Seventeen magazine has made a monumental pledge: it will use realistic (as in, not stick figure) models and never change girls’ faces or body shapes with Photoshop. Why the sudden promise? It is all thanks to the work of Julia Bluhm, a fourteen year old from Waterville, Maine.
This past May, Bluhm started a petition on a website called Change.org, asking Seventeen magazine “to commit to printing one unaltered—real—photo spread per month.” Bluhm is a part of SPARK (Sexualization, Protest, Action, Resistance, Knowledge), a movement that wants to draw attention to the dangers of sexualization to girls.
On May 2, Bluhm and other young women gathered outside of Seventeen’s headquarters in New York to protest the teen magazine’s photo-shopped models. They posed in front of a white backdrop, wearing old jeans and jackets and holding up signs that said, “Where are the girls like me?” At the time, the online petition had over 24,000 signatures.
Ann Shocket, Seventeen’s editor-in-chief, invited the girls up to her office that day, but Shocket did not make any promises on the day of that meeting. However, in July, after over 84,000 people had signed the petition, Bluhm and other SPARK activists hand-delivered the printed petition to Seventeen. Subsequently, Seventeen created its Body Peace Treaty, which promised not to digitally alter girls’ faces and bodies and encouraged its readers to sign a pledge to do various things, such as “respect[ing] my body by feeding it well, working up a sweat when it needs it, and knowing when to give it a break” and “not let[ting] my size define me.”
Senior Carly Olson, who has been subscribed to Seventeen for the past three years, comments, “As I am getting older, I have noticed more the super thin models with perfectly straight hair, and I look in the mirror and don’t see that. This promise that Seventeen has made gives me hope that more girls will accept their looks. Not that physical appearance is the most important thing, but it definitely does contribute to self-confidence.” However, both Olson and junior Angela Solis agree that Seventeen did not have a huge problem with incredibly skinny models. Solis noted, “I think they have a really good variety of body types. Even before the Body Peace Treaty, I think they were trying to keep it diverse.”
The magazine that the SPARK activists have now turned their attention to is Teen Vogue, another popular girls’ magazine. Once again, they have an online petition with currently 11,658 signatures that asks Teen Vogue’s main advertisers to “commit to not advertising with Teen Vogue until the magazine makes a commitment to show real, unaltered girls of all races, shapes, and sizes.” Teen Vogue’s adult counterpart, Vogue, has published a “health pact” in its June issue to not work with underage models and models that appear to have eating disorders.
Solis agrees that Teen Vogue needs to change. She said, “There is a huge difference between the Teen Vogue models and the Seventeen models.” Olson added, “Seriously, if you put a picture from each magazine side by side, the Seventeen models are petite, sure, but the Teen Vogue models are pretty obviously unhealthy.” The editor-in-chief of Teen Vogue has met with the girls from the SPARK movement, but no promises have thus far been made.
