I love this young girl & her mission! Really wish that Seventeen magazine had taken up her challenge (to be honest, I see it as a HUGE missed opportunity for them).
Every day I get messages from young girls begging for help to fix normal, everyday, common body ‘flaws’ (note: actually not flaws, but are perceived that way. Cellulite is no more a flaw than your ears are. It’s normal, common and something that 90% of women have: not that you’d know it from the way it’s represented in the media). Most young girls have no idea how SKEWED our notions of beauty are or how deep they’ve been internalized. Even though most teens women are aware of photoshopping practices, they still pine for the altered bodies they see everyday in magazines, ads, billboards etc.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a magazine that, even just ONCE A MONTH, promoted real bodies? As they are? With no digital alteration?
It’s not a perfect solution, but it is a step in the right direction. And you would think it’s not too much to ask (in fact, it may be just the kind of thing that boosts sales at a time when print media is struggling).
Excerpt via Modern Mom
Julia Bluhm, 14, has gotten more than 48,000 signatures for her online petition to “give girls images of real girls” in the pages of Seventeen magazine. The eighth-grader asked the magazine to commit to printing one unaltered photo spread per month.
In the petition written to persuade the editors, Bluhm wrote that girls are deeply influenced by the perfect images they see in the magazines and rip their own bodies and faces apart when they themselves fail to live up what they don’t realize are Photoshopped, airbrushed standards.
“Here’s what a lot of girls don’t know,” she wrote in the petition, “those ‘pretty women’ that we see in magazines are fake. They’re often Photoshopped, airbrushed and edited to look thinner, and to appear like they have perfect skin. A girl you see in a magazine probably looks a lot different in real life.”
“For the sake of all the struggling girls all over American, who read Seventeen and think these fake images are what they should be, I’m stepping up,” Bluhm continued.
