"Because I am a girl" I will join a womens' militia!

By now I am thoroughly annoyed by the " Because I am a Girl " campaign that is advertised on innumerable subway posters and represented by pleasant hipsters on street corners. Drawing on a rather liberal articulation of feminism, and claiming to be about "empowering" girls in third world countries, this NGO campaign proudly proclaims that "girls' rights are human rights" and asks people to sponsor individual girls and thus learn about "the plight" of girls at the global peripheries.One would think that such a campaign, with all its talk about girls being the future and such, would satisfy our feminist desires. "Yes," we think when we see these advertisements, "girls' rights are indeed human rights!" And now that I am the father of a child with two x chromosomes, I am also concerned with the issue of "girls' rights" insofar as my child will be socialized as a girl, experience patriarchy, and only be able to avoid the specific "plight" of these other girls because she was born at one of the global centres of imperialism. Hell yes, the new father in me wants to proclaim, my child and other girls should indeed be accorded human rights!But like all NGO campaigns centred around women, this is just another capitalist-sponsored dead end that is unable to change what it seeks to change because it is incapable of understanding the terms of oppression. Indeed, if sponsoring individual children, girls or otherwise, really changed anything then groups like World Vision and Compassion Canada would have solved world hunger decades ago. Or maybe Oprah, with her girls' schools in developing countries, would have succeeded in actually making the world a better place. Indeed, this "because I am a girl" campaign proclaims the possibility of breaking "the cycle of poverty" and yet its solution is simply charity sponsorship, NGO interference, and really has no analysis of why this cycle exists in the first place.Obviously this "cycle of poverty" exists because of imperialism, and not because kindly people at the centres of world capitalism are sponsoring girls; these girls cannot break from oppression, from this terrible cycle, unless imperialism is broken. And it is hard to imagine a campaign that is funded by such dubious pro-imperialist multinationals like Birks Diamonds, and is beloved by an imperialist country such as Canada, as being able to break from the material context upon which this poverty cycle is contingent.Once again we are presented with a campaign to end third world poverty and oppression that is incapable of confronting the roots of this poverty and oppression because it is bound up in the cycle it pretends to critique. This campaign rightly recognizes the necessity to support girls but imagines that the horrific context in which these girls find themselves has nothing to do with the governments and corporations from which it draws money. Perhaps it is just a problem of the "backwards" cultures of these regions where "because I am a girl" campaign seeks to intervene––an evil disconnected from any supervening structure.Yes, girls and women are super-exploited by global capitalism and thus their self-determination is a revolutionary necessity. Recent people's wars have interrogated this problem, have attempted to arm girls and women, have even begun to develop an ideology of "proletarian feminism" to interrogate this problem. But the "because I am a girl" campaign is not interested in revolutionary womens' militias that might produce the self-determination they claim to support; in their mind, I'm sure, they would believe this was tantamount to supporting child soldiers!Nor do they seem to recognize that the fact the majority of the world's production is performed by women and children (children who are most often girls)––so that the countries in which these NGOs persist can have the freedom to launch "because I am a girl" campaigns as if their philanthropy is not contingent on oppression to begin with––means they should be looking at girls as potential proletarian revolutionaries rather than nodes for NGO intervention.Hell, this campaign has even made an international "girls' day" as if "girls' rights" weren't somehow a part of International Womens' Day… but hey, let's just try to separate ourselves from a global event that is connected to communism and feminism! Let's talk about third world girls as if they won't grow up to be women shut into factories owned by some imperialist multinational that is one of our sponsors!Point being: if this campaign actually wants to change "the plight" of girls then it should endorse womens' militias and factory take-overs on the part of women and girls. Such a revolutionary agenda, though, would put it at odds with its corporate sponsors and so, like every NGO, it will remain caught within an imperialist framework.