As you may have heard, at the end of February it was announced that Beyoncé Knowles, Salma Hayek Pinault and Gucci creative director Frida Giannini launched a global campaign called "Chime For Change". The latter is aimed at linking women across the globe, raising funds and awareness for girls' and women's empowerment and revolves around three key main themes - education, health and justice. The campaign is associated with Catapult, a crowd-funding platform also focused on women's empowerment.
Despite the campaign seems to have very honourable aims and purposes, just the fact that it exists makes you worry. If the campaign exists and if the world needs a change, it's because women empowerment maybe doesn't exist in our society and times; besides, too often, ordinary women risk of being written out of history by the same people who claim to be rescuing them.
Let's think about it: Beyoncé, Hayek and Giannini are indeed empowered women with well-established careers and they probably suffer fewer sexist attacks than millions of anonymous young girls and women in ordinary jobs. Last September Hayek also told The Telegraph that her husband still pays for her clothes (“He [François-Henri] still pays for it, so I feel always like I can't just go and take anything I want, you know? I could, because he is really nice to me, but I always feel I cannot become that, some crazy woman that comes and takes half the store”) and while we may be happy to hear that at least she doesn't get free presents like many other wealthy people out there, it's only natural to wonder why, if she is an emancipated woman, her husband still pays for her clothes (but it's just because I don't have a millionaire husband that I can't find the answer to this otherwise rather banal question...).
It's even more natural to wonder if celebrities are trying to write ordinary people, and in this case ordinary women, out of history even when they become testimonials for campaigns aimed at doing something good. One of the problems is that quite often such campaigns are sponsored, supported or founded by a powerful brand.
"Chime for Change" is indeed founded by Gucci (funny how one day they tell us a garment or an accessory can empower us, and how the next day they offer us a campaign that can empower us...), and we all know that the fashion industry is responsible for putting a lot of pressure on young women.
Very rarely runways are employed to launch specific protest messages, while most of the time, models remind us ordinary people how inadequate, fat and ugly we are. In some cases editorials from fashion magazines also spawned racial issues: sixteen year old white model Ondria Hardin posed as a black woman in the "African Queen" editorial on the latest Numéro Magazine, sparking a debate on the Internet and enraging quite a few readers.
Yet brands and the fashion industry can't obviously be deemed responsible for the general madness we have seen happening all over the world with sex offences and violence against women constantly on the rise.
As you may remember, last year, a young Pakistani girl, Malala Yousufzai, was shot in the head by Taliban militants while returning from school, because she had spoken out in favour of girls' education; in December, a 23-year-old woman died in a Singapore hospital a few days after she was gang raped on a bus in India and the incident spawned mass protests and calls for protection of women all over the country.
In January in our currently very confused Europe and in a politically unstable Italy, former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, still under criminal investigation for underage prostitution, labelled judges who ordered him to pay his ex-wife £29 million a year in a divorce settlement as "feminists and communists" (who knew that being a feminist was a crime...). Two days ago a bankrupt man entered a government office in Perugia, Italy, and shot two women employees - who were not involved in turning down a payment by the Umbria region to his company – before committing suicide. And while this last incident may be the product of the current economic situation, you still wonder if things would have gone the same if he had found two male employees.
The Internet often doesn't help as well: at the beginning of March a slogan shirt sold on Amazon’s UK website and designed by Australian brand Solid Gold Bomb outraged many. Moving from the English slogan "Keep Calm and Carry On", the shirts read "Keep Calm and Hit Her", "Keep Calm and Rape A Lot", and "Keep Calm and Rape Off". The excuse was that apparently the slogans were generated by an automated algorithm (a misogynistic algorithm?), but it's incredibly scary to even think about such products, in the same way as it is pretty upsetting to read about fetishist trends such as death porn or cannibal porn (you may have heard about NYPD officer Gilberto Valle who stood trial at the end of February for allegedly plotting to kill and eat women).
From such points of views, there is very little to celebrate this International Women's Day. Then again, there is in fact a lot to celebrate – beautiful ordinary women, especially those ones who may be going through hard times or may be coping with difficult situations.
You can join the celebrations by checking out Sara Shamsavari's "London Veil" series featuring portraits of Muslim women on the streets of London showcased at the WOW - Women of the World Festival (8-10th March) at the Royal Festival Hall, or looking for a screening near you of the documentary Girl Rising, featuring nine stories of girls in developing countries all facing various challenges to get an education.
If you're a musician or working in the music biz you can also join female:pressure, an international database and network of women in the fields of electronic music and digital art (from musicians, DJs, producers and performers to other professional figures, label owners and researchers included), inspired by the fact that women are under-represented in contemporary music production and also in performances (think about male-dominated music festivals).
If you're a fashion journalist and critic, I would also urge you to start writing more about menswear - male journalists can write about womenswear so why can't women write about menswear?
Change - the genuine transformative social change we need in a world that has still got a very misogynistic approach to life - is not spawned by branded campaigns, but by a mix of individualism, independent thought, and originality, a mix that still exists in each and everyone of us, beautiful ordinary women.
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