I’m going to
create a more realistic magazine where women are still beautiful but they’re
not so impossible or unrealistic as human beings, for us to relate and
associate with. Magazines where the image has been cropped will have a clear
and obvious disclaimer. Like the food labels that even McDonald’s had to follow
suit with. They state how many calories each food item on their menu is. At the
end of the magazine the unedited picture of the models will be featured.
There will also
be a section, not the last page of the magazine, where there will be real life
stories of women who learned or who feel comfortable in their body shape and
size. There will be workshops on how to help women find the right clothes for
their body type and what make up is best for their skin. Each body type has
different clothing types that will best highlight and flatter each body type.
 |
| Girls are taught two things early on. (google.com) |
I’m making this
magazine because it is frustrating to see unrealistic ideals fed to everyone
and no one noticing how impossible it is reach these ideals and how unnecessary
it is to meet those ideals. While tabloid and fashion magazines have proven to
cause serious injury to women in various ways, they do sell and are profitable.
It would be ideal if we as humans, men and women, focused and spent our time on
more academically stimulating literature instead of following the every foot
step of one particular (albeit famous) individual who will never know or meet
you – but that’s not the case. And that is not the main problem here. The level
of pervasiveness of magazines and the extent of its influence in diverse areas
of life from the mundane like the cereals we eat to more personal areas like
our sex life begs for some sort of [effective] regulation.
 |
| Cosmopolitan.com |
While parents
carry a heavy burden of the responsibility of regulating what their children
consume, apps that regulate and/or block access to certain accounts can only do
so much when the advertising is everywhere: on trains, buses, TV shows, etc.
The website healthychildren.org asks parents to read the magazines that their
children consume to understand the values that are being fed to them. While
this website extension of the American Academy of Pediatrics is a start, it is
not enough. Other magazines that don’t follow the norm like Bitch magazine are
successful and explore various areas of women perspectives, its audience is
limited and clearly not for a younger generation who are yet to learn what the
terms feminism and gender equality mean, let alone other topics that are
touched in that magazine.
 |
| Feminist magazine (bitchmagazine.org) |
No comments:
Post a Comment