On December 10, my group went to City Hall to meet with Samantha Levine. She worked for the former mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg. Ms. Levine started the “I’m a Girl” campaign. If you have read my earlier blog posts, you know that we have already had an interview with Denis Ahlgrim, the designer of the “I’m a Girl” posters.

We had a very interesting conversation with Ms. Levine, where she told us about why she started this campaign and how it affected her. When we asked her how women’s representation in the media had changed her life growing up, she told us that it hadn’t really directly affected her, but she had noticed how other girls were falling into bad eating habits and trying to make themselves more “beautiful”.

I think it would be interesting in our teach-in to bring up how many people are not directly affected by the “perfect” woman displayed in the media, and we could discuss people’s observations of how other people are affected. One thing that I learned, and found very interesting, was when Ms. Levine said that girls self esteem, really drops around the age of twelve. She said that she observed this from working with the girls to make the posters for the campaign.

I think it makes sense that girls would begin feeling more self conscious when they start to reach the age of being a teenager. It was nice to talk to someone who was really fighting to support girls in our generation, and hearing about how she is doing it. Talking to someone who is working in the field of social justice was really inspiring for our group, and we learned a lot from her.

Getting to hear about how she found all the girls was interesting too. They wanted to make sure that they didn’t use any models, people who were less experienced with the idea of posing for a camera, so they could get a

more natural look. They didn’t want any typical beauties, they had a lot of girls in the project who were the daughters of Ms. Levine’s co-workers. Just hearing about the process, and how she decided to make this campaign was truly inspiring, and motivating. Also, what better way to top off the experience by meeting the mayor (at the time), it was very exciting getting to meet Michael Bloomberg.