Potty-Mouthed Princesses Drop F-Bombs for Feminism by FCKH8.com

It's the pathetic adult who would come away after watching that with strictly the notion that "they were making those sweet little girls say those words." and not be able to see the message behind it.

My daughter has issues with the site the video came from, it's transgender phobic and cuts and pastes other people's work from the net without crediting them.

would you (or she) have been happy to agree to her wearing just provocative underwear at that age, poledancing and twerking to a song which protested against the patronising sexual objectification of women?

The many, many problems with FCKH8′s ‘potty-mouthed princess’ video
By Caitlin Dewey
October 23

Most people would agree the gender wage-gap is bad. But is it more or less bad than profit-motivated adults instructing little girls to curse for a viral video?

That is, in a nutshell, the false equivalence at the heart of a new and wildly controversial video by the T-shirt brand FCKH8, which since Tuesday has racked up more than 100,000 views on YouTube alone. The video consists of girls, ages six to 13, dropping frequent F-bombs in a discussion of pay inequality, stereotypical gender roles and sexual violence — a concept far more dangerous to the six-year-old mind, some might argue, than any casual curse words could be...

Presumably, if you do find the girls’ language offensive, you’re not a very good feminist. And if you don’t find the girls’ language offensive, you are — to paraphrase one breathlessly horrified conservative blogger — an Occupy Wall Streeter, an atheist, or a “sexually confused and anti-American angry woman.”

So regardless of your feelings on f-bombs, feminism, and the viral-industrial complex more generally, nobody wins here. Except FCKH8, of course, which is kind of the whole idea.

FCKH8 is, after all, a for-profit company, owned entirely by Synergy Media — a corporate branding studio that specializes in (whaddya know!) marketing. Each T-shirt FCKH8 sells retails for between $15 and $37, five dollars of which the company promises to donate to charity. After FCKH8’s last campaign — in which the company had children from Ferguson, Mo. read statistics on racism to “white people” — that cut went to the Mike Brown Memorial Fund and the NAACP. Critics, of whom there are many, were not impressed.

“Everything, it seems, can distilled, packaged, bought and sold — including racism,” wrote Colorlines’ Aura Bogado, one of many to fault FCKH8 for making money off Ferguson’s tragedy.

This new campaign, with its new feel-good issue, doesn’t stray too far from that script: It’s still about provoking solely for provocation’s sake. There’s the age of the girls in question. The fact that they’re all dressed like “pretty princesses.” The casual deployment of phrases like “pay up, motherf***er,” which just rings gratuitous. (FCKH8 has, for its part, defended the video as a strong statement against sexism.)

Nevermind that the video would have made a far more credible point about rape and gender roles and the wage gap — not to mention, social and moral norms — if adults starred in it instead of little kids.

“What’s more offensive?” FCKH8 tries to ask. “A little girl saying f***, or the sexist way society treats girls and women?”

Whatever the answer, it’s clearly good business for FCKH8: The company has built a veritable empire by throwing the veil of social good over more capitalist ambitions. Power to you, guys. You’re clever businessmen. Just don’t expect us to laud your grand stand for feminism — been there, done that, will not buy the T-shirt.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/10/23/the-many-many-problems-with-fckh8s-potty-mouthed-princess-video/

By Gavia Baker-Whitelaw 
September 15, 2014

A clothing company's anti-racism T-shirt is getting some hate of its own.

FCKH8 is best known for selling T-shirts with slogans such as “Straight Against Hate” and “Some dudes marry dudes. Get over it.” But recently, the company branched out into what it describes as “anti-racism gear.”

This move is already causing some controversy, partly due to the T-shirt campaign’s link to the protests in Ferguson, Mo.

The new FCKH8 T-shirts, wristbands and bumper stickers are printed with the slogan, “Racism isn’t over. But I’m over racism.” Although FCKH8 is a for-profit company, $5 from each T-shirt, hoodie and tank top will be donated to anti-racism organizations such as the NAACP and the Mike Brown Memorial Fund. These products were launched with a viral video titled Hey White People, which features six kids from Ferguson quoting statistics about racism in the U.S.

You can view the video Hey White People here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQfg52m0-4o&feature=player_detailpage

FCKH8’s Mike Kon said that the T-shirts “[give] people a way to turn their chests into little billboards to speak out against the evil of racism and start an important conversation our nation needs to have.”

However, this campaign has already run into some pushback from the very organizations that it was intending to promote. Race Forward, one of the charities originally listed on FCKH8’s anti-racism apparel page, quickly posted to Facebook, saying that they would not accept any donations from FCKH8. Colorlines, a news and commentary site published by Race Forward, then posted an article under the headline, “This is the company making money off of Ferguson,” criticizing FCKH8’s T-shirt campaign and viral video.

Colorlines described FCKH8’s video as showing children “reciting parts of a script that’s clearly been written by adults,” and went on to mention the for-profit nature of FCKH8, which is owned by corporate branding firm Synergy Media.

FCKH8 responded in a lengthy post on their website, saying that Colorlines and Race Forward were using “Click-baiting, Race-baiting, Homophobia, Minimizing Ferguson Residents, Trivializing Breast Cancer Awareness Efforts & Distorting Facts to Get Views & Donations.”

In answer to comments pointing out the potentially problematic nature of hiring a white director to cast African American children in an ad for anti-racism T-shirts, FCKH8 riffed on a quote from Martin Luther King. They wrote, “we’d prefer that the video and message from the participating Ferguson families and kids be judged on the content of its character and not the color of the skin of the director who pitched in to help make it.”

Popular vlogger and comedian Franchesca Ramsey (a.k.a. Chescaleigh, who is known for videos including **** White Girls Say To Black Girls), called FCKH8’s post “eye-roll inducing.”

“This is rich,” she wrote. “A FOR PROFIT COMPANY is accusing an anti-racism non-profit organization of race baiting for donations?! This from the company that has not once spoken about anti-racism until Ferguson (way genuine!), and their contribution is… T-shirts and a $5 donation.”

In an email to the Daily Dot, a representative from FCKH8 pointed out that their products had already raised $6,000 in one week, and that several other charities had contacted them for donations. They also emphasised that the organizations receiving donations from FCKH8 are not necessarily affiliated with FCKH8 itself.

“We specially made it a point in several places on the website to note that the organizations that we are choosing to donate to are not involved with our campaign. As understandably some of our vocal LGBT advocacy and youth-oriented name and attention-getting style are not how these great groups present themselves we wanted to be clear that is is just us supporting them good work and not the other way around.”

The issue of FCKH8’s “attention-getting style” has always been a source of conflict with the marginalized groups it attempts to represent. Both as a for-profit business and as a fundraising organization, FCKH8’s main goal is to promote itself and sell more products. Inevitably, this causes some friction with non-profit campaigners who demand a more nuanced discussion of race, gender and sexuality.
http://www.dailydot.com/business/fckh8-ferguson-t-shirt/

Does a girl of this age have the emotional maturity to even comprehend these issues.

Quote:

Does a girl of this age have the emotional maturity to even comprehend these issues.

doesn't this remind you of how Bill Clinton would get up on stage and seek out advice from 7 year olds on how to end war,famine and general suffering? This is a particularly nasty side of our practice of fetishizing children.