Fame Day: #thevagenda, When Twitter took down the Tabloids

Have you seen these revamped tabloids floating around?

These awesome rewrites were prompted by a recent challenge that Vagenda Magazine gave on Twitter:

It’s a Twitter campaign I love for two big reasons.

1) It ditches the anger and embraces the humour 

#thevagenda highlights an issue that continues to be perpetrated, with seemingly no end in sight. I’ve touched on my frustration with sexism in media a couple times in the past (Problem with Pink, Problem with Cute), but this campaign does something different.

It’s easy to get on a rant about these kinds of issues, and I think it’s really understandable when people get angry about the portrayal of women in the media. That being said, “feminism” is still something that is pretty commonly feared. I understand this fear because I myself used to call myself “an equal-ist, because women and men should be treated equal.”

I’m not the first woman to have said this kind of thing, especially before they knew much about the history of feminism.

The most common expression I hear when discussing feminism with individuals who would not consider themselves feminists is “why call it feminism if the focus is supposed to be equality?” I never seem to come up with a very good answer for this question in the moment, but I did find a fairly clear video that discusses it for me:

Many of my friends have reposted these images, and I’m assuming some of them would not agree with the general worldview expressed by The Vagenda, or even with the idea of feminism at all. In spite of this, everyone can appreciate the ridiculously unfair standard we hold women to in our magazines.

2) it calls out women who love beating down other women 

In an indirect way #thevagenda also challenges the way we women think about each other.

Who, for example, is the most avid consumer of tabloids? In a survey comparing news viewing habits of women and men, Pew Research Center concluded that women are “more than twice as likely to list [a tabloid story as their] most closely followed story (22% vs. 10%).” This is somewhat unfortunate considering that the majority of tabloid reporters are male, and therefore don’t directly experience the kind of sexism prominent in their magazines. 

#thevagenda acts as a quiet reminder for any woman, like myself, who might sometimes feel tempted to look down on others in order to make ourselves feel better.

So here’s to Vagenda Magazine and finding a way to take down the patriarchy… in a way that everyone seems to like.