Bloomberg Now Focusing His Energies On Girl Power
Well, easy enough to make jokes about, given his prior focus on shaming citizens into eating right, shaming teens into not having babies (or feeling terrible about the ones they do have), and embarking on his own behind-the-scenes campaign to make sure women in his orbit constantly feel belittled and objectified, but this is actually pretty great. Thanks in large part to a push from Bloomberg’s Press Secretary Samantha Levine, the city has now launched “The NYC Girls Project,” aimed solely at helping girls between ages 7 and 12 feel good about themselves. It’s almost suspiciously nice.
The city is now pouring $330,000 into the campaign, which Levine told the Times was partly inspired by author Cheryl Strayed’s statements about how a “failure of feminism was that women still worried about what their buttocks looked like in jeans.” Levine added, “I think being a woman in this society, it’s sort of impossible to not be aware of the pressures there are around appearance, around weight, around trying to always look a certain way.”
As such, the campaign itself is relentlessly positive and comes along side parks department fitness classes, self esteem-boosting programs in after-school programs city-wide, and its own #ImAGirl hashtag. All of which feels a whole lot nicer than showing us fat pouring into a glass. And anyway, the world would probably be a much, much better place if politicians spent more time taking their cues from Cheryl Strayed.
Follow Virginia K. Smith on Twitter @vksmith.