Courtesy of Julia Bluhm
Melissa's "Foot Soldier" last weekend was Julia Bluhm: blogger, media activist with SPARK Summit -- and eighth grader. Despite not yet being seventeen, the 14-year-old ballet dancer from Maine took issue with magazines like Seventeen made her and her friends feel self-conscious through their Photoshopped and airbrushed photos. Julia decided to take matters into her own hands, drafting a petition on Change.org which asked Seventeen to stop altering their models to look unrealistically thin and blemish-free. She also staged a photo-shoot protest outside of the magazine's headquarters in New York City.
This week, Seventeen responded through their letter from the editor in their August edition, publishing a "Body Peace Treaty." (See a PDF here.) In the "treaty," Seventeen's editorial board vowed to:
- "Never change girls' body or face shapes"
- "always feature real girls and models who are healthy,"
- "celebrate every kind of beauty in our pages... all body types, skin tones, heights and hair textures."
Two days after her victory, I spoke to Julia and was able to get more insight from her on this campaign and its success.
What made you want to get involved, create a petition to Seventeen magazine?
I’m a blogger for SPARK Summit, which is a girl-powered movement; we basically talk back to the media on things that we think are unfair. We talk a lot about how Photoshop has a negative effect on girls in SPARK, and it got me thinking about it. We wanted to start a petition, so I wrote the petition. We targeted Seventeen Magazine because it’s a really popular magazine among girls, and also they do a lot of stuff to help girls feel good about their body image, so we thought that they might want to take it a step further.
Melissa's "Foot Soldier" segment about Julia.
Was there a personal reason why you wanted to get involved?
Yeah, I have some friends who feel… who wish they looked differently I guess, and I know people who – even if they are just joking around – say things like “Oh it’s a fat day” or something like that. It just shows how much emphasis we put on our bodies and how we should look. And the idea of beauty and the idea of how we should look often comes from the media, and it’s an unrealistic idea of beauty, and when we strive to reach that we can really hurt ourselves, because it’s impossible to reach without Photoshop. So I guess I saw the effects within my group of friends and stuff, and girls I saw in school and I knew it was an important issue and I wanted to do something about it.
Do you thing the Body Peace Treaty issued by Seventeen goes far enough?
They said in their Peace Treaty that they promised that they would not alter girls’ bodies or face shapes. I think that’s really important. That’s even more than we were asking them to do I think. Because we were asking them to do one photo spread that was Photoshop free, and they’re saying that they’re gonna do the whole magazine. I think that’s really good. And they made a public promise, so I think they’ll stick to it, but if they don’t we can definitely talk back to them because they did make a public promise for it. But I think they are going to step up to the game because this will get them some really good publicity.
Were you surprised?
I guess I knew from the beginning that there were a lot of people out there who agree with the petition, but I was really surprised that many people would actually log on, find the petition and sign in. I didn’t really think that Seventeen would actually agree because it seems kind of far-fetched when you think about one of the most popular magazines among teenagers listening to… me. But at the same time they’re not just listening to me. They’re listening to me and the 84,000 people who signed my petition.
So what’s your next project?
Well, I’m supporting, two other girls from SPARK Summit are starting another petition targeting Teen Vogue for the same reason and I’m totally in support of that and I’ll help them out as much as I can and I signed their petition. So that’s our next big step with this movement. I’ll definitely keep helping out with that. I’m also going to be part of a girls group within my community called the Girls Advisory Board, it’s part of Hearty Girls Healthy Women, and we’re going to keep working on that issue there.
And you’ll focus on media portrayal of girls?
Yeah, it focuses on lots of things about girls in the media, but we’ll probably, since this is a current issue, we’ll probably talk about that a lot.
Check out Julia's video response to the success of her change.org campaign, after the jump.
14 year-old Julia Bluhm - who was fed up seeing friends and fellow ballet dancers try to "fix" themselves to be as "pretty" as girls in magazines - yesterday won her campaign on Change.org asking Seventeen magazine to feature photos of 'real' girls.
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this girl has initiative. i think that most 14 year old girls have thought of something like this, but it took a girl like her to act on it.
My thoughts on President Obama not appearing at the NAACP's Presidential Candidate Address.
It is nearly laughable that Mr. Romney would say that he is the best candidate for African American voters. However, the sitting President doesn't feel it necessary to appear at the NAACP event, in-person; rather the President sent a surrogate, in the form of Vice President Biden. At the very least, Romney appeared. Therefore, Romney's claim that he is the best candidate for African-Americans is almost laughable, instead of completely laughable.
I am well-aware that Democrats have taken advantage of the fact that they do not have to compete for African-American votes. A certain bit of knowledge does not persist in the minds of Democratic politicians; given any two choices, A and B, there is inherently a third choice: abstention. We could abstain from voting for the Democratic candidate, as opposed to affirmatively voting for such a candidate.
I have always been of a mind-set that the African-American community should not diversify our political alignment because the correct metaphor for politics is war, not investment. We use metaphors to extend our understanding of new, or unfamiliar concepts and situations. We use similes to compare such situations, and thereby gain insight into the new situation. Choosing the correct metaphor, however, is crucial. I am confident that the better metaphor for politics is war, not financial investment. Given that the metaphor is correct, in war, one does not divide one's army into two and send half of one's resources to the other side of the conflict in order to fight a better war. In similar fashion, one should not divide one's community into two and send half to the side of the Republican party. Our member communities have made it possible for there to be a President Obama. We have built a scaffolding within the Democratic Party that never existed in the Republican Party, not even prior to the 1965 enactment of the Civil Rights Legislation - prior to which, the vast majority of African Americans voted for Republican candidates.
Given all that I have said above, I find it difficult to peruse the hard-statistical data to discover that for the last 20 years, African-Americans have done consistently bad under Republican and Democratic administrations; meaning that we vote Democratic, but we receive no benefit from our votes for Democrats, apart from structural benefits for our politicians within the Democratic Party. It was Bill Clinton that declared that the era of Big Government was at an end, and ended the safety net for people, of all colors, living at the margins of society. It was under his administration that Medicaid and food assistance programs were decimated; beginning the growth in the percentage of children living in poverty to a local-maximum.
Is Mitt Romney's claim laughable, in your opinion? As I evaluate the situation, and find that even an African-American president does not want, or does not find it required, to make an appearance at the NAACP, I find myself astonished and fuming! I keep going over the costs of abstention, and find such costs too high for our people as a whole, as abstention, in combination with the outcome of the efforts to suppress African-American votes, would give comfort to those who define themselves as opponents of African-Americans. One should never give comfort to those who self-identify as an enemy. Therefore, abstention seems impossible, IN THIS ELECTION, but I think a clear message should be sent to Democratic politicians in the mid-term elections of 2014. In so doing, it is my hope that the great importance of satiating the political needs of African-American communities, which does not persist in the minds of Democratic politicians, will ultimately become static knowledge – a kind that they can never forget.