Within six days of being posted on Vimeo and Instagram, the video went viral. The poem, a powerful piece on the dichotomies of women as Women’s Health calls it, is about the impossible standards imposed upon women (and men in some cases, although the focus is on women) and depicts the pressures and conflicting messages they're bombarded with on a daily basis.
The magazine put it out there like this:
This also goes to show the power of video, as the original post dates back to December 2017. Not only does this poignant message still hold relevant today, but the video format and, of course, the magazine’s reach has proven effective to get it across.
Producer Claire Rothstein told The Guardian that her and director, Paul McLean are feminists. “We’re not huge activists… But the message for us is always about female empowerment, however you want that to be.”
Her work is very much political. The second issue of Girls. Girls. Girls. featuring actress Rachel McAdams wearing Versace, diamonds and a breast pump – another piece of Rothstein’s – also went viral in 2018, and she shot actress Rose McGowan for the same issue, then in the midst of the Harvey Weinstein rape case. “It’s meant to be ironic,” she told The Guardian. “But that’s lost on some people.”
I don’t understand why sexy has become a negative thing. I take those classic stereotypes that are considered negative when seen through the male gaze and flip them on their head. It’s hyper-real, it’s fantasy, but I don’t see that as diluting the message in any way.It’s this aesthetic that lends itself to getting the message heard. “If the video wasn’t as stylised as it is, it wouldn’t have made the impression it has.”
Mlisska Hubert 14 Aug 2018
Rainville, the copywriter, is a 22-year-old undergraduate student at the University of Vermont. She says of her blog that it was created to spotlight this piece of writing. After sharing with close friends on her personal Facebook page, the post began to travel through many circles of social media anonymously. The creation of this blog was to make space for this personal piece of writing to exist in a format that is highly amateur, far too unedited and quite emotionally raw.
