Julia Bluhm, a 14-year-old from Waterville, Maine, is petitioning Seventeen Magazine to be more conscience about the many tiptop perfect images the magazine allows. The 8th grader wishes one of the biggest teen magazines in the fashion industry would tolerate an untouched photo spread per month.
“I want to see regular girls that look like me in a magazine that’s supposed to be for me. I wanted to help stop it and do something to show girls that they don’t need to look like these pictures to be considered beautiful,” she told CBS.
“I’m in a ballet class with a bunch of high-school girls,” wrote Bluhm in her “Seventeen Magazine: Give Girls Images of Real Girls,” petition on Change.org. “On a daily basis I hear comments like ‘It’s a fat day,’ and ‘I ate well today, but I still feel fat.’”
The dauntless 14-year-old isn’t just pressing keys on her laptop; she’s quite proactive in getting her voice heard. This past Wednesday Bluhm traveled to New York City to lead a protest, which was set up like a faux photo shoot, on Hearst Corporation’s doorstep, the company who owns the targeted magazine.
“We want to show Seventeen that we love our body just for who we are and we don’t need Photoshop to fix us…and we can be pretty without…we can take pictures of ourselves and be pretty,” Bluhm said. “These pictures [in the magazine] look too perfect to be like anyone I know. You look around and most people you see on the streets or at school don’t really look like this.”
Julia’s concerns are on target and undoubtedly play a role in many school age girls, including black and brown girls. According to Lynn Grefe, the president of the Eating Disorder Association of America, she has witnessed the effects that photoshopped ads can have on children.
“I’ve seen a 9-year-old girl on a feeding tube at treatment centers—and that’s just not one, believe me,” Teefe said. “It’s just getting worse and worse, and why are we doing this to kids? Why are we making children feel self-conscious?”
Julia’s petition has garnered more than 25, 000 signatures and attention from the magazine’s editor who was willing to meet with her.
“We’re proud of Julia for being so passionate about an issue – it’s exactly the kind of attitude we encourage in our readers – so we invited her to our office to meet with editor in chief Ann Shoket this morning. They had a great discussion, and we believe that Julia left understanding that Seventeen celebrates girls for being their authentic selves, and that’s how we present them. We feature real girls in our pages and there is no other magazine that highlights such a diversity of size, shape, skin tone and ethnicity,” the magazine’s spokesperson said.
Do you think Julia’s petition is necessary?
