Posts Tagged self-esteem

By Vanessa • 11 years ago

Quick Hit: The Upside of Ugly

We’re a few days late highlighting this, but it’s just too good not to share. Jessica at The Nation responds to the 14-year-old girl was recently given $40,000 in free cosmetic surgery because she was being bullied for having ears that stuck out:

As my friend writer Jaclyn Friedman once said to me, the problem isn’t that girls don’t know their worth—it’s that they absolutely do know their value in society. Young women know exactly how ugly the culture believes them to be. So when we teach girls to simply “love themselves”, we’re implicitly telling them to accept the world as it is. We’re saying that being beautiful is something worth having when we should be telling them a culture that demands ...

We’re a few days late highlighting this, but it’s just too good not to share. Jessica at The Nation responds to the 14-year-old girl was recently given $40,000 in free cosmetic surgery because she was ...
By Vanessa • 11 years ago

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 ...

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 ...
By Vanessa • 11 years ago

Friday Feminist Fuck Yeah: Julia Bluhm


Julia Bluhm is one bad-ass 8th grader. You may have heard about the petition the SPARKteam activist recently started, calling on Seventeen magazine — in the effort to include real girls in its pages — to feature just one photo-shopped spread per issue. After 30,000 signatures, Seventeen editor Ann Shoket invited Julia to meet on Wednesday — though not actually agreeing to address Julia’s request  at all. (Not to mention including a kinda condescending statement about the meeting, methinks.)

Nonetheless, Julia handled the outcome of the meeting with grace, saying:

“The fact that Seventeen‘s editor-in-chief met with me in person proves that the voices of teen girls everywhere are getting through … While I would still change some of the ...


Julia Bluhm is one bad-ass 8th grader. You may have heard about the petition the SPARKteam activist recently started, calling on Seventeen magazine — in the effort to include real girls in its pages — ...
By Laura • 12 years ago

Paper-mache Princess.

Work starts at nine.
Not enough light to blend this illusion,
Not enough time.

I blend just enough to be effortless,
But not so much that I’m revealed.
My pale skin hiding beneath the layers,
Waiting to be accepted, not to be concealed.

I live as these other people,
Laminated, polished and frozen.
But somehow something tells me,
They’re really all broken.

They asked me at school what I would like to be,
Now I just want to be a celebrity.
The mask I won’t do without, it is my shield.
You’ll never get close enough for it to be healed.

Someone else’s hair has become glued to mine.
Stripped of all meaning, bleached of all desire.
Glowing layers of paint sprayed onto my ...

Work starts at nine.
Not enough light to blend this illusion,
Not enough time.

I blend just enough to be effortless,
But not so much that I’m revealed.
My pale skin hiding beneath the layers,
Waiting to be ...
By Chloe Angyal • 13 years ago

Quick hit: Hugo Schwyzer on the connection between perfectionism and unhealthy relationships

Hugo Schwyzer has been writing a lot about perfectionism of late, because as someone who teaches college-aged women, it’s a problem he comes across quite frequently. In his most recent post on perfectionism, he writes about the belief that he finds among some of his students that unless a woman is approaching physical “perfection,” she has no right to expect very much from the men she’s involved with:

Working with high school and college-aged young women, I’ve heard the same thing more and more often in recent years. These smart and amazing young women have somehow gotten the idea that in order to be treated with respect and love, they have to be damn near perfect. One student said to ...

Hugo Schwyzer has been writing a lot about perfectionism of late, because as someone who teaches college-aged women, it’s a problem he comes across quite frequently. In his most recent post on perfectionism, he writes about ...