In this economy, where a head of lettuce costs more than a gallon of gas, asking people to pony up $30 for a quarterly read is a big ask. That’s like three oat milk lattes, people! You could get a solid meal at Taco Bell for that. The audience for this is either wealthy white women in the suburbs who want to feel like they’re “doing something” or college students who will just screenshot the articles and post them on their finsta for free. The business model feels as outdated as the idea that you can change the world by writing a strongly worded letter to your congressman. Newsflash: they don’t read those. They’re too busy taking campaign donations from the very people trying to repeal the 19th Amendment.
However, and this is a big however, we live in a world where the Supreme Court just decided that history and tradition are more important than, you know, not dying of sepsis after a miscarriage. In this hellscape of a timeline, having a print publication that says “This is not okay” for the record, without a comments section full of incels screaming about how women belong in the kitchen, feels almost revolutionary. It’s a permanent, tangible artifact in an age of ephemeral content that disappears faster than a conservative’s commitment to “fiscal responsibility” when a tax cut for the rich is on the table. There’s something to be said for holding a physical magazine in your hands, flipping through the pages, and smelling that faint scent of ink and desperation. It’s a tactile reminder that the fight isn’t over, even if it smells like a musty library.
The new issue, from what I’ve skimmed through while pretending to work, does have some genuinely great calls to action. They’re not just screaming into the void; they’re providing actual resources for how to get involved in local politics, how to support abortion funds, and how to navigate the increasingly terrifying legal landscape of just trying to exist as a person with a uterus. It’s like a survival guide for a dystopia that’s already arrived. The pieces on the far-right’s war on trans people, on the erasure of Black women’s
Final Thoughts
Having tracked the feminist press for decades, I’d argue *Ms.*’s true legacy isn’t just its scoops on Roe or its unflinching coverage of workplace harassment—it’s that it permanently fused personal testimony with political analysis, forcing mainstream media to treat women’s lived experiences as hard news. The magazine’s evolution from a bold 1972 insert to a digital-first nonprofit mirrors the movement’s own painful, necessary maturation, proving that ideological purity is less durable than institutional resilience. In the end, *Ms.* didn’t just report on feminism; it became a living archive of feminism’s contradictions, and that honesty is precisely why it remains indispensable.