beauty standards

New Moon Girls (The Beauty Issue)

admin — Sat, 01 May 2010 12:00:00 +0000

If you’re a parent or a person who interacts with and cares about children, you might have noticed some worrisome trends, especially among girls. I have seen girls as young as seven show concerns over “getting fat” or being unpopular. Bullying, body image conflict, and other issues seem to be plaguing young women earlier and earlier.

Most women who call themselves feminists would agree that enriching the younger generation is crucial. The statistics on young girls today are disturbing: according to the National Institute on Media and the Family, forty percent of girls between nine and ten surveyed had tried to lose weight. The NIMF also published study results that stated the following: “One in every three articles in leading teen girl magazines also included a focus on appearance, and most of the advertisements (fifty percent) used an appeal to beauty to sell their products.” This is getting serious, folks. We cannot continue to feed our daughters this kind of messaging and then wonder why rates for eating disorders and low self-esteem are so high. That said, I think it can sometimes be hard to give these girls positive messages that are digestible and make sense at their level. Who wants to listen to boring old parents anyway?

Thankfully there are forms of media to help. If your daughter, sister, or friend is drawn to magazines, hide their latest issue of Teen Beat and replace it with New Moon Girls. The magazine has so many fun sections that she will hardly miss it. New Moon puts a spin on traditional magazine sections to make them even more relevant for girls. Instead of a Letter from the Editor being written by an adult, girls who helped work on the magazine write it. The advice column provides advice from—you guessed it—girls. The entire magazine focuses not only on giving girl readers good content but also in making sure that it is credible and relevant by getting it from the very girls New Moon targets. Simply put, this magazine is genius.

The Beauty Issue (May-June 2010) is full of positive messaging and reinforcement, something girls today often lack from the media. The issue contains features on beauty including how to boost your body confidence, your favorite body part, and a piece on inner beauty, as well as short fiction. The idea of beauty is tackled from every possible angle, giving girls an opportunity to discover what they like most about themselves rather than showing them yet another picture of female celebrities and models.

I am encouraged and thrilled about magazines like New Moon Girls and my hope is that they will continue to compete with more mainstream magazines for the attention of young girls. (Hint: They can’t do so without our support!) This magazine is for anyone who wants a girl in his or her life to know just how special she is.

Written by: April D. Boland, May 1st 2010

Face It: What Women Really Feel as Their Looks Change

admin — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 16:01:00 +0000

By Vivian Diller, Jill Muir-Sukenick

Hay House

As the authors of Face It explain in the preface to their book, women who came of age during and after feminism's second wave were brought up to believe our looks don’t have to define who we are or determine our possibilities. What mattered more in this 'enlightened' new age were our brains, our talents, our degrees, our abilities, and our ambition. The paradox is that women continue to receive conflicting messages from the media and our culture about the role appearance plays in our lives. Because many of us have never attempted to unravel our ambivalent feelings about our appearance, the way it impacts our self-esteem, and how we relate to our family and friends, we deny these feelings when we see the first signs of aging—or react with a vengeance to try to arrest the aging process.

Face It is all about guiding women through this potentially treacherous time, during which many of us feel the very ground shifting beneath us. Like many adolescent girls, aging women cling to what the authors describe as “masks” that take the form of "workaholism," addiction to cosmetic surgery, excessive exercise, and dieting to protect ourselves from the sadness and loss we feel at the change in our appearance. In this thoughtful and engaging book, the authors, both psychotherapists and former models, present the stories of how different women approached the aging process. Runway models, nurses, homemakers, and businesswomen, who range in age from early thirties to mid-sixties, tell us their stories.

Some women never felt their appearance played much of a role in their lives, and were taken by surprise when they felt a sense of loss, or even panic, about their changing looks. In contrast, the models interviewed for the book were aware of aging, given that it pushes them out of their profession at the youthful age of twenty-five, and experienced a range of feelings and emotions similar to what many women face when they enter midlife. For women who believed that their intelligence and ambition were their ticket to success, it was often embarrassing to admit to friends and family how their changing looks were impacting them, because it seemed frivolous or superficial.

The authors use the experiences of these different women successfully navigating this challenging time with the use of an innovative six-step program that forms a pathway to a new acceptance and understanding of the aging process. This program involves taking an honest inventory of one's experiences with beauty and acknowledging how family and culture shapes one's identity as a woman. While the authors stress that they aren’t against using plastic surgery to enhance one's appearance, they want to give women the tools to make decisions about it from a place of strength and appreciation for their unique attributes, not out of a panic to "stay in the game."

As a forty-something woman, I found this book intriguing and was pleased to discover that it lived up to its billing of helping women navigate such a challenging time in our lives. Face It helps women of any age to gain an understanding of how to fully own the aging process and not react out of fear to our changing looks and bodies, but to, instead, appreciate and learn from the journey.

Written by: Gita Tewari, April 23rd 2010

Body Panic: Gender, Health, and the Selling of Fitness

admin — Tue, 26 May 2009 00:21:00 +0000

By Shari L. Dworkin, Faye Linda Wachs

New York University Press

Much has been made of representations of bodies, women’s bodies especially, in the media; this terrain is heavily traversed, particularly in feminist discourse. Magazines can be particularly insidious culprits of spreading rigid body doctrines, and for this they have been criticized and pulled apart in many ways. What makes Body Panic: Gender, Health, and the Selling of Fitness different is that Shari L. Dworkin and Faye Linda Wachs are relentless in their pursuit of a comprehensive, empirical study of the ways in which both women’s and men’s bodies are represented in mainstream fitness magazines.

Smiling and posing from the racks as mainstream America waits in line at the grocery store, male and female fitness models shine as beacons of wellness. Oiled, buffed, flexed, but above all sexy, these men and women represent a promise of a better life within the covers. Fitness magazines preach a doctrine no less rigid or demanding than the imperatives of the fashion industry to be thin or the cosmetic industry to be beautiful; however, they do so behind the shield of “health” that so often keeps them from harsher criticism. Dworkin and Wachs dismantle the concept of “healthism” in Body Panic, exposing the ways in which the fitness industry packages and sells a narrow and constrictive version of wellness as a one-size-fits-all prescription to happiness, sex appeal, a long life, and more.

If one only works hard enough, and wants it badly enough, the magazines preach, dreams of “health” and “fitness” can be realized. Based on gender, however, one’s goals should be different. Dworkin and Wachs examined a cross-section of mainstream magazines for both men and women over a span of about ten years, and used a detailed rubric to break down the differences and similarities between them, particularly the cover photographs. The discrepancies, while not surprising, are nonetheless indicative of the unequal ways women’s and men’s bodies are displayed and consumed.

Body Panic takes a fresh look at the diet and exercise industries; Dworkin and Wachs show us that no one, woman or man, young or old, is safe from the pervasiveness and influence of these powerful money-making machines. By no means suggesting that individuals ignore or disregard their “health,” they rather implore us to be critical of media sources we consume, particularly when it comes to our bodies. It is no surprise that the diet and exercise industries consistently make top dollar in the United States—by creating morally superior imperatives and edicts of fitness, and by repackaging the health of our bodies into something that can be bought, these industries ensure that their customers will continue to chase, and pay for, through money or social capital, the health ideal they have fabricated. An ideal so strictly policed is always worth dissecting, and Shari L. Dworkin and Faye Linda Wachs have done this in top form in Body Panic.

Written by: Kelly Moritz, May 25th 2009