The Women’s Movement Needs Fresh Ideas

Karlie Kloss and a few other models had their likenesses removed from fashion billboards in New York to symbolize the #NotThere campaign, publicizing the too tired to argue notion that women are still not treated equally to men. You know it’s a well-planned awareness campaign when you need to explain to people what it means.

I thought maybe you got in a fight with Kate Spade. Is that even a real person? Did you pound each with your heels? I saw two women fight like that once. It was spectacular.

The Not-There Org is pushing daily solutions for helping raise the esteem of girls everywhere.

The Girls Scouts were founded 103 years ago today. Celebrate by telling a girl in your life how much you believe in her.

Previous days suggestions have encouraged bedtime reading to daughters since girls are routinely locked in shame closets while parents read to their sons. Also, explaining to girls that the Kim Kardashian mobile game is just fantasy and scheming superficial reality show whores don’t exist in real life.

These Not-There ideas all seem good, but not particularly great. Not as great as the fact that a strong majority of law and medicine and other professional school graduates are now women. That politics is increasingly run by female elected officials and appointees. That women represent a majority of eligible voters in this democracy and were the clear deciding demographic in electing President Obama to eight years in office. There’s also that fall back position about being able to wrap even the most powerful of men around their finger tips simply but making a kissy face and wearing a short skirt. Is that degrading? I don’t know, my first paying job in this male-dominated world was mopping up vomit in toilet stalls. I’d have traded that in for showing some skin and giving an old guy a half chubby. Where’s my United Nations sanctioned holiday?

Some day Glynda will descend and remind women that they had the power all along. Now please put the impossibly skinny models back in the fashion billboards to drive girls into fits of despair and lifelong credit problems.