This Girl Can is a campaign launched by England Sports to encourage women to be active no matter how they do it or how they look. In common culture, the trend is to be fit, active, and toned. Social media is filled with women having "the perfect body", sculpted to perfection in every way. Although being healthy and fit is attainable with hard work and dedication, most women struggle to attain their goals.
By DOUGLAS QUENQUA
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — For a table set up by a campus student group, this one held some unusual items: a gynecologist’s speculum, diaphragms, condoms (his and hers) and several packets of lubricant. Nearby, two students batted an inflated condom back and forth like a balloon.
On an unnamed part of the internet, young adult author Gwen C. Katz found a delightfully deluded male author claiming that his facility with writing natural women characters constituted an unassailable rebuke to the idea that we need diverse authors to write diverse viewpoints. If a male author can write a woman this convincing, surely there’s no need for the #OwnVoices movement!
Rokudenashiko is on a mission to free the vagina. In her native country of Japan, the vaginal slang word “manko” is considered taboo while the penis equivalent, “chinko,” is used freely. Rokudenashiko (the pseudonym of artist Megumi Igarashi) uses her manko art to destigmatize the vagina, using it as the basis for whimsical figurines, iPhone cases, dioramas, and, in her most infamous piece, a kayak.
To honor their battle, Lebanese women's rights organization ABAAD launched a powerful song and music video titled Not Your Honor. The clip was launched on the occasion of the "16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence" initiative which took off on Nov. 25, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women.
Laura Poitras’s Academy Award–nominated documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022) about photographer Nan Goldin is a powerful and thoughtfully constructed film. Focusing on Goldin’s work with the activist group Prescription Addiction Intervention Now (PAIN), it allows viewers to continue appreciating the ongoing rebellion and inspiration of this singular artist.
Is there a way to make sex ed, big, scary, nasty, icky, sex ed, fun again? In the Spring Quarter of of 2013, UCLA students in the Sex Squad, a performance troupe dedicated to injecting a dose of humor into high school sex education, set out to answer that question through a series of short videos.
Yumi Ishikawa, a Japanese actress, freelance writer, and part-time funeral parlor worker, started the #KuToo Movement because she feels it’s unfair she has to wear heels at work. She also feels that being required to wear heels is rooted in a cultural problem, one much deeper than physical discomfort.
As massacres, civil wars, and violence permeated communities, people have searched for asylum in other countries. Due to its location and relative safety, Spain has become a common destination for immigrants seeking a better life. Female immigrants in particular tend to experience much more arduous journeys in that they frequently are subjugated to sexual abuse.
FEMEN is an organization that is revolutionizing the feminist movement. Founded in Ukraine in 2008 and adopted in Spain in 2013, FEMEN protests gender-based issues such as inequalities, violence, patriarchy, etc. Since its creation, it has spread to several other countries, and there have been hundreds of organized protests.
Stop Telling Women to Smile is a street art project by Tatyana Fazlalizadeh that addresses gender based street harassment.
Street harassment is a serious issue that affects women world wide. This project attempts to take women's voices, and faces, and put them in the street - creating a presence for women in an environment where women are a lot of times made to feel uncomfortable and unsafe - outside in the street.
At the end of June of this year, as France sweated through record high temperatures, a group of men took a moment to escape the heatwave and compete in the inaugural Mr Triton France competition.
Organised by Merman Ludo, the event – which organisers believe might be the first of its kind in the world – saw ten competitors from all over the country face off in a battle to be the best merman France has ever seen.
On March 9, 2018, China's largest feminist platform "Voice of Women's Rights"'s Weibo account and WeChat official account were permanently suspended. Before being blocked, its Weibo account had 180,000 fans and the Wechat account had 70,000 fans. In order to retrieve the account, the staff of "Voice of Women's Rights" conducted a long-term struggle to defend their rights.
The Ginsburg without photoshopped sunglasses and a crown fueled a revolution with lawsuits instead of protests. She believed in incremental progress instead of bold gestures. She was projected to be a conciliator on the court, not its preeminent liberal dissenter.
Now, “everyone wants to take a picture with me.”
Estados de excepción (States of Exception) is series of participatory cultural interventions created for women to freely and joyfully exercise our rights in public and secure environments, currently being produced in Mexico and abroad.
"Suzanne Lacy is an internationally known artist whose work includes installations, video, and large-scale performances on social themes and urban issues. One of her best-known works to date is The Crystal Quilt (Minneapolis, 1987) a performance with 430 older women, broadcast live on Public Television." (http://www.suzannelacy.com/)
Created by and for women, Broccoli is an independent print magazine based in Portland, Oregon. Although intended for cannabis users, Broccoli is an art and lifestyle magazine that bills itself as “playful, informed, eclectic, and thoughtful.” It encourages the discovery and appreciation of cannabis through explorations of art, culture, and fashion.
"SOA Cycle, and what it later became, which is called the Democracy Cycle, is a group of seven large works that approach the question of democracy. What is democracy? How is it constructed? How is it implemented? Is it something that is to be thought of in relation to its political influence? Or is it something that plays out in terms of cultural and social, and even emotional terms, for instance?
Haiti is a conservative society where Roman Catholicism shapes many of its social norms. Patriarchal norms, says Haitian feminist Pascale Solages, co-founder and general coordinator of feminist organization Nègès Mawon, have informed its strict views on abortion. In Haiti, women can’t legally access voluntary abortions. Doctors can’t perform them unless the woman’s life is in danger.
At the peak of her career in 1976, Georgia O’Keeffe refused to lend her work to a pivotal exhibition in Los Angeles, “Women Artists: 1550 to 1950.” It was one of a wave of all-female shows — some 150 — that decade to spotlight artists largely ignored by major museums and galleries. But O’Keeffe, the most famous female artist of her day, saw herself in a different category — “one of the best painters,” period.
Jessica Williams talks about women's experiences with street harassment in New York with a satirical approach on how to avoid this unwanted attention.
http://www.cc.com/video-clips/5ndnit/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-jes...
Keith Haring is known to be one of the biggest artists raising awareness for HIV and AIDS, considering he had also passed away from HIV. Starting his career covering ads with spray paint and chalk in subway stations in New York City, his work started trending and he became an activist for this cause.
Fanfiction is political, subversive, radical. Writing Harry Potter as a girl, Hermione as black, or Ron as transgender exposes people to narratives written from the perspective of marginalized communities. But is writing fanfiction a type of activism?
In Women Are Heroes, JR introduces women who sometimes look death in the face, who go from laughter to tears, who are generous, have nothing and yet share, who have had a painful past and long to build a happy future.