14 year old girl initiates movement against images of women in fashion magazines
[Brussels, 08 May 2012] Julia Bluhm, a 14 year old American schoolgirl, has presented a petition signed by more than 46,000 people to Seventeen magazine, asking the industry to publish untouched images of ’real’ women and girls in order to combat the bad body image prevalent among her co-students.
According to an article published on 04 May in The New York Times, Ms. Bluhm is a blogger with Spark, a project that fights the sexualisation of girls, and started the petition online through Change.org.
In an interview with the NYT journalist, Ms. Bluhm commented that: “I look at the girls, and a lot of them, like, they don’t have freckles, or moles, anywhere on their bodies.” “You can’t, like, see the pores in their face, they’re perfectly smooth. Their skin is shiny. They don’t have any tan lines or cuts and bruises or anything like that.”
These ordinary features of human flesh, she said, can be disguised with makeup and lights. “At the same time, they can’t cover up everything,” Julia said. That leaves only digital retouching.
The EWL lobbies for a women’s rights perspective in the work of the media and advertising industries and has produced a ressource tool for raising awareness on this issue.
The cover of the May issue of Seventeen magazine.
Read the full The New York Times article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/04/nyregion/seventeen-magazine-faulted-by-girl-14-for-doctoring-photos.html?_r=1&src=ISMR_AP_LO_MST_FB.
