Magazines for Real (project proposal)

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

Feminist magazine (bitchmagazine.org)

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.