When Patricia Stonefish returned home to the United States from Egypt in 2014, she brought with her a new outlook for conceptualizing women's self defense. Having seen firsthand the benefits and empowerment of Taekwando/ Hapkido/ Gumdo classes for Egyptian women during and after the revolution in 2011, she decided to put her decade of martial arts training to good use on home turf.
Museums and art galleries are not usually the sites of feminist political protest. Yet over the past couple of years, before the lockdown, gallery visitors all over the UK had noticed a small, determined activist whose modus operandi is “Small signs, big questions, fabulous wardrobe”.
As the summer warms up, bringing with it sleeveless tops, Xiao Meili, a women’s rights advocate, is collecting photos of women’s armpits. Her goal: to challenge a growing belief in China that a woman must have hair-free armpits to be attractive.
Despite the pushes to motivate more young girls into STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields, women are still very underrepresented in almost every scientific field. Part of this motivation is because a lot of young girls would rather do something else.
You’ll find Johanna Toruno on the streets of NYC plastering pictures of her flower-filtered poetry, Kendrick Lamar, and Selena on blank walls, street lights and buildings. When I came across The Unapologetically Brown Series on Instagram I was intrigued not only by the name but by the concept of being unapologetic and brown as the premise for a body of street art.
In response to a memo from Afghanistan's education ministry, Ahmad Sarmast, the founder of Afghanistan's Institute of Music, began a Twitter campaign with the hashtag #IAmMySong. In response to the hashtag, Afghan girls have taken to Twitter with videos of themselves singing tagged with Sarmast's hashtag and spreading petitions against the ban. The ministry memo banned girls 12 years old and older from singing at school functions.
Artist Daniel Soares pasted Photoshop toolbar stickers on these H&M posters as a nice little reminder that not all is as it seems. Y'all know how Photoshop messes with our perception of beauty, and I think this is a smart little stunt to snap us back into reality when we start to wonder why we never look like the girls on the posters we walk past every day.
“Girl’s Day” in China was supposed to be a way for boys on college campuses to show the girls how much they care. This year it went too far.
Have you heard about “Girl’s Day?” It’s a big holiday for Chinese college students. Every year on March 7, students throughout the country celebrate the day as a campus version of International Women’s Day.
Rights activists in Mozambique have marched through the capital Maputo to protest a colonial era law still included in new legislation that allows rapists to go unpunished if they marry their victims.
The "marriage effect" clause sees convicted rapists given a five-year suspended sentence if they marry their victims and stipulates that the perpetrator should stay married to the victim for at least five years.
The Photoshop action — a downloadable file that applies an action with a single click — is aimed at art directors who may be creating such ads. The action, which was disseminated on Reddit and other places where Dove thought such art directors might visit, promised to add a skin glow effect, but actually reverted the image to its original state.
The latest in street art activism is confronting sexism in an unconventional, but wonderful, way.
Street artist, Elonë, from Karlsruhe, Germany, is paving her city with messages against sexism, street harassment and sexual abuse — all printed on menstrual pads.
The SlutWalk protest marches began on April 3, 2011, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and became a movement of rallies across the world. Participants protest against explaining or excusing rape by referring to any aspect of a woman's appearance.
On what seems to be just another ordinary day, a man is exposed to sexism and sexual violence in a society ruled by women... Eléonore Pourriat's short film imagines how a man might experience a sexual assault in a matriarchal society.
In the early 1980s Keith Haring created hundreds of drawings in the New York subway system. He used chalk to paint on unused advertising space, which was covered with black sheets of paper. Haring was caught and fined numerous times.
Buses serving several routes in central Seoul have acquired a new and highly controversial passenger: a barefoot “comfort woman”, wearing a traditional hanbok dress with her hands resting on her knees.
In the series The History of Korean Women, Cho's suggests that the cost of that gain cannot be paid for by a cultural amnesia masking the pain and suffering of previous generations. Here the semantic emphasis is on the official - the status of women and their contribution to the survival and growth of Korea. Their efforts have gone uncelebrated due to their relegated status within a five hundred year old social system.
Neighbors in modern cities have less and less communication, and they all go about their business as soon as they close the door. In Switzerland, a woman dies every week as a result of domestic violence, so in an effort to get everyone to act, the charity has put up an interactive billboard in a shopping mall that shows a man in a family doing violence to a woman.
On Christmas day in 1993, kids were finding more than they bargained for under their trees: Mattel’s new talking Barbie dolls growled “Dead men tell no lies,” while Hasbro’s macho GI Joe’s chirped “I love to shop with you.”
Filmmaker Michael Moore has called for a nationwide boycott of Walgreens after the pharmacy chain announced it would not sell abortion pills in 20 states.
n February, 20 Republican state attorneys general wrote to Walgreens Corp. threatening legal action if Walgreens provides the abortion pill, mifepristone, to consumers in their pharmacies across the U.S.
We have learnt that Barbie’s body is literally unattainable, but in a role reversal, Pennsylvania-based artist Nikolay Lamm shows us what Barbie would look like if she had the body of a real woman.
Using the measurements of an average 19-year-old woman, Lamm created a 3D model, which he photographed and compared next to a standard Barbie doll.
According to the Daily Mail, it reported that Lamm’s 3D model looked “a lot more natural”.
This project served as an educational tool to demystify the female body and bring awareness to the issues of reproductive rights and the ignorance that sometimes plagues common misconceptions about the reproductive system. I think this campaign is very successful in its approach. It exhibits paintings and displays of uterus and the female form in a non-sexual way.
At TED2009, audience member Cindy Gallop gave a 4-minute presentation that became one of the event’s most talked about. Speaking from her personal experience, she argued that hardcore pornography had distorted the way a generation of young men think about sex, and talked about how she was fighting back with the launch of a website to correct the myths being propagated.
They are disparaged as “free-willed” women, “stubborn,” “picky,” “incomplete.”
But a video by an East Asian beauty brand that went viral over the past week has upended the conversation on China’s sheng nu, which translates literally into “leftover women” — those who happen to be over 27 and unmarried.
“People think that in Chinese society an unmarried woman is incomplete. You feel like an outsider,” says one young woman.