During long airport waits, I’ve often wandered to the magazine rack, my eyes pleasantly glazing over at the diverting covers. Many women’s magazines (with obvious exceptions like BUST and Ms.) are meant to distract us, to offer an escape that an be lovely, but is also generally void of any real social or personal significance. What if mainstream women’s mags like Seventeen, Good Housekeeping, and Brides addressed painful topics like sexual abuse, forced marriages, slavery, rape culture, and sex trafficking?
The crowdfunding organization Catapult is focusing its attention on international women’s rights, and its new campaign “Cover Stories” imagines what magazines might look like if they spoke to difficult topics like gender violence. Following the visual aesthetic and headline style of popular magazine covers, the series of three images hopes to unsettle the public into recognizing profound injustices occurring all over the world.
Cover stories include “The Wedding You’ll Never Forget BUT WISH YOU COULD,” “Boyfriend or Pimp? The telltale signs he’s selling you for sex,” and “365 Days to train the PERFECT slave.” Yes, these topics are difficult to read about, but knowledge and understanding is the first step towards fighting national and international violence against women. To learn more about the campaign and the devastating global statistics on violence against women, check out this post.
Thanks to Lost at E Minor and Mashable
Images via Mashable
