Girls want to be accepted, appreciated, and liked. And when they don’t fit the criteria, some girls try to “fix” themselves. This can lead to eating disorders, dieting, depression, and low self esteem.
I’m in a ballet class with a bunch of high-school girls. On a daily basis I hear comments like: “It’s a fat day,” and “I ate well today, but I still feel fat.” Ballet dancers do get a lot of flack about their bodies, but it’s not just ballet dancers who feel the pressure to be “pretty”. It’s everyone. To girls today, the word “pretty” means skinny and blemish-free. Why is that, when so few girls actually fit into such a narrow category? It’s because the media tells us that “pretty” girls are impossibly thin with perfect skin.
Here’s what lots of girls don’t know. Those “pretty women” that we see in magazines are fake. They’re often photoshopped, air-brushed, edited to look thinner, and to appear like they have perfect skin. A girl you see in a magazine probably looks a lot different in real life. As part of SPARK Movement, a girl-fueled, national activist movement, I’ve been fighting to stop magazines, toy companies, and other big businesses from creating products, photo spreads and ads that hurt girls’ and break our self-esteem. With SPARK, I’ve learned that we have the power to fight back.
That’s why I’m asking Seventeen Magazine to commit to printing one unaltered—real—photo spread per month. I want to see regular girls that look like me in a magazine that’s supposed to be for me.
For the sake of all the struggling girls all over America, who read Seventeen and think these fake images are what they should be, I’m stepping up. I know how hurtful these photoshopped images can be. I’m a teenage girl, and I don’t like what I see. None of us do. Will you join us by signing this petition and asking Seventeen to take a stand as well and commit to one unaltered photo spread a month?
As of this writing, Ms. Bluhm has inspired 73,407 signatures towards her goal of 75,000.
Now, this is no ordinary kid. She is a writer for Spark, a teen-run women’s rights blog fighting the sexualization of girls, who describes herself as “a feminist” who “not only wants to put a stop to sexualization and stereotypes of girls in the media, but also to negative stereotypes of ballet dancers.”
This is a new campaign from Mother’s Night (Moedernacht) which launches on Mother’s Day. The organization is a partnership of a number of European non-profits. Their aim is to create awareness of the unnecessary number of deaths that occur during childbirth in developing countries.
As the agency behind the campaign told me: “Designer Claudy Jongstra was asked to breath new life into the ugly duckling of pregnant women’s fashion: the bellyband”. The result is the ‘MotherBand’, a fashionable bellyband whose name purposely references the strong connection between mothers the world over.
The idea behind the campaign is to create an incentive to spread the message in a viral way. Mother’s Night is giving away the MotherBand to one lucky mother-to-be. Website visitors are ask to send a message with the name of a friend by filling in a form. Easy and smart.
“If even a fraction of fashionable women pick up and pass on the MotherBand to their friends, our organizations will be able to more effectively do what we do best: to put pressure on policymakers to take even more steps to save women’s lives,” says Dionne Veldman, director of RutgersWPF, on behalf of all the participating organizations.
Slam poet Khodi Dill and hip hop artist Theresa Point (AKA T MelaD of Rapsure Risin)wrote Stop the Silence as a “PSA Poem” to raise awareness of violence against Indigenous Canadian women and to raise funds and support for affected families as they struggle for justice.
It’s part of The Embracing the Families initiative, a collaboration between advocate Beverley Jacobs, Amnesty International Canada, and Mix 3 Productions, an Aboriginal owned media company based in Vancouver.
According to a Canadian government statistic, young Indigenous women are five times more likely than other women of the same age to die as the result of violence.
Indigenous women have long struggled to draw attention to violence within their own families and communities. Canadian police and public officials have also long been aware of a pattern of racist violence against Indigenous women in Canadian cities – but have done little to prevent it.
The pattern looks like this:
- Racist and sexist stereotypes deny the dignity and worth of Indigenous women, encouraging some men to feel they can get away with acts of hatred against them.
- Decades of government policy have impoverished and broken apart Indigenous families and communities, leaving many Indigenous women and girls extremely vulnerable to exploitation and attack.
- Many police forces have failed to institute necessary measures – such as training, protocols and accountability mechanisms – to ensure that officers understand and respect the Indigenous communities they serve. Without such measures, police too often fail to do all they can to ensure the safety of Indigenous women and girls whose lives are in danger.
You can support the campaign by donating at Yourmix.ca and sharing the word. You can also get a free MP3 of the slam perforance there.
This is one of those positive, grassroots campaigns that I really love to see.
A group of American students at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, are challenging their schoolmates to tell the world why feminism is still relevant to their generation.
The campaign hub is a Facebook page that has earned more than 10,000 “Likes” in just a couple of weeks and continues to engage students around North America.
Unfortunately, such a public display of support for women’s rights in the highly-politicized environment of an American election year has prompted jeers from some quarters. According to The Chronicle, a few campaign signs posted around the Duke campus were quickly vandalized with sexist statements such as “I need feminism because sandwiches can’t make themselves,” or “I need feminism because it’s funny watching them try to play sports.”
Kate Gadsden, one of the project’s founders, said she was not surprised by this reaction. She added, “To me, it validated the project.“
As the campaign for the American Presidency ramps up, feminist groups are doing everything possible to keep the ”War on Women” meme alive.
While the Republican party was choosing a candidate to run against President Obama, candidates and some Republican legislators at the national and state levels were promising and working to limit access to abortion and birth control for American women. In the middle of this highly-charged atmosphere, conservative radio provocateur Rush Limbaugh referred to a women speaking out for birth control coverage in health insurance as a ”slut”.
This has sparked a number of backlashes to reclaim the word “slut” as an identity of power. And this is one of them. It invites women from across the United States (and a few elsewhere) to proclaim their sluttishness and literally put their presence on the map by adding a “slut” icon (taken from the iconic reclining nude female silhouette seen on so many truckers’ mud flaps).
From their “about” page:
Birth control is under attack in the United States.
Conservative members of our government and society have launched what is essentially a war on reproductive rights. They have made attempt after attempt to limit the availability of essential services to women, men, and families who need access to them to live healthy, productive lives.
They have also repeatedly made judgment calls on those of us who do choose to use birth control—calling our morals and values into question and referring to us as sluts, whores, and other derogatory names—without even trying to understand that the use of birth control represents an awareness of our individual responsibility to do whatever we can to protect our health, and to ensure that the children we bring into this world are born into families who have the resources and ability to take care of them.
“Sluts Across America” is the collective voice of the women and men in this country who use or support birth control, and are sick of being judged because of our desire to be responsible and safe about our sexual health. If protecting ourselves makes us sluts, then it’s time to redefine what “slut” actually means.
And there are many who have. What can I say? It’s a slutty world out there. And thank god for that.
Walk a Mile in Her Shoes is an annual fundraiser for The White Ribbon Campaign in which men don high heeled shoes and stumble, hobble and tumble to show solidarity in ending violence against women.
This low-budget but cute PSA for the Toronto event was just released:
There’s also a :15 single-character version (and I presume there will be more):
Sure, it’s a rather traditional view of gender stereotypes and fashion, but for the average guy it looks like a bit of goofy fun for an important cause.
These shirts, with their simple, yet polarizing statement, recently caused an uproar at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington.
According to mainstream “mommy blog” The Stir, “Author, filmmaker, and third-wave feminist activist Jennifer Baumgardner began designing them eight years ago, in an effort to encourage women to speak about their experiences with terminating a pregnancy.”
But when Ms. Baumgardner arrived at UNCW to participate in a panel discussion about abortion, she was faced with protestors with their own shirts that read “I haven’t killed a baby.”
The Stir’s Maressa Brown notes, “Whether anti-abortionists like it or not, 1.3 million abortions occur in the U.S. every year. But the topic is still so taboo that we can’t talk about it. Well, plenty of women feel it’s their right to talk about it. And wear these tees they shall. Seems to me Baumgardner and anyone who ‘dare’ wear her tees in an effort to speak her peace could only be described as brilliant and brave.”
This domestic violence campaign started running nationally in movie theatres across the United States. They are from ARTesia Healing Arts, an art project under A Touch of Love Foundation.
ARTesia and her founder Michele Foster partnered with veteran film maker Stew Birbrower who created a commercial campaign to address the subject of domestic violence.
The campaign emphasize that domestic violence is epidemic across the board; affecting young and old, black and white, rich and poor.
The Voice over in all spots is from Louis Gossett, Jr.
Last year, 20-year-old Egyptian blogger Aliaa Magda Elmahdy caused a social media frenzy when she posted nude photos of herself on a blog. Why? Because she is an Egyptian woman, and even though she is a self-proclaimed atheist and feminist, many people in the Muslim world saw her as a threat to the women in their own communities. (I experienced this firsthand on Twitter, when following the hashtag #nudephotorevolutionary)
This year, activist Maryam Namazie launched The Nude Photo Revolutionary Calendar as a show of support for Aliaa Magda Elmahdy. Launched on March 8, International Women’s Day, the calendar runs from April 2012 to April 2013.
Ms. Namazie says: “What with Islamism and the religious right being obsessed with women’s bodies and demanding that we be veiled, bound, and gagged, nudity breaks taboos and is an important form of resistance.”
The calendar, designed by SlutWalk Toronto Co-founder, Sonya JF Barnett, it features a variety of women of different backgrounds who wished to pose nude to take a stand for freedom. (Including FEMEN activist Alena Magelat.)
Says Ms. Barnett, “I felt that women needed to stand in solidarity with Aliaa. It takes a lot of guts to do what she did, and the backlash is always expected and can quite hurtful. She needed to know that there are others like her, willing to push the envelope to express outrage.”
See some low-resolution images from the calendar after the break. You can also download or purchase it here.
Men Can Stop Rape launched this campaign called Where Do You Stand? last month. The worked together with the American Association of University Women (AAUW) to increase the number of men on campus who intervene to prevent dating violence and sexual assault.
The campaign is a direct result of the many recent incidents of rape, sexual assault and dating violence that have occurred on campuses.
62% of undergraduate students say they have encountered some type of sexual harassment according to recent studies.
Men Can Stop Rape is focusing now with this campaign on male bystanders who witness potentially violent situations.
Men Can Stop Rape Executive Director, Neil Irvin. “This campaign builds on young men’s ability, desire, and commitment to being strong without being violent. We look forward to using Where Do You Stand? to deepen existing relationships and build new partnerships with college campuses across the country.”
Human trafficking – it is the new slave trade, an action many of us thought be extinct after the US Civil War. But it is worse than ever, not least because many of the victims hand themselves over to get out of economic and political peril. They want to…
I recently had the privilege of being invited to speak and participate in the 2012 Design Ethos Conference/Do-ference at Savannah College of Art and Design. The creator of the conference, Scott Boylston, is a longtime friend in the relatively small socially conscious design community and I was delighted that…
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