Very early this morning, model Cara Delevingne got an assistant to pour a bucket load of ice cold water over her head, yelling ‘douse me motherfuckers’. As the ice water rendered her entire white crop top and T-shirt get-up soaked and see-through, you have to wonder why she did it.
And why Selena Gomez nominated her to do it, and why Taylor Swift and Lena Dunham and Justin Bieber and Mark Zuckerberg of all people have also done it.
Well, it’s the latest and coldest wave of online activism, where nominated participants have to pour the bucket of ice water over their head or pay $100 towards charity. For the social media age of activism, the pouring is filmed and features the chattering-limbed, ice-cold participant nominating a mate.
Oh, and the charity they have to donate to if they don’t go through with the challenge is the ALS Association, which aims to rid the world of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or motor neurone disease as we know it in the UK. The US nicknamed it ‘Lou Gehrig’s disease’, after the baseball player whose career was brought to a halt after developing the condition in 1939, but the most well-known figure in the UK to suffer from an ALS-related condition is scientist Stephen Hawking.
No-one knows quite why ALS was teamed with ice buckets, but the aim of the ice bucket videos is to draw awareness to ALS. However, the logic of donating to charity by dumping the bucket of ice on your head is a bit disjointed.
And, you don’t see much coverage of the people who decide not to do the challenge: President Obama has been nominated several times by 86-year-old socialite and widow of Robert F Kennedy, Ethel Kennedy, Justin Bieber, basketballer LeBron James, satirist ‘Weird’ Al Yankovic and Ellen DeGeneres. He declined Ethel’s offer and has ignored the rest, instead donating the $100 (£60) to the ALS Association.
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But yeah, no-one saw that. So we might gripe and moan that this is a weird online trend that’ll lead to nothing. But people are talking about ALS way more than normal, plus we get to see all sorts of our favourite celebrities doing their O-faces while wearing soaking wet clothes.
The awareness has to turn into donations somewhere along the line, though, and there’s no better place to start than with the rich and the famous. If people will copy them in throwing buckets of ice over their heads (and they will, #icebucketchallenge has over 140,000 posts on Instagram), then it follows that they’ll copy them by giving a bit of money to charity.
Luckily, Taylor Swift is right on the money, and her and Jaime King both pledged a whole wad of $100 bills (on behalf of all the people they were with when they filmed themselves doing the challenge) before covering themselves with water. Once again, we ask ourselves why more celebrities can’t be like Taylor Swift.
Folllow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.