Fashion Mags, Continued

Beyond the evils of airbrushed pictures, these fashion magazines have little else wrong with them, right?

Wrong.

There are two major issues I see with these pieces of fine literature, the first being the "self-help" sections.  These sections can tell a girl how to go from grungy to gorgeous in five easy hairdos, or ten easy exercises, or three essential makeup staples or...  Well, you get the picture.  These sections are just as harmful as the models, their underlying message extremely hurtful and oh-so-subtle.  So much so that most don't even realize that it's saying, "If you ever want to look better than THAT, you've got to take our advice".  How does that help girls see the value of themselves as a person?  It doesn't.  It can't.  Nobody is ever perfect concerning appearance, and as a result the race to the perfection promised in the magazines is a neverending one.  It is so easy to get caught up in consulting the magazines to make you look better, and pretty soon, it begins to resemble an addiction.  If you can't buy the magazine, you go to a friend's house before the dance and get hit after hit of fashion mag-ness.  The performance treadmill doesn't work.  It never has and it never will.  If all these girls who claim to be independent, free-willed women depend on a fashion  magazine for self-esteem, then the women's movement has utterly failed.



Isn't your mother proud.



Is that a super short dress or a long shirt?  What about a camisole?



Would it have killed you to get a jacket?



 I thought modesty was a virtue.  The covers above show a varying degree of IMmodesty.  Girls see this every day, this repulsing advertisement of female bodies.  It's disgusting, really.  None of the women above are better people for having dressed that way.  They only have more appeal.  With information like this flooding into the minds of young girls in our culture, it's no wonder popular clothing today has taken such a nasty turn.  I go out shopping and have to avoid the junior's section because all the clothes in their are definitely off limits.  I'm not saying turtlenecks and long skirts, but a little decency would be much, much appreciated.  Then maybe I could walk into Barnes and Noble without feeling like the only important thing about being female is cutting an appealing image.







Fashion Mags. The End of Women's Equality.

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?"