Girl power wins

Julia Blumhn, a 14-year-old from Maine launches an online petition to get Seventeen Magazine to stop Photoshopping its models, and she wins.

“I guess I didn’t think it would actually happen so it’s been really exciting for me.”

It’s been called a victory for girl power. But before we declare victory, let’s see how many copies they sell.

If there was a market for normal-looking professional photos, how do you explain wedding photography?

What’s amazing to me is that with all of us now taking digital pictures and constantly tweaking them in our own computers – that anybody would accept any photograph as “real” anymore.

We do the same thing Seventeen has been doing!

And here’s the other thing: In a world where everything is retouched, at least you could look at some impossibly gorgeous specimen and say to yourself, ‘Aw, she’s been retouched.’

But if nothing is retouched, it means when you see someone who’s impossibly gorgeous, you’ll have to conclude, “Oh my gosh, there are people who are really impossibly gorgeous.”

By the way, did you see what motivated Julia to start her petition? Hearing girls in her high school ballet class saying things like “I feel fat.” You can blame the magazine, but what about ballet?

Ballet companies are notorious for choosing girls based on body type because it’s about fantasy; it’s about sexuality, and in sex as in war, truth is the first casualty. And that will remain true whether it’s the Photoshop of the page or the Photoshop of the mind.

Bottom line: If you want to know what people REALLY look like, it’s not hard. Just get your face out of the magazine and look around you, if you can stand it.