Before the Weather Gets to Them

The Always ad asks a simple question: show me how to run like a girl. Then it films teenagers and adults performing their best impression—arms flailing, expressions exaggerated, bodies made deliberately small and silly. Then it films actual young girls doing the same thing. They just run. The gap between those two sets of footage is the entire argument.

What the #LikeAGirl campaign captures is the mechanism—the specific invisible point at which a neutral phrase becomes a diminishment, absorbed so thoroughly you don’t notice it’s happened. Before a certain age, "like a girl" means nothing except like yourself. After that it means something else entirely, and that shift doesn’t announce itself.

I’m wary of advertising that packages empowerment alongside disposable hygiene products. The business interest behind the film is obvious and a little uncomfortable. But the observation inside it is real, and the filmmaking is good, and sometimes those things are true simultaneously. The subject survives the medium.