A selection of articles on body image and media literacy issues.

Boy Blogger: “Seventeen Magazine Pictures Are Silly and Unreal”

An excerpt: “The girls I know, real girls, don’t look anything like this. They look normal. Most of them aren’t covered in makeup, they wear the kind of clothes I wear, comfortable, everyday clothes, and they don’t look like Barbie dolls…”

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2 Teen Girls Took A Fashion Mag Into A Lunchroom And Came Back With This Video

An excerpt: “Bursts of hysterical giggling aside, seeing these young girls juxtaposed next to the magazine photos is a reality check for all of us. About halfway through, they start to ask teen boys what they think…”

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Historical Perspective on the LEGO Gender Gap

An excerpt: “LEGO bricks were originally marketed as toys for both boys and girls. The 60s saw the introduction of new elements to the LEGO system like wheels, windows and hinges. Marketing images from this era tend to feature boys and girls equally…”

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Prom Spending Surges? Media Panics, Hype and Critical Thinking 2012

An excerpt: “Ever since media headlines began trumpeting four-figure price escalations and pundits started crowing that ‘prom is the new wedding’ citing a national AVERAGE of $1078 per a widely distributed Visa survey of 1000 phone respondents, I decided to put my incredulousness to an informal peer review using social media as a conduit…”

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Tropes vs. Women in Video Games

Help support this amazing project by Anita Sarkeesian: “I love playing video games but I’m regularly disappointed in the limited and limiting ways women are represented. This video project will explore, analyze and deconstruct some of the most common tropes and stereotypes of female characters in games. The series will highlight the larger reoccurring patterns and conventions used within the gaming industry rather than just focusing on the worst offenders. I’m going to need your help to make it happen!”

• Kickstarter.com: “Tropes vs. Women in Video Games”

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The Center for Eating Disorders at Sheppard Pratt provides a comprehensive continuum of specialized care for children, adolescents and adults with eating disorders. Our holistic and multi-disciplinary approach to recovery helps individuals and families move beyond surviving to thriving.

For the past two weeks I’ve been busy editing the very beginning of “The Illusionists” – a 10 minute sequence that introduces all the main theses of the documentary. I want to include brief glimpses at advertisements and magazine articles from the 1930s to our days, so yesterday afternoon I was at the library, going through dozens of old issues of Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Ebony, Harper’s Bazaar and People magazine.

In the December 1982 issue of Harper’s Bazaar, I found an ad by cigarette brand Virginia Slims, which I found disturbing on many levels.

But first, some background information about the company. In her excellent book “Can’t Buy My Love,” activist, filmmaker and author Jean Kilbourne (whom I had the honor of interviewing in The Illusionists) writes,

In 1968 Virginia Slims was introduced by Philip Morris. In the following six years, the number of girls ages twelve to eighteen who smoked more than doubled. There followed a proliferation of cigarettes designed exclusively for women, such as More, Now (which exploitively had the same name as the acronym for the National Organization for Women), Max, Eve, Satin and Misty. By 1979, magazine tobacco advertisements targeting women equaled those targeted to men. These advertisements offered and continue to offer smoking to young women as a way to rebel and be cool, of course, but also as a way to control both their emotions and their weight. And, of course, advertisements offer cigarettes to everyone as a powerful symbol of sexuality.”

The ad from Harper’s Bazaar offered a diary for 1983 – The “Virginia Slims Book of Days.” It could be obtained by mailing a 1 dollar check to Virginia Slims and enclosing two labels from any packs of Virginia Slim cigarettes.

I quickly glanced at the headline and I had to read it over at least three times – I simply could not believe it. My first reaction was: this must certainly be meant in irony. I did some research online when I returned home and I’m afraid to say they meant every single word, when they proclaimed:

Learn what your parasol says about you, why your broom is your best friend and how to suppress dangerous attacks of ambition. All in the 1983 Virginia Slims Book of Days

And underneath the headline:

“The Virginia Slims Book of Days is your own personal engagement calendar with plenty of space to note 365 days worth of appointments, reminders and engagements. And along the way, there are intriguing anecdotes, photos and outrageous quotes to keep you amused the whole year through.“

Underneath the picture of the model is the big bold slogan:

“You’ve come a long way, baby.”

(Which sort of contradicts the bit about the broom and the dangers of ambitions, but who are we to judge?)

If you come across any examples of badvertisements, please send them to illusionists.film [at] gmail [dot ] com

Links:

• Can’t Buy My Love

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Generous support for The Illusionists provided by:

The Center for Eating Disorders at Sheppard Pratt provides a comprehensive continuum of specialized care for children, adolescents and adults with eating disorders. Our holistic and multi-disciplinary approach to recovery helps individuals and families move beyond surviving to thriving.

I recently found this thought-provoking poster on Pinterest – which was put together by the NOW Foundation for “Love Your Body Day.”

The image is a tad too small, so I’ll reproduce the text here:

Please share this widely!

Links + Resources:

• The NOW Foundation
• Love Your Body Day

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Generous support for The Illusionists provided by:

The Center for Eating Disorders at Sheppard Pratt provides a comprehensive continuum of specialized care for children, adolescents and adults with eating disorders. Our holistic and multi-disciplinary approach to recovery helps individuals and families move beyond surviving to thriving.

An excerpt:

The Conversation about women’s bodies exists largely outside of us, while it is also directed at (and marketed to) us, and used to define and control us. The Conversation about women happens everywhere, publicly and privately. We are described and detailed, our faces and bodies analyzed and picked apart, our worth ascertained and ascribed based on the reduction of personhood to simple physical objectification. Our voices, our personhood, our potential, and our accomplishments are regularly minimized and muted. [...] The insanity has to stop, because as focused on me as it appears to have been, it is about all girls and women. In fact, it’s about boys and men, too, who are equally objectified and ridiculed, according to heteronormative definitions of masculinity that deny the full and dynamic range of their personhood. It affects each and every one of us, in multiple and nefarious ways: our self-image, how we show up in our relationships and at work, our sense of our worth, value, and potential as human beings. Join in—and help change—the Conversation.

– Ashley Judd

April 9th, 2012

Spread the word, share this on Pinterest:

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Generous support for The Illusionists provided by:

The Center for Eating Disorders at Sheppard Pratt provides a comprehensive continuum of specialized care for children, adolescents and adults with eating disorders. Our holistic and multi-disciplinary approach to recovery helps individuals and families move beyond surviving to thriving.

A woman is often measured by the things she cannot control. She is measured by the way her body curves or doesn’t curve. By where she is flat or straight or round. She is measured by 36-24-36 and inches and ages and numbers. By all the outside things that don’t ever add up to who she is on the inside. And so if a woman is to be measured, let her be measured by the things she can control, by who she is and who she is trying to become because as every woman knows, measurements are only statistics, and statistics lie.

Apparently in the 1990s NIKE ran this ad in a few magazines and used it in a promotional campaign for Nike Women, offering posters and notecards of it. If you’re lucky enough, you can still find copies at flea markets…

First Time Here?

You can subscribe to our posts via RSS or sign up to receive them via email.

Generous support for The Illusionists provided by:

The Center for Eating Disorders at Sheppard Pratt provides a comprehensive continuum of specialized care for children, adolescents and adults with eating disorders. Our holistic and multi-disciplinary approach to recovery helps individuals and families move beyond surviving to thriving.