By Stephanie Cole If you want to commit to sparking change, the first step is to choose media awareness every day. Media awareness is surprisingly easy to achieve; no dramatic enlightenment required. Simple steps include: Don’t be a mindless consumer. Think critically about the messages that advertising, films and television are promoting. This takes surprisingly…
By Bailey Shoemaker Richards and Kaye Toal Today is boot camp for all of you 101 shoppers. This holiday season, it’s more important than ever that we tackle the stores with a critical eye, since it seems like companies are always ramping up their attempts to sexualize, demean and otherwise alienate young women shoppers. From…
SPARK is expanding to high school and college campuses across the country! We’d love for you to join us in building a movement against the sexualization of girls in media. Interested? Start a SPARKit Girls chapter at your school and start SPARKing change! How do I create a SPARK chapter at my school? Fill out…
By Melissa Campbell After the first SPARK Summit in October 2010, I wrote that I had never felt camaraderie and companionship like I had at the Summit. I talked about how great it felt to be part of a growing movement, to know that I was not alone, and to see change—to be change. “Make…
By Seila Rizvic Being a media-literate person is no easy task. The more you learn about oppression the more painfully obvious it appears in the world around you and some days, you’ll be forced to confront patriarchy more times than you may be able to handle. Luckily, there is an online community of like-minded oppression-haters…
By Stephanie Cole Facebook has had a misogyny problem for a long time now. Let’s be honest, it started as Facemash, a blatantly misogynist, and illegal, website. So why I am not surprised with the events of the past week? For months, nay, years now, women have been lobbying the social networking site to remove its…
The media doesn’t represent us–so we’re making our own media. We’re sick of media that shows women and girls as weak, catty, looks-obsessed, boy-crazy objects of pleasure, so the SPARKteam is joining Miss Representation in demanding media that fairly, fully, and accurately represents women. For every 1000 videos submitted, the folks at the Miss Representation campaign…
By Joy Lovely A friend of mine recently linked me to an, er, interesting study. This study asked 268 adults to judge the photographs of 25 women, aged 20 to 50 and ranged from white, African-American and Hispanic. Though some participants were forced to make a snap judgment while others could gaze with no time…