"Impressionable Girls" Speak Up!

This just in: young "impressionable" girls, can think and speak for themselves?! Surely they don't really know what they're talking about though, they haven't lived long enough ...right? Well the other day I happened to come across an article online that spoke to these issues and more. I thought they seemed particularly relevant to our Brown, Halpern & L'Engle reading, "Mass media as a sexual super peer for early maturing girls" (2005). The article I read on Jezebel.com was about an interview with Tavi Gevinson, whom was referred to as the "16-year-old blogging phenom who started her own online magazine for teenage girls last year" (*cough* impressive! *cough*). This particular interview was regarding her opinion on Seventeen Magazine's response to budding activist, fourteen year old Julia Bluhm's petition to the magazine to feature one photo spread a month that's free of photoshopping. 

Hold up. Let me take a minute or two to catch you up on this whole Julia Bluhm thing, as it all went down earlier in May of this year. Basically, during middle school Bluhm began to become more aware of the effects that the images of unrealistically perfect femininity, produced by magazines like Seventeen, were having on conceptions of body image for herself and her female peers. This essentially sparked her passion to begin to organize a petition to Seventeen, which through the help of broader media coverage (such as blogs) amassed over 26,000 signatures before the date of her protest, where she hand delivered 25,000 signatures for the petition to Seventeen herself. The article we read for class stated that "One-half to three-fourths of girls aged 12-15 years read magazines such as "Seventeen", "Teen", and "YM" (Brown et al. 2005). Not only is Bluhm's activism an commendable accomplishment, but it carries even more weight having come from an intelligent fourteen-year-old girl. This helps to highlight not only that young girls like Julia Bluhm are interested in media content being produced specifically for them, but their capacity for owning a consciousness that keys in on how the media's messages are effecting them and their friends. 

Alright, getting back now to the article I originally began telling you about. I thought it was a great follow up article on how things between Seventeen and Julia Bluhm have played out in the past couple months. It also offered a more thought provoking critique of Seventeen, by bringing more attention to the content the magazine is actually pumping out, versus the photoshopped/airbrushed images alone. Tavi Gevinson quotes, "It took me a little bit once middle school started to realize taht if I didn't read Seventeen, I didn't feel obligated to watch what I eat. Language is powerful, along with photos." 

(Sidenote: Gevinson is young, pretty, skinny, and fashion forward enough girl to be considered a model herself in my opinion ...plus she has a cool model-girl name 'Tavi' to top it all off!). This article delves deeper into her personal critique of the magazine's content. Through her personal critique, Tavi reiterates what was brought up in our Brown regarding how, "The primary themes of these magazines are about how girls can make themselves attractive enough to catch and keep a boy. Although teen girl magazines have steadily increased content about sexual health topics such as contraception, pregnancy, and STDs, a much higher proportion of content focuses on sexual attractiveness and strategy." (Brown et al. 2005). 

Overall I felt that not only were these articles relevant to what we've ben reading about and discussing in class about the media's impact on maturing girls. I thought these were not only two great examples of young women taking the initiative to be attentive media consumers by analyzing magazine media content, and not settling for simply being told by a magazine how they should look/act/think. These girls are also inspiring examples of activism against stereotyped heteronormative media content. Julia and Tavi have a heck of lot to be proud of at their age, and I can't even imagine how they'll take their activism to the next level in the future. At this rate it looks like the next generation of female activist might be referred to as "magazine burners"!