Eliana Dockterman

In a new campaign spot for the White House’s “It’s On Us” anti-sexual assault campaign, a schlubby bystander becomes the hero. This otherwise zoned-out guy on a couch decides to get up and intervene when he sees another young man trying to stop an inebriated woman from leaving the party, thereby potentially stopping a sexual assault.

The PSA is a new tactic to address what has become a crisis of sexual assault on American campuses by focusing on the role of bystanders. Recent research shows that 1 in 5 women is the victim of an attempted or completed sexual assault during college, and one in 16 men have also experienced some kind of sexual assault. And while the issue has gained attention in the media and through White House efforts to end assault on campus, pop culture is still rife with imagery that undermines these efforts to raise awareness about rape and sexual assault. Just this week a sexist music video depicting men in a fraternity telling women to “shut the f*** up” when the women refuse to “do girl on girl” went viral.

As the debate about sexual assault on college campuses has raged on, the blame has often fallen on the both the victim and the assailant for drinking too much or making other poor choices. Rather than being caught up in the debate over fraternities and binge drinking, the White House is attempting to reframe the argument. “Is it on her? Is it on him? The campaign says, ‘It’s on us.’ So we’re offering a third narrative,” Rachel Cohen Gerrol, executive director of of the PVBLIC Foundation, which helped push the campaign, explains to TIME.

“One of the questions we’ve gotten is why doesn’t this campaign say directly to men, ‘Stop raping’? And the reason for that is that the campaign is research-based,” Lynn Rosenthal, the White House Advisor on Violence Against Women, explained at an Advertising Week panel on the campaign. According to research, campaigns can change the behavior of those surrounding a person committing sexual assault: teach college kids bystander intervention, and they will be more cognizant of what a dangerous situation looks like and how to stop it.

“We don’t really have any evidence that a PSA campaign or t-shirts would change the behavior of an actual offender.”

The new spot is a followup to the White House’s first ads for the campaign, a star-studded video where celebs ranging from Jon Hamm to Kerry Washington to Vice President Biden and President Obama himself say that “It’s on us” to stop sexual assault. One of the campaigns celeb advocates is Rose Byrne, an Australian, who says she didn’t know much about fraternity culture or the problem os sexual assault on campus until she was offered a role in Neighbors, the Seth Rogen summer comedy about a couple with a baby who gets into a prank war with the fraternity next door. She did her research and was surprised by what she found. This year, fraternities have come under fire not only for their hazing tactics but also for being the scene of many alleged incidents of rape and assault.

“For me, it was eye-opening doing that film because it was all about how powerful fraternity culture is and how intimidating it can be,” Byrne told TIME. “What I’ve learned is that environment can be very intimidating for victims of sexual assault.” It was after wrapping the film that she jumped at the chance to join the White House in their campaign educating college students—and specifically college freshmen, who are at the highest risk of being assaulted—about bystander intervention.

The site will offer myriad ways that students can intervene to prevent an assault, whether it’s telling a possible assailant that his or her car alarm went off or spilling a beer on him or her. The toolkit of suggested ways to intervene may eventually be supplemented by prizes for students who come up with the most creative methods, according to Jason Harris, CEO of Mekanism, the advertising agency that designs the spots for the campaign. The site also encourages students to intervene in conversations about sexual assault online that devolve into victim blaming.

“As you see this conversation begin to happen on social media, and you see people starting to say, ‘Well of course she was asking for it. She flirted with him or she slept with him before,” says Rosenthal. “When you intervene in those conversations, that’s just as important as the interventions that you’re talking about in the moment that you see something happening. That’s how we create a new social norm.”

The other social norm the campaign is trying to change: athletes being held to a different standard than their peers. Given the very public problems with sexual assault in national sports leagues, the White House will also be partnering with the NFL, PGA Tour, NASCAR and the NCAA for the campaign. And schools with storied and highly influential sports programs are already making the pledge, including the entire football team at Penn State and Coach Mike Krzezewski’s basketball team at Duke.

As Byrne points out, the problem among athletes who are allowed passes for their bad behavior spreads far beyond America. “There’s a lot of cases like this in Australia. Sporting teams and football teams and the FAL and the NRL historically have been involved in horrible gang rapes,” she says. “There’s absolutely a culture in Australia of those sorts of things being wrongly tolerated because of who those men are.”

The White House has found changing the culture on campus through school administrations is a daunting task. That’s why the campaign also slyly speaks directly to the students rather than the institutions themselves, some of which had long fought the idea that sexual assault among students is a matter for their adjudication. “Schools have to deal with their boards, they have to deal with their funding, they have to deal with the people who support them mostly via athletics—the biggest donors at universities buy athletic fields and things like that,” says Gerrol. “And students could give a s***. And they just say this is not going to happen, not on our watch, not on our campus. So it’s easier and faster to make change with people who are not beholden to donors.”

GoldieBlox, an engineering toy for girls that got began on Kickstarter, made waves last year with a viral video showing girls using traditional pink toys to build a Rube Goldberg machine. For this holiday season, they’re taking on the status quo again with a new video and a new toy.

In the ad, an Orwellian ‘Big Sister’ tells a line of young girls dressed in pink dresses and heels, “You are beauty, and beauty is perfection.” The girls line up and take too-skinny, too-pretty dolls that look suspiciously like Barbie from a conveyor belt—that is until a girl with frizzy hair, overalls and Chuck Taylors shows up and destroys the machine with a hammer. Out from the decimated machine sprouts, you guessed it, a GoldieBlox doll complete with wild hair and sneakers.

It’s yet another effort by the small toy brand to disrupt the pink aisle dedicated to girls in the toy store, which tends to emphasize beauty over brains.

GoldieBlox began as a boxed toy that included a storybook and the wheels, gears and other building materials girls needed to construct machines that would help the character Goldie and her friends. It also had the added benefit of teaching young girls the fundamentals of engineering at a time when just 11% of engineers are women. Sparking interest at a young age is the key to closing this gender gap: Studies show that girls lose interest in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) careers as early as age eight.

As Goldieblox creator Debbie Sterling told TIME last year, there are very few girls’ toys on the market that foster an interest in these critical skills. And those that do often emphasize being pretty over being smart: As a parent of a small girl, your options are the chemistry set for concocting makeup or rebelling and shopping in the boys’ blue isle. Even companies paying lip service to teaching girls engineering have come under fire for perpetuating problematic stereotypes. Some parents say that Lego’s Friends line for girls, for instance, has too many sets dedicated to pet beauty salons and too few dedicated to school.

“The Lego Friends line has definitely been getting girls to play with Legos,” says Sterling. “But I don’t think it’s been inspiring girls to want to be engineers. It’s continuing to inspire girls to look pretty and decorate.” Enter, GoldieBlox’s building toys, which found massive success their first holiday season. GoldieBlox is now available at over 1,000 retailers, including Toys R Us.

It’s no surprise then that Goldie is now foraying into the doll market.

Most action figures designed for boys are based on strong, empowered characters (think: G.I. Joe). Not so for girls. Dolls usually emphasize being cute over being powerful. There are the babies that girls must mother, the Disney princesses with eyes larger than their waists and Barbies with feet that can never wear flats, only heels. Indeed, Barbie, despite efforts to lean in, is perhaps the worst offender. A recent study showed that little girls who played with Barbie dressed as a doctor aspired to far fewer and less ambitious careers that girls who played with an amorphous Mrs. Potatohead doll.

Female action figures aren’t any better. They’re usually hyper-sexualized with large breasts and splayed legs, designed for adult male collectors. Another company, IAmElemental, noticed the gap in the market earlier this year and launched a successful Kickstarter campaign to create their own kick-ass heroes with normal women’s proportions to inspire girls to be brave heroes too.

Like IAmElemental, the GoldieBlox action figure is certainly aspirational. The tagline? “Other dolls are built for fashion, Goldie is built for action.” But the company also aims to make Goldie more relatable than other dolls. She doesn’t have impossible beauty standards like Barbie, but she also doesn’t fall into the uncool nerdy girl trope popular in kids’ shows (like Gretchen from Recess). And she makes mistakes, unlike the boy geniuses popular in kids’ culture.

“There’s Bob the Builder, Bill Nye the Science Guy, Jimmy Neutron—they’re all boys with IQs off the chart,” says Sterling. “That’s intimidating for all kids, but particularly for girls who suffer from this thing called math anxiety where they have really, really high standards for themselves when it comes to math.”

In short: Your daughter could never be Barbie (or Jimmy Neutron for that matter). But if she put her mind to it, she could become Goldie. Giving girls smart role models—not just pretty ones—isn’t as simple as destroying Big Sister’s conveyer belt. Goldie will still have to compete with Barbie and Elsa from Frozen on Christmas lists. But this is a start.

Here’s last year’s ad:

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