Apart from that my friend Nadine was nice enough to show me this awesome speech by Joss Whedon the creator of women protagonist characters such as Buffy from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel and Firefly. He’s a firm believer and preacher of gender equality, and his reasons for creating these characters. I’m sure that you’ll find his reason (singular) quite obvious, and he made it too obvious that unfortunately after so many changes in everything that surrounds us… the core notions and beliefs that defines and differentiates the two genders have ceased to change with time and it’s only through creating these characters and feeding them through mass media that perhaps change will gradually begin. So I suppose we haven’t really gotten that far, but it’s nice to see someone else who gives a damn.
Enjoy :)




http://demo.fb.se/e/girlpower/ Here’s another body image campaign called “The ‘Why’ Campaign” made possible by the Ministry of Health and Social Affairs from Stockholm, Sweden. It’s another initiative against media and its effects on body image. In particular they target a younger age group, which emphasizes the urgency of conveyed norms and values in our society. The campaign’s goal is to have the general public question and be critical about mass media, and it tries to do so by allowing viewers to directly email the person in charge with that particular advertisement or media establishment. The concept works on several levels, but has areas of opportunity. It works because by voicing the public’s concerns to that particular person in charge it could possibly have some effects on the next decision he/she will need to make for future campaigns. However, at the same time ad agencies could use those comments against people like me, because it places everyone else in an extremist position with no grey areas to debate upon, or is there? Then of course there are campaigns such as Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty http://www.campaignforrealbeauty.com/, which directly targets those who are in those extremists positions. It will take more than a realization to transform years of social conditioning into what we define as “real beauty”, and unfortunately standards do exist in our society as they do help maintain social order. Think about how hard it would be for us to get along if we all had different views of what beauty means? Are we then questioning the definition of beauty or the existence of that word?