F is for Film Star

A group I support called THE ALTERNATIVE PAGE 3 posts honouring info about women every thursday and I wanted to share this one on my blog today…

ANGELINA JOLIE (we love thee)

Not a page to shirk controversy, we know our Thursday babe is likely to cause some mixed reactions, but…
Angelina Jolie Voight (38) from Los Angeles was virtually born in a film studio. She had a wild teenhood experimenting with knives, being bullied at school, and self-harming, and suffered for many years with suicidal depression, yet in spite of this, she’s still managed to tuck an Oscar, 2 Screen Actors Guild Awards and 3 Gold Globes under her skinny belt.

However, it was when she was filming Lara Croft: Tomb Raider in Cambodia that her thoughts began to turn to Humanitarian work. As soon as filming was over, she began visiting refugee camps around the world to learn more. She donated $1 million in response to an international United Nations High Commission for Refugees emergency appeal – the largest donation UNHCR had ever received from a private individual. On her missions to war-zones, she made sure she covered all her own costs and shared the same basic living conditions as field staff on all of her visits. In 2001, Angelina was named a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador at UNHCR headquarters in Geneva.

In May 2012, she joined William Hague in a campaign against sexual violence in military conflict zones, the Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative. To highlight the problem, they travelled to eastern Congo, where rape has been frequently used as a weapon of war by rebel groups and soldiers. In 2013, Angelina spoke at a G8 foreign ministers meeting, where ministers pledged $36 million in funding to go toward developing international standards for the investigation and prosecution of war rape, and before the UN security council which responded by adopting its broadest resolution on the issue to date.

When, earlier this year, Angelina was told she carried the cancer gene that killed her mother, she made the difficult decision to have a double mastectomy to avoid the risk of leaving her gang of children without a mother (3 adopted, 3 with partner Brad Pitt). We reckon that when you’ve been voted the World’s most Beautiful Woman, it takes a certain strength of character to take a decision like that – AND face up to the crass comments on Twitter and Facebook that followed from men saying they were no longer interested in her…

Still, as Angelina says: “I’m with a man who’s evolved enough to look at my body and see it as more beautiful because of the journey it has taken.”

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About the alternative page three:

A place to celebrate great women in all their humanity and reality. Fighters, survivors, thinkers, doers, PEOPLE. Not just a pair of boobs…

This page is deliberately tongue in cheek. Our aim is to parody the condescending, patronising way in which the “other” Page 3 has traditionally described their models. We deliberately ape their style and apply it to women of note in order to demonstrate just HOW unacceptable and ridiculous this is. We believe that the best way to tackle bullies is to laugh at them, and we believe that women have been bullied for years by what has become institutionalised sexism in the mainstream media.

That said, this is not a militant page. We simply believe that the new Editor of The Sun, David Dinsmore, missed a trick by refusing to reconsider dumping the sexist anachronistic swamp throwback that is Page Three of The Sun when he had the chance. He could have turned Page 3 into something wonderful, a place to celebrate women in all their forms. Women who’ve achieved great things, who’ve battled illness and survived. As he won’t do it, we’re going to show you their pictures, every day. Please feel free to post yours. Your mum, your sister, your daughter, inspirational women. Real men welcome.
“Taking the Pee out of Page 3 since 2013”
Follow us on Twitter: @Alternativep3