There has been a rise in the number of protests and movements for women, body positivity, feminism and women’s rights in recent years.
There have been a lot of protests over the last few years for women and the issues they face. One that happened last year was the women’s marh which happened globally on January 21st. While called the Women’s March, the goal of the march was to avocate for human rights and other issues including women’s rights, racial equality, LGBTQ rights and immigration reform.
In Ireland this march took place in two cities. One in Galway where 250 to 300 peole gathered, and one in Dublin where thousands turned up, the march was moved on the day to a larger area because of the number of people that turned up.
One major campaign that happened in Ireland this year was the abortion referendum. The ‘Repeal the 8th’ started months before the referendum. It caused a lot of debate over the months leading up to the vote. With the pro-choice campaign fighting for women’s rights on what to do with their bodies. It was a step in the right direction for women.
A recent protest for women in Ireland is against the comments ae by a barrister in a rape-trial. This barrister held us the 17-years-old girl’s underwear up as evidence of why the man accused should be aquitted. This sparked outrage and public backlash, with protests and online campaigns happening. Online girls were posting photos of their underwear on their social media with the hashtag #ThisisNotConsent to protest the events of the rape trial.
All these protests and campaigns show that feminism is important and very active in modern society. Also that it is needed to work against the many issues facing women and even other groups
Jameela Jamil, actress from The Good Place, has taking a lot of strides in promoting feminism and body positivity.
She requests that she does not be photoshopped in any photoshoot she does and doesn’t photoshop the photos she postss on her social media, she advocates strongly for body positivity, espeically for women.
“I find photoshop to be one of the worst things to happen to women,” she said in an Instagram post in June about a shoot she did for a magazine.
One major step she has taken is the establishment of her body positivity campaign and account called I Weigh. She was inspired to start this ‘Insta-movement’ after she came across a post about what the Kardashian’s individual weights were, she responded with her own post about her ‘weight’ which was made up of this such as ‘I make an honest living’ and ‘I speak out for women’s rights’.
From here she created account encouraging people to post pictures of themselves to the account and caption it with the things that make up their ‘weight’. The account currently has 214k followers and is still a growing movement.
Despite the rise in feminism in recent years, there is still a bt of a way to go until there is more equality in our society.