Auntie Mildred walked into Barnes and Noble today, intent on finding the classics rack. They were having a Buy Two, Get the Third Free deal, and she needed her hit of classic literature. But the moment Auntie Mildred walked through the door, (after holding it for an elderly lady with a cane), her eyes started bleeding.
Too. Many. Fashion. Magazines.
When I was in seventh grade, our middle school had a magazine sale as a fundraiser and everybody, and I mean EVERYBODY, bought something. There was a competition for the classroom that could sell the most magazine subscriptions and our homeroom wanted it, badly. On the last day, our entire class pooled our cash and bought some subscriptions for the class as a whole, and one of these was Cosmogirl, a breed of magazine I had never seen before. All the girls went insane looking at the pictures of the models when the issue would come in each time, almost taking notes on how the models did their hair and wore their clothes. I remember looking at one of the magazines once and wondering how the girl got to be so pretty.
Well, she didn't. The fashion industry airbrushes the life out of the real pictures, making the models slimmer, smoother, and shinier. When they're done with the picture, the girl in it doesn't even exist. In Barnes and Noble, there were rows and rows of magazines with non-real people smiling at me, and I had to escape. So yes, I hid in the children's section at the little table.
The fashion industry is not helping anyone in America by making beautiful women even more beautiful. It's deceitful, it's wrong, and it gives girls the wrong idea about what is really beautiful. Even if they won't admit it, I'd bet my retirement fund that if someone asked girls what they'd change about themselves, most of them would mention something about beauty.
Women as a whole SHOULD boycott these magazines, protesting their airbrushing and photoshopping techniques, but sadly, I am not so delusional as to believe that will happen. All people can do is continue to feed positive input into girls' minds, encouraging them to find their talents that make them quirky and utterly themselves.
CLICK HERE
This is a video you MUST see. Watch it and then tell me nothing's all that wrong with presenting that kind of face to our children. I dare you. All I could think after seeing it was, "After centuries of fighting for equal rights in all societies, THIS is what women have come to?"
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