WATERVILLE, Maine — This quaint New England town seems an unlikely garrison from which to wage digital-media warfare. But as Seventeen magazine editors have learned, youth activism can be ignited anywhere, given the right spark.
In April, Waterville eighth-grader Julia Bluhm, 14, journeyed to Manhattan to protest Seventeen’s practice of retouching photos, making girls and young women look sexier and less flawed. After an interview with CNN, she was invited to the magazine to discuss her objections and spent an hour doing just that. Bluhm and her teammates at SPARK — which stands for Sexualization Protest: Action, Resistance, Knowledge — eventually collected more than 84,000 signatures on their anti-Photoshopping petition, distributed online through Change.org.
Comments
Good luck with this. I hope the magazine, and others like it, will follow through. I never realized how much they enhanced pictures of models until I saw all the latest pictures of Drew Barrymore in the cosmetic ads. While a nice looking girl with a quirky little mouth, her pictures make her appear to be ravishingly beautiful! How can even the most naturally beautiful young girls compete with people like this? They can't. They believe they have to starve to look like these models (who in real life are scrawny, not thin) and buy cosmetics they don't halfway need. Models are obviously wearing false lashes in ads for mascara while touting their product as the reason for such long full lush lashes. How do they get away with this?
Great (and much needed) work!