Today is International Day of the Girl. The United Nations 2019 theme for International Day of the Girl isGirlForce: Unscripted and Unstoppable.
Today, girls’ movements are stopping child marriage, promoting girls’ education, standing up against gender-based violence, demanding action on climate change, tackling issues of self-esteem, and standing up for girls’ rights to enter temples or public spaces during menstruation. Girls are also engaging with municipalities to advocate for financial investments in their communities and for truly inclusive development that recognize their needs. Girls are proving they are unscripted and unstoppable.
There are, though, still formidable forces attempting to script girls and/or stop them. So much progress has been made to push back those walls but they’ve yet to completely come down. The determination and potential is there though and to find out more about how you can support girls and get involved, please read theGirlForce action plan here.
To mark International Day of the Girl, House Sussex posted this video on Instagram featuring Meghan Markle.
It’s another example of the Sussexes, Meghan of House Sussex in particular, getting more creative with social media. By social media standards, obviously, this isn’t breaking new ground. By royal social media standards, however, Meghan voicing the montage, cutting in clips from past speeches and footage from when she was a girl advocating for change, feels new. It’s also a new way of working, royal working.
Traditionally the only way to “see” royals working is to actually see them. They show up for an appearance and the photos are shared but when they’re not at an opening of something or on tour, you don’t get a sense of the work that’s being done. Now, though, the Sussexes are using social media to show their work. Even if Meghan’s not out in public, you now know that behind the scenes she’s been working alongside their team, planning their social media posts, crafting the messages, recording the voiceovers, editing the clips. Old ass pearl-clutchers won’t appreciate this because they don’t get it, but a generation of people who live online and understand the effort that goes into the maintenance of online engagement will absolutely appreciate the mechanics behind each social media drop. This is a new way of measuring royal work – and it’ll be a while before conventional measuring tools account for it.
You know how, at the end of the year, they always tally up the British royal family’s public engagements and talk about who the workhorses are and shame the slackers? They only count physical appearances. But they’ll have to, soon, find a new measurement algorithm that takes into consideration the digital contributions. Because, more and more, that’s a valuable form of connection for the royals. After all, they wouldn’t all have social media accounts if they hadn’t already conceded long ago that it was a necessity. And all of that is real strategy, real labour, real work.
