Spread your legs and spread the word
- so we can stop the spread of cancer.
Get #SpreadYourLegs trending so we can get the age of cervical screening down to 18!
"Everyone assumes that hearing you’ve got cancer will be the worst moment of your life. You’ve seen the adverts where there’s a load of sad people staring into the camera with tears in their eyes and sad expressions on their faces like they’ve realized that unicorns don’t actually exist. And they get chucked into breaks when you’re trying to relax with a few biscuits of an evening making you listen to how one in three people have this horrible disease. That’s enough to ruin anyone’s Emmedale"
Cancer is a mother bitch and if you have it, you don’t really know what to do with yourself. I want to show people the reality of cancer and how it affects or will affect them, their family, their friends, their cat and their unicorn.
My name is Effi Mai and I have a company called ForrReal. After being diagnosed with Cancer at seventeen I decided to do something for others. So five years later I told people I have the disease and here I am. I’ve had two types of the shitty thing myself, breast and cervical, which I’m sure is the universe’s way of telling me to stop having sex. If I get mouth cancer, I’ll really know. So what was I saying? Yes so still have the cervical stuff currently so now it’s time to share the knowledge and love and possibly prevent other girls from going through this.
So this is how we do it.
ForrReal is a few things. First, it is an advice website for every woman. When I came out of the cancer closet my inbox started to fill with questions, inquiries, pictures of inspiring cats and all other fancy bits. I try and answer every email in detail, with dialogue, with humour (if sometimes a tad inappropriate) and all the positive princess love I can give. Anything from what to eat to stop feeling nauseous to what wig is best to French braid. These questions and answers will all go public on the brand spanking new website.
Secondly, it is to let everyone know the real stuff about cancer. The effects of everything from beginning to end, the things that doctors don’t have the time to tell you and the stuff that will happen. How to check your breasts, how a lump feels, how not to panic and how to cope with having to tell your loved ones are just tiny examples.
If you start having chemo you might expect to feel sick, but you probably won’t expect to have a nosebleed while you’re wearing a white dress. If you’re put on pills to stop the hair loss you won’t expect to feel high and want to tell strangers on the tube that you love them. All in a cancer day. I want to put all the articles I have written into a book in due course once the company grows.
Thirdly, which is my biggest challenge, is that I want to get the age of which a woman has a cervical screening test down to the age of eighteen and to have a smear every two years. Living in Wales at the time, I was lucky enough to get a screening done at twenty years old and they caught it at stage two. Currently in England you have to be twenty-five before you even get a letter telling you should possibly maybe slightly think about going to get a smear test. And then you have to wait five years before you get another one. Cervical cancer can be cured if it is caught early and this just isn’t happening in the UK.
**The LESBIAN add on to part three. If you are a lesbian, you can get cervical cancer. You don’t have to sleep with a penis to get it. You don’t have to do rude things in the back of mini with that penis either. You can get cervical cancer, gay or straight. Look at me for example, gold star lesbian, never slept with said penis and bam! It got me in the vagina.
Spread your legs and spread the word
It’s a company where there’s a community and there’s women and girls who can join together each knowing what the others are going through.
What we need from you princess faces
What I need for you is money for funding of the actual company ForrReal, and money for Effi and team to live on while we do it. Effi likes talking about herself in the third person and should do it more often.
I work from home on a magazine and newspaper that I plan to connect this company to. Also, when you're throwing up throughout the day it's difficult to maintain a proffessional outlook in an office environment. I work on this every spare minute I have. I’ll even miss Pretty Little Liars in order to work on it. That’s dedication of the highest order in my world.
I also have a small team working with me so we can run the campaign and run the website smoothly, and they don’t really ask for much for working their bums off for this company. Just a slice of pizza and a shot of tequila now and then.
We need your help to keep things running, especially through the next few crucial months of our growth. We have made it this far with the support of everyone around us, and we believe that by putting all of our energy, commitment and unicorn love toward these efforts we will soon be able to support ourselves while continuing to fight cancer and help the people with this horrible disease every day. Let’s fuck cancer up the arse. With a cactus.
We are campaigning to raise £30,000 to help us as we become a full-fledged and self-sustaining business. Any amount would help us greatly to reach our goal and get the website, campaign, and everything else we can give out there.
Why we need the big amount of money with a lot of zeros behind it.
So our old website was about as useful as a cordless tampon.
It got too full of hits and people on it and other people asking questions and basically exploded all over the show leaving with us with an empty shell of nothingness. Might be a tad dramatic but basically it’s what happened.
Like all of us here, our web developer had been learning the ropes as she went along, and she also works full time and has one of 'child' things too that needs looking after. I want to take her on full time to run the website and maintain everything cool that happens there. Our theme for the last one was a free floral one from wordpress and once we hit around 30,000 hits a day it stopped working. We want to include so much more with forums, webchats ,vlogs, advice columns, reader’s stories, health talks, artwork that makes it look fancy and of course the cat videos to keep you entertained.
The website needs –
Designing
- Building
- Maintenance
- Phone support
- Advertising and sponsorship agents so we can be self-sufficient
Campaign stuff
For people to pay attention, we need to make it happen. We want to create a team that can take our work out of my little purple living room where we always disturb the cat and out in to the world. We want to eventually go around the youth groups, schools and very importantly LGBT groups and talk to them about getting checked and just how preventable cancer can be. We don’t want to be another boring talk either, we want to make women laugh and we want to tell them everything they need to know.
- Flyers and brochures designed, printed out and spread around the place
- Money to travel on the trains to get to places to talk
- Advertising in magazines, on websites and on posters to raise as much awareness as possible and to help us with our campaign to take it to the government.
Until we broke everything down we didn't realize how much this would cost us. The campaign and the support of women is most important to me and we really need the money to do this. Any funds left over from the fundraising goal will go towards supporting the rest of the business and paying the team what they deserve. If we get a tridilillion pounds we’l go on a unicorn hunt too.
Even if you can’t give us moneies please help us by spreading the word, sharing on here, shouting it out from some sort of rooftop or writing a very clever tweet on face-tigram-trest. We've just got the hang of the whole social media thing so we're up and running now.
Put #SpreadYourlegs in your tweets and lets get it trending so people actually pay attention.
Without any of the jokes, this campaign could not be more important to me. Struggling with cancer these past five years has been the hardest part of my life. And yes, this probably sounds like an Xfactor sob story so I can win more votes because my rendition of Purple Rain didn’t quite move people enough but I would really love your help with this. The unicorns will thank you. Love.