Latest news with #MelaniSanders
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
2000s Movie Queen, 57, Shows Natural Body in Bold Swimsuit Post: ‘I Probably Have Cellulite and I Don't Care'
2000s Movie Queen, 57, Shows Natural Body in Bold Swimsuit Post: 'I Probably Have Cellulite and I Don't Care' originally appeared on Parade. Actress Ashley Judd doesn't care—literally. The 57-year-old beauty recently joined the viral social media trend inspired by influencer Melani Sanders, founder of the 'We Do Not Care' movement. The A Time to Kill star is embracing the philosophy of doing and being whatever she wants—without worrying about other people's by Sanders' hilarious and empowering posts, Judd shared an unfiltered video of herself wearing a one-piece swimsuit while playing in the ocean. Appearing makeup-free with wet hair and her natural body on display, Judd fully leaned into the carefree spirit of the movement. While joyfully splashing in the waves, Judd said, 'When I'm in my swimsuit, sometimes I get a little chafing, like right down there, so I put on cornstarch. Good trick if you don't know it already—there might be a white thing there—and if you see it, I don't care. And I have a jellyfish—it's a non-stinging kind—and I think the central nervous system is that part. That may not be right, and I don't care.' She continued, 'There's another club that my inner child belongs to, and it's called the MSU club—'Make Stuff Up.' I'm picking my crotch, and I don't care. If you don't like the MSU club for inner children—we do. We do this!'Judd then playfully jumped into the ocean, practiced underwater handstands, and later turned back to the camera to add: 'I probably have cellulite and I don't care. And I probably have hungry bum and I don't care.' The actress' candid, carefree post had fans rushing to the comment section in support of her refreshing realness. 'I love the 'we don't care' club!! I totally get it!!' wrote one supportive fan, while another added, 'You are pure magic. Thank you for being so human.' 'Let's normalize being real human women. Period,' another commented. Tap here to see Ashley Judd's full post. 🎬SIGN UP for Parade's Daily newsletter to get the latest pop culture news & celebrity interviews delivered right to your inbox🎬 2000s Movie Queen, 57, Shows Natural Body in Bold Swimsuit Post: 'I Probably Have Cellulite and I Don't Care' first appeared on Parade on Jul 23, 2025 This story was originally reported by Parade on Jul 23, 2025, where it first appeared. Solve the daily Crossword
Irish Examiner
6 days ago
- Lifestyle
- Irish Examiner
Clodagh Finn: The ‘We Do Not Care' club is striking a powerful chord with menopausal women
Melani Sanders, the American influencer and founder of the We Do Not Care club, made me want to coin a new phrase after spending a few joyous hours in her perimenopausal company courtesy of Instagram. 'Whoop-scrolling' perhaps, because that is what I did when I binge-watched her list the myriad nonsenses that burrow their way in the heads of so many women. Her message, blunt and beautiful, is this: There is no need to put yourself under pressure trying to please everybody. Indeed, anybody. And for women on the verge of menopause or already in it, nothing is mandatory but survival. Unpainted toenails. We do not care. Separating laundry. We do not care. Bikini line. We do not care. Cellulite in short shorts. We do not care. 'Legs is legs.' And a favourite, hoovering behind things. 'We do not care how long it's been since we pulled out the stove and refrigerator to clean behind them. We do not use behind them. If we can't see it, we ain't cleaning it.' Can you flaw the logic in that? Melani Sanders, a 45-year-old mother of three living in West Palm Beach, Florida, was already well-known on social media, but she was catapulted into the stratosphere in May when one of her posts struck a deep chord with women of a certain age everywhere. One bone-tired day, after shopping, she caught sight of herself in the car mirror. Instead of self-flagellating for the untamed hair and the too-small sports bra she saw reflected back at her, she took out her phone and recorded a video of herself saying this: 'We about to start a perimenopause and menopause club, OK? And it's gonna be called the 'We Do Not Care' club… let me tell you what that means,' she said, explaining how it did not matter a jot that she had left the house wearing a poorly fitting bra or that she hadn't used hair product. She finished with this glorious exhortation: 'Let's all talk about what we don't care about today.' She unleashed a tsunami. Here are a few sample waves: 'We do not care that we defrosted food to make for dinner tonight. Now that tonight is here, we are tired and will be ordering.' 'We do not care if we snore. We are asleep.' 'We do not care if our 20 something rolls their eyes when we ask them to fix our phones, we taught you how to use that bathroom.' 'We do not care that we grunt when we stand up and say 'oof' when we sit down. This is the sound of caring leaving our bodies.' Whoop-scroll for yourself and see if you agree with the 2.5m people, at last count, now following Melani Sanders on Instagram and TikTok, adding their voices to an ever-lengthening list of things that simply do not matter when you are faced with the symptoms of menopause. Here are two recent examples that made me laugh in recognition: 'We do not care if the underwire is hanging out of our bra. Any support is better than none/ We do not care if we wear leggings every day. Jeans hurt our stomach.' What is clear in all of it, though, is that far from not caring, Melani Sanders and her followers care deeply about carving out a collective space where they can be filter-less and real. While the We Do Not Care club is hilarious, it is also deadly serious. It shows what can happen when one straight-talking woman gives a voice to the many who have, for so long, felt silenced in a world that hid, and much worse, minimised the impact of menopause. Now, by stark but welcome contrast, it seems to be the topic of the moment. There is good and bad in that. The upside is that women such as Sanders can deadpan on social media and build a global community in weeks. Can an Irish branch of the We Do Not Care club be far behind? Though, the joyous confluence of humour and community has probably already worked its silent magic here because the beauty of it all is that you can cheer — and whoop — from the sidelines. The downside, however, is that whenever an issue is highlighted, the moneymakers and the brand-pushers spot an opportunity and swoop in. It is hardly surprising, then, to see that Melani has already been offered a series of commercial partnerships. More power to her if she can monetise her message which, for now at least, remains undiluted. Money and medicine, though, are a more problematic mix. We have been far too quick to medicalise what is essentially a natural phase in a woman's life. That is not to say drugs and therapies are unwelcome. Bring on anything that helps, but all research — and we need much more of it focused on women's health — must be informed by the experiences of those it is purporting to help. If the We Do Not Care club's moment in the viral sun tells us anything, it is that women are far more interested in their health than they are in trying to conform to the manufactured idea of beauty. Sanders is particularly good at calling out the latter. She's spit-out-your-tea funny on opting out of the battle to keep body hair under control. I was going to write the word 'unwanted' before body hair in that sentence, but that just shows how deep the conditioning goes. That, however, is very recent. The ancient Egyptians and the Romans may well have plucked and depilated, but the idea that under-arm and leg hair are unsightly is a mere century old. A vintage advert for the Milady Decolletée Gillette razor. We can pin the blame for that particular insecurity on the fashion industry, which shortened skirts and sleeves in the early 1900s, and razor company Gillette which developed the Milady Decolletée in 1915 to shame women into thinking those previously unexposed parts of the body could only be presented to the world if they were smooth and hairless. For the three centuries before that, nobody was offended by leg or underarm hair. Alas, that simple fact was drowned out in the early 20th century by ads asking women, 'Can you bare it?' over sketches of the latest fashions. 'To wear these charming new sleeves, arm-pits must be smooth as your cheek, sweet as your breath,' one ad for Neet depilatory and deodorant products proclaimed. Gillette, meanwhile, presented the lie that good grooming meant keeping 'the underarm smooth and white', and it boldly vaunted its shiny new razor as the solution to the 'embarrassing personal problem' of underarm hair. Thus began 110 years of body angst, fuelled by the fashion and beauty industries, the razor industry and generations of women — including myself — who, deep down, knew that we were being peddled nonsense but conformed anyway. How liberating, then, to see the rise of the We Do Not Care club. Imagine what harm we could reverse, what freedom we could win, what future we might fashion, if we all allowed ourselves to join it.
Telegraph
17-07-2025
- Lifestyle
- Telegraph
I don't believe any midlife woman who says they don't care what they look like
Are you a member of the We Do Not Care Club? It's an online sensation started by Melani Sanders, a 45-year-old mother of three from West Palm Beach, Florida, who invites midlife women to tell her what they no longer care about. From her bed, clad in an old, grey T-shirt and baseball cap, she rants about how she doesn't care about bras – 'bras suffocate us'. She doesn't care 'about looking pregnant when we're not pregnant – that's just our perimenopausal or menopausal bodies '. She doesn't care 'about being late, cos we have our own s--- to do'; or having unpainted toe nails – 'I'm going to wear my flip-flops, they are just my feet'. She doesn't care 'if you think I have a s--- attitude, or that I'd rather watch TikTok than clear up'. If she has chin hairs, or ' cellulite in short shorts, that's just how I look, God made me that way'. I have to say I love her attitude – in 2025, it still feels revolutionary to see a woman out and proud, blowing up so many social 'shoulds'. I particularly love that she is taking aim at the kind of dreary, midlife grooming which is expensive, painful and endless. You know what I mean: threading, waxing and toe maintenance that can easily become a full-time job for what the ghastly Gregg Wallace has described as 'women of a certain age'. But while I appreciate Sanders's brand of We Do Not Care sentiments, I'm afraid her credo is not actually what I see in my community of midlife women. The reality of life for my 'Queenagers' (my word, I thought we needed a more positive rebrand), is many of them buckling under a myriad number of 'cares'. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Melani Sanders (@justbeingmelani) My women are holding up the sky. Last week, one woman in our sharing circle talked about how she is only getting three hours of sleep a night and is worrying about burning out because she is single, looking after her mother with dementia, working full-time AND supporting her two sons. The boys are in their early 20s and are working for free as interns in London to try and get jobs in finance. Their mum is paying their rent to help them get on that first rung on the corporate ladder (AI has reduced the number of entry level graduate jobs available by 40 per cent, so competition is ferocious). I said maybe she should let them fend for themselves – but, like many parents, she is committed to helping them get launched in the world. And that is getting harder and harder, because this is a boomerang generation. Unsurprisingly, the poor lady looked close to collapse, and then she admitted she is worried about losing her own job. 'It's amazing how all the women get whacked as they hit 50,' she said. Redundancy is a massive midlife female 'care'. In the last week, I have been supporting five senior women with ostensibly amazing careers who have just been 'let go'. Their crime? To be over 50 in a world where gendered-ageism is real. It's not just the workplace where men have a whole life, and women a shelf life. Research conducted by my company found that, by 50, over half of women have been through at least five of the following: divorce, bereavement, redundancy, caring for elderly parents, or a Gen Z with an anxiety or mental health disorder (not to mention their own health issues, menopause, and other kinds of abuse). The midlife clusterf--- (as we call it). Add to that, the constant bombardment we women face from anti-ageing messages in our youth-obsessed culture, where freakishly young-looking female celebrities, from Nicole Kidman to Kris Jenner, are held up to us as exemplars of how we are supposed to look. And most of us can't just disappear into a We Do Not Care slob zone of stretchy tracksuit bottoms and witch hair chins, if we want to hang on to our already precarious places in the world. OK, if we work from home, we can slob around in work-out gear – but for most midlife women, it's just not as easy as saying We Do Not Care. We're told every day that our value is wrapped up in how we look. I'm all for throwing off the patriarchal programming, which values women primarily for being foxy and fecund. But I see so many women of my generation battling that conditioning. They're facing an internal war between their desire to move into a new phase of autonomy – letting it all hang out and putting their needs first – then oscillating back into caring very much indeed about their dependents, and how they keep their peckers up in the world. Why else is practically every woman I meet dosing themselves with Mounjaro? The tyranny to remain slim and sexy, and lose the dreaded 'meno belly' feels real. And it is depressingly omnipresent. Last month, for instance, I attended a launch at the House of Commons for a new campaign called What Women Want. It's supposed to be about ending violence against women, erasing the gender pay gap – all the big stuff. Ahead of it, Good Housekeeping magazine did a survey of its (mainly midlife) female readers asking them that very question: 'What do you want?' The top answer? 'To lose half a stone.' I told you: They Do Care. So while I love the devil may 'do not' care attitude to chin hairs and brassieres, clearing up after messy relatives and not pedicuring horny 50-something feet, this isn't the reality. We live in a culture where gendered ageism is alive and kicking, the pressures on midlife women are off the scale but nonetheless, we've got to stay in the game, because we don't get our pensions until we are 67 (and women retire with 35 per cent less in the pot than men). I'm afraid We Do Care because we HAVE to care. For now, Ms Sanders's vision is just a fantasy of what the world might be like if we valued older women for all that they are, not just their attempts to stay young. I applaud her mission, but I'm afraid it's not reality for most of yet. We'll know we really don't care when young women look forward to being middle aged, as the time when it all gets good – not dread every wrinkle as an impending sign of doom.
Sydney Morning Herald
13-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
The unexpected upside to menopause that nobody warned me about
Recently, a trend has been taking place in a particular corner of social media. Founded by American Melani Sanders, it's called the 'We do not care' movement, and it's giving perimenopausal and menopausal women around the world a rallying cry for a common experience. Her videos feature deadpan, joyful announcements of things she no longer gives a toss about, like wearing bras ('they suffocate us'), hiding bloat that makes us look pregnant ('but we're not'), and apologising for the presence of cellulite when we wear shorts ('we've got them, we wear them'). With 1.1 million Instagram followers, Sanders' movement has been joined by the likes of actor Ashley Judd, who proudly confessed to wearing her nightgown past the point of hygiene and using its hem to dry her hands, forgetting her shoes and going barefoot around town, and skipping chin-hair plucking and hair brushing because she doesn't care any more. Presenter Shelly Horton has also joined in, saying Australian women 'don't care about hiding our age … We count it like toddlers now. I'm 51 and 9 months – because we've earned every damn month.' More than just a viral moment, there's a scientific reason behind the phenomenon of women no longer caring about societal norms. As women enter perimenopause our estrogen levels drop, and this decline in the so-called 'caretaker hormone' results in our compulsion to please falling away. The people-pleasing, the emotional labour, the self-policing – all of it starts to fade as the grip it once had loosens. And in its place is something wild and freeing. According to the 2021 Australian census, about 4.3 million Australians are women aged between 45 and 64, while about 2.1 million women are aged 65 and over. This translates to more than 6 million people who are currently navigating, or have previously navigated, menopause. Though perimenopause – the transitional lead-up – can begin as early as 40 and last between four and 10 years, menopause typically occurs between the ages of 45 and 55, with the average age being 51. That's roughly a decade or more of hormonal turbulence, brain fog, sleep disruptions and mood swings, all while still working, parenting or caregiving. No wonder we hit a point where we just stop caring; it's not apathy, it's survival. With 80 per cent of women experiencing symptoms, it's time we stopped whispering and started shouting about what this stage really looks like. We sweat through sheets, cry at commercials, forget the word for 'dishwasher' mid-sentence, and experience anxiety spikes that make us question reality. But in the midst of this chaos, a strange liberation appears. For the first time, we're not hormonally tricked into putting others' needs first.
The Age
13-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
The unexpected upside to menopause that nobody warned me about
Recently, a trend has been taking place in a particular corner of social media. Founded by American Melani Sanders, it's called the 'We do not care' movement, and it's giving perimenopausal and menopausal women around the world a rallying cry for a common experience. Her videos feature deadpan, joyful announcements of things she no longer gives a toss about, like wearing bras ('they suffocate us'), hiding bloat that makes us look pregnant ('but we're not'), and apologising for the presence of cellulite when we wear shorts ('we've got them, we wear them'). With 1.1 million Instagram followers, Sanders' movement has been joined by the likes of actor Ashley Judd, who proudly confessed to wearing her nightgown past the point of hygiene and using its hem to dry her hands, forgetting her shoes and going barefoot around town, and skipping chin-hair plucking and hair brushing because she doesn't care any more. Presenter Shelly Horton has also joined in, saying Australian women 'don't care about hiding our age … We count it like toddlers now. I'm 51 and 9 months – because we've earned every damn month.' More than just a viral moment, there's a scientific reason behind the phenomenon of women no longer caring about societal norms. As women enter perimenopause our estrogen levels drop, and this decline in the so-called 'caretaker hormone' results in our compulsion to please falling away. The people-pleasing, the emotional labour, the self-policing – all of it starts to fade as the grip it once had loosens. And in its place is something wild and freeing. According to the 2021 Australian census, about 4.3 million Australians are women aged between 45 and 64, while about 2.1 million women are aged 65 and over. This translates to more than 6 million people who are currently navigating, or have previously navigated, menopause. Though perimenopause – the transitional lead-up – can begin as early as 40 and last between four and 10 years, menopause typically occurs between the ages of 45 and 55, with the average age being 51. That's roughly a decade or more of hormonal turbulence, brain fog, sleep disruptions and mood swings, all while still working, parenting or caregiving. No wonder we hit a point where we just stop caring; it's not apathy, it's survival. With 80 per cent of women experiencing symptoms, it's time we stopped whispering and started shouting about what this stage really looks like. We sweat through sheets, cry at commercials, forget the word for 'dishwasher' mid-sentence, and experience anxiety spikes that make us question reality. But in the midst of this chaos, a strange liberation appears. For the first time, we're not hormonally tricked into putting others' needs first.
