SUPPORT TEEN VOICES

Teen Voices isthe only alternative print magazine created by and for girls in the country. Their local Boston program has a national, and even international, impact through the print and online magazines that reach hundreds of thousands of girls worldwide, and now it’s in danger. 

Teen Voices is more than just a magazine; it’s a community institution: 

• 87 Boston teen girlstake part in SHOUT!(Sisters Helping Other Unheard Teens) and work as Teen Editors and writers for the print and online versions ofTeen Voices.”  Girls come from the Boston neighborhoods of Roxbury, Jamaica Plain, Dorchester, Mattapan, Hyde Park, West Roxbury, and Brighton.
• Their teen constituents are 14 to 18 years of age; 82% come primarily from low-income families and 93% are girls of color (70% African descent, 18% Latina, 5% Asian), and 7% are Caucasian
• 110 Boston neighborhood teen girls participate in Poetically Speaking, a forum in the Boston Girls Writing Community.
• 6 Peer Leaders run programs and public forums.
• 35 college women and recent college graduates are trained to mentor the teen editors in their production of Teen Voices’ print and online magazines.

Like many girls, participants in Teen Voices are dealing with serious issues at home and in their communities. The issues range from racism, sexism, elitism, hunger, violence, depression, sexually transmitted diseases, sexual identity exploration, and unplanned pregnancy. For many, schools are not institutions that support their ability to address these issues, or their self-confidence. They need safe spaces to talk—with adults as well as peers—so that they can feel validated, supported, and informed. Some girls have support at home with parents, grandparents, teachers, or religious leaders; for others, Teen Voices offers a rare source of consistent, supportive adults.

Due to a recent decrease in funding, Teen Voices is in crisis and must raise $300,000 by August 1st. Please support this important, brilliant magazine by donating whatever you can and helping to spread the word. 

rheamhebert:

When I was younger, I used to read Seventeen.  It was a guilty pleasure that I kept going for about a year. 

When I got older and went to college, I realized that magazines didn’t have a lot of material I found relevant to me.  Unfortunately, this didn’t mean that they didn’t impact me.

I had a baby mid-way through college.  I wasn’t ready for it and my body wasn’t, either.  I ended up with a lot of extra weight and a lot of angry-red stretch marks.  I had grown up thinking I was fat, due in large part because I had older, skinny brothers who thought it was harmless or funny to tease me.  After my baby, I was fat.  I was unhealthy and I felt like I looked horrible. 

As I got healthier and lost weight, I didn’t lose the vision of myself as “too big.”  I was curvy before.  When I say “curvy” I don’t mean it as a self-edifying euphemism for “fat,” I mean curvy: I had wider hips and a full bust (like all women in my mother’s family).  I was always aware that I wasn’t “thin.”  Still, I liked being curvy.  (I still do.)  It was who I was and it wasn’t as harsh as skinniness, which I associated with my brothers and their angles and women who were emaciated-looking. 

Still, it wasn’t fun having people at school and in my family associate curvy with simply fat.  There wasn’t any room for curvy to be normal.  Looking back at photos, I wasn’t fat.  It took years to realize that what everyone assumed was fat was just not very thin.  I’ve been fat.  I’ve never been skinny.  The later means that most people (at least in the teen/young adult years) just say “not skinny,” which can be (and often was) read as “fat.”  And fat is a pejorative.  It’s not ok.  But it’s not really a size: it’s the opposite of the norm, which is what you see in magazines, on TV, in movies, on billboards.  That isn’t really normal, but it’s what is seen as normal. 

Part of the feeling of being too big came from magazines.  After high school, I didn’t read them or buy them, but I still saw them.  They never had people like me in them or on the covers.  Women were called “bombshells” and the new “curvy” set, but they weren’t anything like me.  They were still very long, very thin, and very angular.  Their “curves” were created with push-up bras and strategic poses.  Their “bombshell” status was announced more through pure-red lipstick and wavy hairstyles than through actual physique.  I would get angry and then sad—was I just fat?  Again?  Or, was it that they were lying?

Turns out, they were lying.  They were using photo manipulation to add curves, to remove curves, and to eliminate the curves (rolls, folds, etc.) that go along with having curves.  It became clear to me that to be beautiful to a magazine you had to look one certain way.  However, they would call that one way many things.  This creates all manner of confusion. 

For me, trying to lose extra, unhealthy weight after my pregnancy, I had to stop looking at magazine.  I avoided them wherever I went.  I had to tell myself that they weren’t real.  I would get pictures and put them in my journal, marked up to show the unreality.  Still, I felt that I was “too much.”  One day, after losing all the excess weight, I walked by a mirrored window.  I had been watching people in it all day (I was waiting for a class) and I didn’t register myself as myself when I passed by.  I looked just like everyone else.  We were all normal.  Not “too big,” not “too small,” but just normal.  A normal range, from thin to curvy to thick.  I realized that I was normal.  I looked normal.

I don’t think I’m beautiful.  I would like to be.  I would like to be beautiful and sexy and all those things that magazines promise can be had with this product or that process.  You know what, though?  Fuck that.  I don’t wear make-up.  I don’t buy beauty products.  I’m not worried about possible wrinkles (I’m now 32).  I do pluck my eyebrows.  I do wax the (to me) unsightly hair off my chin.  I have a way that I want to look and a way that I think looks good on me, given my coloring, my size, and what I want to be able to do in the world.

The pregnancy that ended with me being fat also ended with me having a daughter.  She’s 12 now.  Unlike my family, who develop young and curvy, she’s tall and thin, like her father.  She has longer limbs for her height than I do.  She isn’t busty; she looks like a 12-year-old.  At 12, people routinely thought, and said, I looked much older. 

As far as I know, my daughter isn’t part of the statistics mentioned by this campaign: she doesn’t spend anywhere near as much time with media (an average of 10hr 45m a DAY); she isn’t unhappy about her body (53% of 13-year-olds); she’s never dieted.  As far as I know.  She tells me a lot: about her crushes, her period, her weird new novel.  What doesn’t she tell me?  What does MY fear of being fat and “too much” do to her?

Because I am normal, I want magazines to keep it real.

Because I want to feel that my ‘look’ and size is acceptable, even beautiful, even if for a moment, I want magazines to keep it real.

Because I have a daughter who is growing up with only one vision of beauty and normality, I want magazines to keep it real.  This is especially important because she is close to this norm—but she needs to see other beauty; we all do.  Beauty that isn’t tall, thin, blond, and white. 

If you want to have new readers, talk to us.  Show us.  Listen to us.  Beautiful can be short.  It can be fat.  It can be non-white.  It can be non-blonde.  It can be non-smiling.

Also, finally, beauty shouldn’t be the only message you see when you look at a magazine cover.  Yes, I may want to be beautiful.  But I am already smart, talented, and engaged.  I don’t need to be beautiful, sexy, desirable, and pleasant (as suggested by giant, glassy-eyed smiles) all the time.  People are beautiful in their intelligence, in their talent, in their ability, in their inability, in their anger, in their indignation, in their sadness, in their joy, in their consternation.  Let women be beautiful in their own ways.  REFLECT this in your magazines.  Keep it real. 

After a wildly successful Day 1 of the Keep It Real Challenge asking magazines to drop idealized image editing—both Lucky Mag and Marie Claire publicly showed support!—it’s time for Day 2: blog-o-rama!

We have three written pieces & several vlogs going up today about image retouching, body image, magazines, and media, and we want YOU to contribute! Submit posts to us, send us the link to a post or video you’ve posted elsewhere, or tag your related tumblr posts with #keepitreal & we’ll reblog and tweet about your pieces. You can also post your pieces in the Facebook event!

Join us!

Our executive director just found a huge bag full of Seventeen Magazines from the late ’80s in her childhood bedroom closet. Join her as she travels down memory lane and compares the teen mags of her youth—complete with Seventeen Wedding Guide—to their modern day counterparts. 

JOIN US in the #KeepItReal Challenge!

Seventeen Magazine: Give Girls Images of Real Girls!

Girls want to be accepted, appreciated, and liked. And when they don’t fit the criteria, some girls try to “fix” themselves. This can lead to eating disorders, dieting, depression, and low self esteem.

I’m in a ballet class with a bunch of high-school girls. On a daily basis I hear comments like: “It’s a fat day,” and “I ate well today, but I still feel fat.” Ballet dancers do get a lot of flack about their bodies, but it’s not just ballet dancers who feel the pressure to be “pretty”. It’s everyone. To girls today, the word “pretty” means skinny and blemish-free. Why is that, when so few girls actually fit into such a narrow category? It’s because the media tells us that “pretty” girls are impossibly thin with perfect skin.

Here’s what lots of girls don’t know. Those “pretty women” that we see in magazines are fake.They’re often photoshopped, air-brushed, edited to look thinner, and to appear like they have perfect skin. A girl you see in a magazine probably looks a lot different in real life.

That’s why I’m asking Seventeen Magazine to commit to printing one unaltered — real — photo spread per month. I want to see regular girls that look like me in a magazine that’s supposed to be for me.

For the sake of all the struggling girls all over America, who read Seventeen and think these fake images are what they should be, I’m stepping up. I know how hurtful these photoshopped images can be. I’m a teenage girl, and I don’t like what I see. None of us do. Will you join us by signing this petition and asking Seventeen to take a stand as well and commit to one unaltered photo spread a month?

Marie Claire wants you to love your body, but not before you get it bikini ready by freezing off your fat. 

Your messages are a little mixed, Marie. 

korsakoffiancoping:

(Source: Men’s Health)

Men of the world, are you fucking serious?

Wow. Wow. Even if this is skewed towards the demographics of Men’s Health (whatever those are), this is pretty appalling.