We’re currently amid a feminist revolution. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. As a member of the vagina-having population in this country, I’m a proponent of women’s rights. But lately, I just feel like I’m watching Rosie the Riveter, the editor-in-chief at Jezebel, and everyone with a Twitter account standing around a dead horse, senselessly beating it with a bat that says “Feminism.” By a show of hands, who here has not heard that women only make 77 cents to a man’s dollar? Anyone? And how about that one in five women are sexually assaulted? Have you heard that one, too? And that the way to combat it is by teaching men not to rape? Okay, well then surely this one is new: pressuring young girls and women to be beautiful and have perfect bodies sends the message that their worth lies in how they look, and not what they think. WELL, I’LL BE DAMNED. You’ve heard that one, too.
*Everyone dies of boredom.*
Literally every literate person in America has heard these statistics by now. The people who find them offensive still find them offensive. The people who don’t probably just don’t believe them. The way to educate people at this point is not to continue shouting the same. fucking. thing. at them until they care. It’s to provide examples. It’s to share stories. If you want to make a difference, you need to show people injustice, not tell them about it. That’s, like, the first thing you learned about forming a persuasive argument, starting, I think, when you were taught what a paragraph was in second grade.
The way to get your message across, however, is NOT to use children as pawns in a campaign based purely on shock value. Sure, when you have a bunch of elementary students dressed as princesses and talking about their “fucking asses,” people will pay attention to it–but at the same time, when you’re not bringing ANYTHING new to the table, it’s for naught. You’re just stripping their innocence so people will hear the same thing they’ve heard every single day for months…but this time, they’ll hear it from you.