Permission
You watch girls get smaller. Not just their bodies—everything. The magazines, the TV, the weight of it. They learn that existing means being looked at, that strength looks wrong on them, that wanting anything is ungracious.
The Always campaign with #LikeAGirl was this strange corporate intervention. A commercial where girls throw and run and fight like a girl
but commit, without the internal flinch, without the voice saying you’re being too loud. A pad company doing consciousness-raising, which is odd and yet somehow right.
What struck me was how obviously it needed to exist. We’d gotten to the point where girls actually needed a brand to tell them it was okay to exist without shrinking. But that’s where we are. You bombard people with systemic messaging one way, you need counter-messages coming back. Sometimes those come from corporations. The strange part is—it works. Not completely, not forever. A girl feels permission, even if it reaches her through someone else’s eyes first.
One ad doesn’t undo the whole ecosystem. Thirty seconds of commercial doesn’t flip a lifetime of conditioning. But the messaging cuts both ways. Counter-messages matter. Especially when they’re cynical. Especially when they’re coming from somewhere you wouldn’t expect.
What the campaign is actually reaching for isn’t pride in being a girl. It’s the basic right to take up space. To exist without the constant apology. That’s what sticks.