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| Airbrush (Photo by Michel90) |
One teen, eighth-grader Julie Bluhm, managed to recently offset that unhealthy (and in certain circles, sinful) message by leading a protest outside the New York City doors of the Hearst Corporation (which owns Seventeen). This enterprising young lady also garnered 25,000 international signatures on
her Change.org petition in favor of this protest. Bluhm was quoted by ABC Nightline as saying:
We want to show Seventeen that we love our body just for who we are and we don’t
need Photoshop to fix us…
It seems that Hillary Clinton couldn’t agree more. After her own recent headlines – which didn’t just focus upon her commendable accomplishments during her trip to Asia, but instead emphasized that she did not wear much makeup and (even) wore glasses to an official Bangladesh event - Clinton was asked by CNN’s Jill Doherty about these “newsworthy” personal choices. Clinton’s stance turned out to be as refreshing as Bluhm’s. She replied: I feel
so relieved to be at the stage I’m at in
my life right now, Jill, because if I want to wear my glasses, I’m
wearing my glasses. If I want to pull my hair back, I’m
pulling my hair back. (ABC News explained that this latter reference was to criticism
Clinton had received for sometimes tying her hair back with “a dated hair tie.”)
Those struggling with extreme poverty in Bangladesh (just as those struggling with anorexia) might not have the energy to care whether a Seventeen model has a real-life freckle,
or whether Clinton’s scrunchie has been pronounced dated. Furthermore, people in Bangladesh might (hopefully) have a far different concept of beauty than Madison Avenue’s. Wikipedia reports that 89.5% of Bangladesh’s population is Muslim. In an
article subtitled In Search of Body Beautiful, Ifrat
Azad writes: In Islam, beauty is not just in the eye of the
beholder. Beauty is in the whole of creation, because
Allah – the One free of all imperfections – is the
one responsible for it… So it is from the wisdom
of Allah that He has chosen to create some of us
short, others tall, some fat, some thin, some
dark-colored, some light – all are beautiful and
perfect in their own right.
Resources
http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/8th-grader-petitions-seventeen-magazine-feature-airbrushed-photos/story?id=16266445
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/05/hillary-clinton-au-naturale-does-the-secretary-of-state-care-about-her-appearance/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Bangladesh
http://www.angelfire.com/mo2/scarves/beauty.html
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