Are Fashion Magazines More Dangerous Than Drugs?
Women have been railing against the unrealistic images in fashion magazines for decades, worrying, especially, about how these unattainable ideals might affect impressionable young girls. But thanks to the power of technology and one very motivated teenage girl, the issue may be getting more attention than ever. Julia Thuhr’s Change.org petition was inspired by video interviews with her fellow 14 year olds in the school cafeteria. How do these magazines make you feel? When the answers were reliably negative, Julia took to the internets. Two weeks and nearly 50,000 signatures later, she’s poised to make the industry raise a well-groomed eyebrow. Whether or not any actual change will occur from her Change.org petition remains to be seen. But if raising awareness was part of her agenda, Julia is already a success.
Last night on ABC’s Nightline, Julia made her case, backed up by likeminded teens and experts. One, who focuses on eating disorders, said she believes looking at these magazines is more dangerous to teenage girls than smoking pot.
Does this seem like a radical assertion to you? I’m not so sure. If you isolated the two, which would be responsible for more independent negative effect? It might be apples and oranges, but it definitely calls attention to the potential for damage.
Seventeen met with Julia for an hour during her visit to New York. After receiving her petition (and presumably, accompanying pitch), they issued the following statement:
[Seventeen] celebrates girls for being their authentic selves and that’s how we present them. There’s no other magazine that highlights such a diversity of size, shape, skin tone and ethnicity.”
Uh, ok. I’m not getting that from the pages of Seventeen, are you? But on some level, it’s not even the editorial that’s in question here, it’s the reshaping of bodies through Photoshop which happens mostly in the advertising. Julia’s asking the magazines to provide one un-altered spread a month to put the tweaked models into perspective. The experts in the video want more than that: legislation of model’s ages and weights, and/or mandatory labeling of digitally altered images.
Do you think Photoshopped images should come with a “This is Not Real” disclaimer? Do you think there is chance in heck of Julia’s petition changing the status quo? Do you agree that these images can be more damaging than smoking pot?
See the Nightline episode here.
I do think photoshopped images in advertisements & magazines should come with a disclaimer at the bottom. It’s not just teens who are effected by these distorted images they see.
It would be great if celebrities stood up & refused to allow their images to be distorted. But that probably won’t happen. I remember a few years back Britney Spears put out an ad for something & everyone claimed it was highly photoshopped, so they released the original image & suprise suprise it was hardly altered.
I think is all BS. The personality of the teenagers is more dangerous to themselves than photoshop images and pot. I will not be surprised if the magazine starts loosing money after they start showing the flaws on their models, every month. This is just like the petition for restaurants and fast foods to change their menus to more healthy food that most people ended up not buying.
Oh, PUH-LEEZE. Reading fashion magazines does not lead to chemical dependence the way marijuana use can. There is no such thing as driving under the influence of fashion magazines the way there is for pot (which accounts for 7% of all fatal car crashes in the U.S.)
Unfortunately we live in a world where it will be almost impossible to rid the media of all the many disturbing things it projects onto young impressionable minds, even adult minds if I really want to get into it… this goes beyond fashion and even gets into over sexualization and the use of drugs, since you brought that up.
The only thing I think we can do is try and help young people be in the world and not of the world. This is easier said then done, but I do think that we need to focus on building young girls self esteem and confidence, and realize they are always going to have constant pressures and bad influences surrounding them.
I wish we lived in a better world, but I think it would be more realistic to help women find confidence in themselves in a healthy way even when being surrounded by these negative influences.
Except that marijuana doesn’t do that either and isn’t, you know, a chemical. I don’t, personally, have any interest in beauty or fashion magazines so I don’t subscribe or have them around the house, which is probably why my teenage daughter has never really expressed an interest in Seventeen. I’m sure she’s seen it at friends’ houses or the dentist’s office or whatever. I feel like we, as parents, have a great deal of influence over what media our children consume and what values they hold.