I’ve been with Preen.ph for a little over a year, and in that time so much has changed. First would be the work that I do. I went from just writing stories and producing shoots to accomplishing much more, including having to give a talk—I’ll get back to that. Other than my workload, I also feel like I have changed. Because of the feminist tone that we use, I have learned to view things in my everyday life with a similar lens. I’ll be honest, I never really spoke up about feminism because, well, I was ignorant and I didn’t really know what it was and i didn’t understand its importance. Now, I always try to advocate and live it as best I can.
Considering the audience
Now, going back to the talk. I was tasked to prepare a short presentation on representation of women and the LGBTQ+ community in media, specifically at Preen.ph. Preparing the actual presentation took a while but what I was more concerned about was my delivery. I gave a couple mock presentations and one of the comments I got was that I had to consider who was I going to be speaking to. I was so wrapped up in getting it perfect that I forgot to think about my audience: mainly college students.
I was presenting in such a way that I assumed the audience would know what I was talking about, when in fact that might not be the case. So, I had to adjust. I had slides that purely explained some terms important to the topic and tried my best to clearly explain what i meant. To make it even more relatable, I injected personal stories. I tried to remember my way of thinking when I was in college and how I would have liked someone to talk about these topics to me. I wanted to make sure that they understood the importance of the issues I was talking about. I had to make it interesting so it would catch their attention as well as make it relevant with real-life situations. For example, I showed clips of Pres. Duterte using his power and dominance to overpower women, and I immediately saw their reactions.
The Q&A
After the presentation, there was a Q&A portion that shocked me. There were so many people who lined up to ask questions. I was happy to see that so many young people wanted to learn about feminism and clear up misconceptions they might have believed. What I also learned from this is that these things should be taught at a young age. I can relate to these students but it’s about time that we start to educate young people about these issues even before college. At the core, feminism isn’t a complicated topic to talk about. It is something simple that even three or five-year olds can understand. However, because these matters aren’t prioritized, some sort of damage control needs to be done. I really do appreciate that I was given a chance to educate these young individuals, now I hope they can spread that knowledge as well.
Art by Marian Hukom
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