1–0 Always

In 2014, a video was released by a company called Always, this company is very well known for its hygiene products and did a commercial reinventing the idea of being “like a girl”. The commercial began with an interview with multiple young girls and guys ranging from the ages of 5–18 by which they were asked to throw, run, and fight “like a girl”. Each of their responses were stereotypical expressions of acting like a girl which lead to the question, is this an insult? The boys and girls then responded with the answer yes. One girl took it as you are trying to humiliate someone for something. The purpose of this commercial was to create a new definition of what it means to be “like a girl”. The idea was to change its meaning from being wimpy, slow, uncoordinated, and bad to positive ideas such as winning, being strong, and sophisticated. These are the qualities of what it really means to be a girl. Due to this video being extremely inspirational and life-changing, it went viral. I remember scrolling through my twitter, Instagram, and Facebook feed and seeing this video being shared by so many people. I literally saw it so many times being retweeted that I could quote the video. And because of that it has made an impact. I’m not sure if it was just me but when a term or expression is called out for being offensive like using the word “gay” or “retarded” as something bad, people usually don’t reference that word or sentence to anything anymore. Once this was released onto social media I haven’t heard anyone use that phrase ever in the last 3 years. Moreover, I feel women have become more independent and empowered since that video came out. Although, they could do that anyways even without the video, I feel it did make an impact in the cause of women’s right and not using their gender as a means of putting someone down.

Moving forward, I believe that this video had planned content. Since the phrase “like a girl” has been around for ages and has been used so many times for targeting a person’s actions negatively, the producers knew that this had to change. They could easily change this perspective of girls since the content was already there. All they had to do was plan everything accordingly such as finding the right amount of guys and girls to ask questions to. Since this video covered most attributes such as being personal, unique, relevant, intentional, careful and inspirational. This planned content made the video much more authentic and ultimately was the reason it went viral.