80% of 10-year-old girls in the U.S. say they’ve been on a diet

Tell me there’s not something seriously fucking wrong with this fact.

This is just one of many that have compelled Miss Representation, SPARK, Endangered Bodies and other organizations to host a 3-day long challenge to encourage the public to push women’s and girl’s magazines to take accountability for their direct impact on the epidemic of shame, self-loathing and starvation among young women in the U.S. And things aren’t getting better.

Their ask? A pledge by these magazines to use at least one unphotoshopped image in each of their issues. This is a larger follow-up campaign to 14-year-old Julia Bluhm’s quest you may have heard about, where she asked for this very thing of Seventeen magazine; while she successfully landed a meeting with their editor-in-chief over her petition, she was politely turned down from her request. Apparently, pictures of real girls was just too radical for them.

Now they’re taking it back to the ‘nets. The awesome thing about this campaign, which kicked off today, is that everything is laid out for folks in this toolkit. So check it out, use the #KeepItReal hashtag, and call out magazines’ Twitter handles below. The industry’s message that cis, white, thin and able-bodied women continue to be the “ideal” is a direct contribution to the dissolution of girls’ and women’s self worth, and it can’t be ignored anymore. And they hold the power to change it, but we need to hold them to it.

 

 

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