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BEIRUT: With the election season getting hotter as the long awaited day approaches, election campaigns are certainly becoming more and more controversial. The new campaign 'Be Beautiful and Vote' (I first saw it on Beirut/NTSC blog) has become the latest billboard campaign to hit a nerve esp. with the Beirut-based Feminist Collective who have created a spoof version of the campaign (Be Intelligent and Vote Blank in addition to a hand written heading saying 'because no one cares about your rights) and listed 12 reasons on their blog for why they consider this campaign offensive to women.
The campaign initiated by General Michel Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) plays on a famous French saying: "Sois Belle et tais-toi" (Be Beautiful and Shut up) by changing the second part into 'Vote' as part of their campaign to target women voters. But it has certainly raised some eyebrows particularly with the Feminist Activist Camp that denounced the whole attempt as a direct offense to women.
Personally, I don't know what FPM's initial intention was from such a campaign, but what I know is that they certainly haven't studied their target group, in this case women voters. Instead of creating a horizontal communication with those women they have resorted to a rather vertical one in which women have ended up on the lower end of that discourse. So please, stop thinking that you know how women think and instead start concretely involving them in every level of the democratic processes!
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