What a great campaign. I’m in the middle of Canadian Music Week madness and I just had to share this here because it ties in nicely with what I talked about for International Women’s Day. I found this on my current obsession: Imgur.
These were curated by Lebanese organization KAFA, turning the idea of verbal abuse into physical to raise awareness.
Photographer: James Day
Have you used any of these words lately? Do you think about how your words can affect someone?
Tomorrow is International Women’s Day. It has been celebrated on March 8th since the early 1900’s, but I first heard about it in my third year of University1.
It’s the kind of day that makes you realize just how insignificant, or significant your actions can be. The theme for this year is The Gender Agenda: Gaining Momentum, and there are 129 events happening in Canada. There’s a fantastic list of events on the website, that you can sift through here. I like days like today because it makes you think about the bigger picture.
We are so blessed in this first world continent; that we can do things that we take for granted, like vote, drive, work for a living, go to school, wear what we want, walk where we want, eat, sit, basically do what we want, when we want. And sure, there is still a long way that we have to go, but it’s nice to see how far we’ve come.
Even still, we have a long way to go; as a human race we have a long way to go. And in the hopes of inspiring change in the right direction, I wanted to show you two of my favourite TED talks related to the subject.
In the first one – Tony Porter’s 2010 talk, ‘A call to men‘, he talks about how we need to step outside of the ‘man box’2.
“My liberation as a man is tied to your liberation as a woman.”
The second talk, I got to witness in person; SlutWalk co-founders Heather Jarvis & Sonya JF Barnett took the stage to bravely discuss some very difficult experiences3 they had to go through and some very important issues surrounding language, our attitudes and the change that needs to happen.
“With infected language we all the power to radically impact somebody’s life. The onus is on all of us.”
As much as I would have loved to embed those videos in this blog post, I couldn’t4. I hope you still learned something though, I did. And now, I shall leave you with a photo that didn’t have anything to do with International Women’s Day, but I do think it fits. It was taken at an event called, That Night in Toronto, held by MyCityLives at Loft4045 and it features a bunch of girls6 being ‘fierce’.
What do you think about International Women’s Day?
