WUNRN
USA - Teens Takes a Stand Against
the Flawless Faces & Perfect Images in Magazines
By JIM DWYER - Published: May 3, 2012
The cover of the May 2012 issue
of Seventeen Magazine.
In Julia
Bluhm’s ballet class, girls arrived and often declared that they were having a
fat day. Or that their skin was pimply or blemished. Or that they looked
disgusting. When she hears complaints in her middle school, where she is in the
eighth grade, Julia said, she has one answer: “Are you crazy?”
Ángel Franco/The New York Times
Julia Bluhm, an eighth grader from
Then, she
said, she came up with another answer, thumbing through one of her favorite
magazines, Seventeen.
“I look at the pictures and they just don’t look like girls I see
walking down the street and stuff,” said Julia, who turned 14 last month.
A blogger for the last year with Spark,
a project that fights the sexualization of girls, Julia had given the subject
some thought, and talked it over with the other bloggers. Then she started an online petition drive through Change.org asking
Seventeen to “commit to printing one unaltered — real — photo spread per
month.”
“We brought Seventeen magazine to lunch and showed it to a bunch
of kids to see if they agreed with the petition,” she said. “A lot of them
signed it.”
Boys too?
“Actually some boys signed it, too,” she said. “I think a lot of
them just signed it because they thought it was cool that I was getting so many
people to sign.”
No kidding. As of Thursday evening, the petition had been signed
by 46,000 people. Julia and her mother, Mary Beiter, came to
The people at Seventeen were, it should be said, feeling slightly
aggrieved that they had been singled out for picture-doctoring practices that
are common in virtually all glossy fashion magazines, and, for that matter, on
the Facebook accounts of millions of people who retouch photographs before posting
them. At some magazines, the practices are far more extreme than at Seventeen,
which, Ms. Shoket says, does not alter the body shapes of the girls in its
pages, contrary to a charge in the petition.
An article in the May issue includes pictures of girls with
melanoma scars; a regular feature, “Body Peace,” has a picture of a girl who
has drawn a peace symbol on a body part that she had been troubled by.
“I think we do a phenomenal job of celebrating the authenticity of
real girls, of celebrating them for all of their real authentic beauty, of skin
tones, of ethnicity, of body shape and size,” Ms. Shoket said. “These are young
girls. They look great.”
On Thursday, as Julia and her mom headed toward the airport, she
said she appreciated that the magazine was doing things to include girls with
many body types. She also gave an unvarnished description of what she sees in
its pages.
“I look at the girls, and a lot of them, like, they don’t have
freckles, or moles, anywhere on their bodies,” she said. “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.
Back to Ms. Shoket: So, does the magazine airbrush pictures of the
girls in its pages?
“I don’t want to get into the specifics of what we do and don’t
do,” Ms. Shoket said.
Julia said the unreal pictures of girls were trouble for boys, as
well. “It shows them unrealistic images of girls,” she said. “Also, a lot of
the boys in Seventeen magazine have, like, 12-packs, and that’s definitely not
very realistic either.”
Both sides said they had agreed to keep in touch, but no promises
were made about publishing an unretouched photo spread. “I gave her my e-mail,”
Julia said.
Ms. Shoket, reeling from a barrage of unpleasant publicity that
she felt did not reflect the reality of her magazine, said she admired Julia.
“What power she has to have an idea and to make her mark on the world,” she
said.
As Julia returned home to the eighth grade, she said that people
from home had kept in touch.
“Facebook and the school are flipping out,” she said.