Alissa Adams is a senior at Desert Ridge High School in Mesa, Arizona. She is one of the students who took offense to a sexist poster the school librarian put up last week that compare girls to a piece of “meat” and boys as “wolves.” The poster implied that when girls dress scantily to be “cute,” then boys see them as “meat,” and then those same boys/”wolves” go on to get lousy grades because they were distracted. In the end, the poster suggests the girls end up with said “loser” boyfriends “because they thought you looked HOT.”
It’s not the first time males and females have been described as “meat” and “wolves,” and though it can be a joke to some, it was not funny to Adams and some of the other students, male and female. Nicky Woolf with The Guardian spoke with Adams who said she was in disbelief when she first saw and read the poster which clearly implied the way girls dressed would/could be a cause for boys to fail. She asked the librarian to take it down. The librarian refused. Adams took to social media. Before tweeting it out, Adams wrote the twitter hashtag #feminism on the poster, adding:
“So it’s the girls’ fault, right?”
Adams said her tweet received thousands of supportive comments. There were some negative sprinkled in — some that implied Adams was too young and would better understand the poster when she got older. She retorted:
“I’m pretty sure I can understand a sexist poster now.”
The next day the school poster was removed. Adams felt like it was a “win.” A spokesman for Gilbert Schools said that once the poster was brought to the principal’s attention, it was taken down, adding it was “not reflective of the spirit and community of Desert Ridge High School or the Gilbert Public Schools District.” Well, that’s good to hear.
Cheers to Alissa Adams and all the students at Desert Ridge. There is hope for a promising tomorrow with young people like this. And how great it is when social media is used for the good.