I just read a really cool article on Yahoo from a couple weeks ago. It talks about a 14-year-old girl named Julia Bluhm in 8th grade that has created a petition on change. org to urge Seventeen magazine to feature one non-airbrushed photo a month. She likes this magazine, and thinks that it has done a lot for girls already with their feature called Body Peace. She has also joined an organization called SPARK that is ”girl-fueled activist movement to demand an end to the sexualization of women and girls in media.” She led a protest outside of a Seventeen magazine office in Manhattan that included a mock photo shoot.
She said about perfect looking models in magazines today: “Here’s what lots of girls don’t know. Those ‘pretty women’ that we see in magazines are fake. They’re often photo-shopped, airbrushed, 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….I’ve been fighting to stop magazines, toy companies, and other big businesses from creating products, photo spreads and ads that hurt girls and break our self-esteem….I’ve learned that we have the power to fight back.” Wow. This girl has obviously found her voice and is using it. We should all look to this girl for inspiration.
