Viral "Be A Lady" Video Sends Viewers Into Cringe World With Mixing Women Empowerment Message

A new footage featuring Cynthia Nixon delivering a piece of message from Camille Rainville went viral on social media. The video, named Be A Lady, saw Nixon narrating plenty of long and contradictory messages that girls and women are told from seemingly puberty: “Be experienced. Be sexual. Be innocent. Be dirty. Be sexy. Be the cool girl. Don’t be like the other girls.”

It was called a phenomenal footage which is created based on the powerful writing back in 2017 named Be A Lady, They Said. Cynthia Nixon is known with her role in cult film Sex and The City with well-known activism and her recent unsuccessful attempt for the governor position of New York. She is the perfect person to deliver the message to the world.

She said while staring in the camera lens, “Be a lady, they said.”

She kept on,

“Don’t be too fat. Don’t be too thin. Don’t be too large. Don’t be too small. Eat up. Slim down. Stop eating so much. Don’t eat too fast. Order a salad. Don’t eat carbs. Skip dessert. You need to lose weight. Fit into that dress. Go on a diet. Watch what you eat. Eat celery. Chew gum. Drink lots of water. You have to fit into those jeans. God, you look like a skeleton. Why don’t you just eat?”

It is undoubtedly a powerful message as there is the inclusion of influential figures as Donald Trump and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Mean Girls’ Regina George and House of Cards’ Claire Underwood.

The poem was supposed to call attention on the double standards every woman has to face. But to say in an honest way, the Be A Lady’s empowering message leaves a lot of gaps in the desired target.

First, the images are not that empowering

Some netizens have pointed out that there are nearly no women of color included apart from very fast flashes of the magazine’s cover features Vanessa Hudgens and Tracee Ellis Ross, with maybe two other black models.

Anyway, there is totally no ability or body diversity in this video. While Nixon recited not to be too large, too fat,  to slim down or stop eating to be able to fit in some jeans, the video shows images of model-like bodies and this has nothing to do with inspiring body diversity.

A lot of the used images in the video are the magazine’s photoshoots themselves. While the vid is powerful indeed, it is unclear how they are trying to broaden awareness from it as it seems like nothing is working the way they wanted it to be.

The whole thing just feels like an advertisement for Girls Girls Girls magazine

It appears that the video is a promotional material for a magazine called Girls Girls Girls who promises to reawaken the time when fashion women were everything about the luxury, the fantasy and the polish.

Be A Lady video was directed by a man

The mixing signal of massages could result from a large reason for the person behind the camera: a man.

The director is Paul McLean, a very talented videographer and photographer but the buzz says that he has “ no business directing a film like this”.

They commented that the video would have more impact if it was a female director who took charge of the making.

Be A Lady collected a number of 4 million views before the official vid was nowhere to be seen on Youtube. Now, the Instagram handle of Girls Girls Girls has garnered 275,000 followers.

In conclusion, the “be the cool girl, not like the other girls” note would have been more powerful if you were not promoting or profiting from the cool-girl image.