Real Women On Billboards

The purpose of this article is to describe the experiences the Real Women on
Billboards had of acting from a clearly thought out strategy.  Hopefully,
this will add to the knowledge that nonviolent activists, feminists and
others working for social justice have of the most effective ways to bring
about change.

Our Action
There was excitement, nervous energy and lots of smiles as nearly forty women
and men gathered at the City Square on the 8th of April.  After light-hearted
introductions round the circle, Karen from the Real Women on Billboards spoke
concisely about the campaign so far.

Guess, a jeans store, knew our demands: that they remove all their sexist
advertisements and that they use non-sexist advertising that represents women
as real women.  Following initial negotiations with Guess over the last month
by letter, by phone and in person, the group felt compelled to express its
views more publicly and creatively.  Anita's heart-strong speech clearly
showed the effect that traditional advertising has on women: the anger, the
time and energy spent worrying about how we look, feelings of inadequacy
about our bodies, the loss of our selves as intelligent whole people.  Also,
sexist advertising encourages men to treat women as passive sex objects. 
This helps to maintain strong sexist attitudes in our culture that promote
violence against women.

So, in remembrance of women and children who have suffered from sexual
violence, candles were lit around the circle.  In time with the echoing beat
of a drum, the group marched silently through late night shoppers, with
candles and placards to the Guess shop on Collins St.  Once there, all
participants stood in silence for a minute, candles flickering beneath
serious faces.

Then the mood changed.  With Gabrielle's encouraging beginning, each person
spoke proudly about the positive image of a woman they had brought along that
they would like to see in advertising.  People spoke of ethnic women, strong
women, talented women, courageous women.  Each person glued their image to
the billboard headed with glittering letters "Real Women on Billboards" until
there was a dazzling display of real women of different cultures races,
shapes, sizes, ages, abilities and occupations.

To the sound of cheers and percussion instruments, Margaret and Vanessa then
presented this shining example of a truly hip and ethical billboard to Guess
as a gift.  They accepted the gift willingly, if rather speechlessly, and the
action was complete on a jubilant note.

Our Campaign
The Real Women on Billboards began in Melbourne in January this year and is
part of the Australian Nonviolence Network ("the Network").  We have the same
ultimate aim of nonviolence and feminism: to share power equally in society. 
Our strategy aims to change values, attitudes, behaviour and structures in
society that oppress.  This means bravely resisting injustice and - even more
courageously perhaps - building alternatives.  Using nonviolent means to
achieve this ensures that the sacredness of all life is always affirmed.

More specifically, the aims of the Real Women on Billboards are: 1. To take
steps towards stopping sexual violence against women; 2. To support each
other in developing and integrating our personal, political and spiritual  
lives; and 3. To honour the power and strength of ourselves as women and to
use this to make real our vision of a feminist and nonviolent community.

So how did we achieve these aims?

To stop sexual violence against women is a long term aim!  It will only
happen with profound personal and political change.  We chose to work with
Guess as one typical structure that uses sexist advertising.  We chose to
highlight the role of mainstream advertising in strongly promoting sexist
attitudes and values that promote sexist behaviours including sexual
violence. 

This focus on changing attitudes, behaviour and structures promotes
self-empowerment and self-responsibility.  This strategy is in contrast with
other common strategies such as censorship and legal change that pose
external rules and punishment to stop violence.  This has only a limited
impact on promoting empowerment and responsibility and, in fact, often
reinforces powerlessness - not a useful strategy when men especially need to
take responsibility for their violence.

Again, in contrast with censorship, we found it powerful to emphasise
positive  alternatives to sexist advertising.  To do this the importance of
imagination and vision was obvious.  The most common resistance I met with
from feminist friends about this campaign was "Guess isn't that bad".  I
agree that Guess' advertising is not the worst, but it is typical.  We have
become so thoroughly brainwashed by sexist media that we no longer have joy
as our benchmark but mere tolerance.  The difference between the objectified
woman in jeans and the powerful ethnic women of our billboard was striking
and convincing.

Strategies that include imagining how things could be inspire new options and
jolt us out of mere survival.  We then enacted our vision as much as possible
in the here and now, so that our means are consistent with our ends.

In our vision we saw that there would be a role for advertising because, even
without capitalism, we would need to let others know about services
available.  But advertising of the future will be radically different and,
importantly, will be directly accountable to the community.  The community
will have direct participation in decision making processes - a real choice -
about how women are portrayed in advertising.  This community accountability
was obvious in our action.

A unique feature of this campaign has been our focus on one specific company.
Many protests are very general and avoid the difficult work of dealing with
conflict with real people.  We are starting to build up a real dialogue with
workers and management of Guess.  Fostering trust has been an important part
of this relationship building and to do this we informed Guess that we will
respect and listen to all workers, management and customers; we showed a
commitment to being as open and honest as we can and we informed the police
of all the details of our action.  These measures helped create an atmosphere
of safety and trust so the real issues can be discussed and also helped
ensure our action strengthened our communication and credibility with Guess
whilst still maintaining a strong stance.

We have realised that we need to have excellent communication, assertiveness
and conflict resolution skills and a long-term framework to do this
relationship building with the intent to change Guess' advertising.  But I
think we are all more likely to change with support, critical feedback,
positive alternatives and long term relationship building.

Real Women on Billboards has experimented with integrating our personal and
spiritual lives with political action and we have found this to be a powerful
combination.  We talked about  personal issues, our spirituality and cultural
background, did rituals, sang songs, ate food...  Sometimes it was difficult
to move from deep feelings to planning political strategy.  Oppression has a
real impact on our bodily selves and we had only just begun to explore using
body movement work to express stuck feelings so they can be used in our
political understanding.  But personal expression enhanced our political
work, making it easier to voice our demands, objections and to make our
action an assertive expression of our feelings and ideas.  Including our
personal experiences is also vital in working with each other.

This was obvious in our attempt to include our differing cultural
backgrounds.  A Jewish woman in the group found this very valuable, but an
Italian woman felt dissatisfied that, with the group being predominantly
Anglo, work on race and culture was marginal rather than central to our
campaign.  Cultural difference was most obviously excluded in our analysis of
patriarchal society because we were speaking theoretically and generalising
women's experience.

In evaluation, we all agreed that it is vital for theory and analysis to be
grounded in experience.  We were able to talk about strong feelings around
racism in our group - feelings of being silenced and excluded, of guilt and
rejection - but there is a lot more work for Anglos, in particular, to do
around their racism and it does need to be central to political campaigns.

There were many other ways we gave each other personal support to do our
political work including: supporting less experienced members to take on
different activist roles, affirmation, rotating facilitation, role plays and
talks about difficulties such as being arrested.  Creating a culture of
support for activism is needed to prevent burn-out and stress and make
activism safe, fun, challenging and sustainable.

We had high levels of trust and support but we also found that we had created
a "culture of niceness" in the group.  This meant that our cynical, jealous,
and so on, parts of ourselves were not as freely expressed as our loving
parts of ourselves.  All parts of ourselves need to be expressed and used to
inform our political work.  This will mean a more real connection between
ourselves and a real empathy with others as we all struggle to transform
these feelings that stem from powerlessness

 One last reflection on the benefits of the structure of the Nonviolence
Network.  The ANN can be seen as a network of decentralised affinity groups
and organisations linked by a commitment to nonviolence.  I feel excited by
the autonomy and support that is available to each group of the ANN.  Each
group is supported by the ANN with its campaign and strategy experience,
resources, personal support and solidarity.  Affinity groups also have the
independence to develop their own campaigns, thus allowing a diversity of
issues and strategies to be explored.  This structure means that action
groups can be small and so function more easily with more scope for personal
and spiritual work to be included within political work.  In turn, each group
helps build the ANN - which is crucial because nonviolence has a long history
and effective strategies that the world vitally needs.

Where will the Real Women on Billboards go from here?  We are unsure. 
Because two women are leaving the group, we would like new women to join us
and help us decide!  If you are interested in joining the Real Women, if you
have any feedback or would like to find out more about the Nonviolence
Network, then please ring me on (053) 481-342.
Jo Barter