Elone, a young woman from Karlsruhe, Germany is in news for her new tactic to spread feminism through her “feminist pads”. It all started with one inspiring tweet from user @cutequeer96, Elone read the tweet in 2014 which later on become her first message of her ‘in-your face’ project started on International Women’s Day this year.
The concept of feminism itself has many negative connotations and many a times it is perceived wrongly as if it is more against the men’s right than in favor of women’s right. But what Elone did was less of female chauvinism and more of sensitizing people with issues of women and for Elone, to convey her message what could be a better medium than the period pads!
As most of women use period pads but they have to conceal it like so many other suppressed issues of their lives.
Elone’s first message on period pad stuck to poles all around her city goes like “Imagine if Men were as Disgusted with Rape as they are with Periods”. Some people or rather I would say, the real target audience of Elone’s message found it offending to see a period pad in public, which is quite ironical as period pads are considered “taboo” but issues like rape are discussed a lot without being eradicated completely from the society.
The whole idea of Elone was to spread the voice of numerable females regarding the issues they face which are ignored in society. As against objectification of women her messages were “My Name is not Baby” and “Rapist Rape People and not the Outfits”. However the consequences of Elone’s initiative are not all positive as she received some abusive comments like “why would you take time and effort to put bunch of false information on pads so you could tape them around your city, how is this even feminism? It definitely doesn’t support equality between sexes. How can one be such sexist, littering asshole?”
But it didn’t deter her and she replied back “False information? Okay I just lied when I said 23 million woman got raped last year , that rapist rape people not the outfits, that’s my pussy my choice, that 20.5 million women are victims of sex trafficking, you are right I am such a sexist person that I can’t hold my sexism , do me a favor and please shut up.” After all, Elone didn’t promote feminism as man hating thing rather she promoted it as a matter of gender equality as one of her message is “…you would look so pretty if you … – NO”.
Elone’s project is one more step taken in the process of mind set change, as within just two days it garnered lot of support from people of other countries and they were on street sticking up their own similar versions. Apart from this Elone’s initiative has created stir in online space too, though some criticized it as a waste of period pads but Elone made sure that she used only one package and she donates period pads to local homeless women regularly.
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