Happy Friday!

So I'm all over the news lately with this project, which is so weird for me. If you follow me on Twitter, then you already get my uncensored musings about why I probably think its best that major life transitions don't typically come with a voice in media. Anyhow, I've been busy enjoying the opportunity to spread the word about healthy body image, media bullshit, and why we need a broader definition of beauty. I won't bore you all with interviews, but feel free to Google stalk me. While I'm here shilling for myself (barf barf barf) I will also encourage you all to fan me on the social cesspool formerly known as Facebook. Now that that's over with...

Picture submissions have been steadily rolling in, with many more promised for the weekend! Here are some smile-makers from today. There are a bunch more over here at Flickr. If you are new to the blog, you can go here for a full description of the project. I'm about 2/3 through a massive post on alternative teen-friendly media. It's not too late to email me your suggestions. I'll try to get that up this weekend.

via Laura at Naked Under These Clothes

Hey mainstream media! We are....

Submissions are trickling in. Here are a few that made me smile especially large. You can see all submissions here. If you are new to the blog, you can go here for a full description of the project.

Planning on writing something later, but figured that I'd get these up to give everyone a midmorning smile.

Hey mainstream media...

In thinking about how to wrap up this project, I decided that I wanted to do something action oriented. The Seventeen Magazine Project has made some strides in calling attention to and promoting discussion about the inaccurate and unfair representations of teens, women, and humanity as a whole in mainstream media. The blog itself, however, has done little to actually spur large-scale, direct change. Having established this blog as a foundation for discussion, I thought it would be nice to end the project with some sort of advocacy campaign-- a project involving readers that called mainstream media out on the carpet for their limited and inaccurate portrayal of what it really means to be a teen, a woman, and a human.

I kicked around some ideas with my dad about possible projects. He vetoed most of my suggestions, pointing out that use of violence/vandalism/open flame/mustard gas would probably cast a dark shadow over the positive message of fair media portrayal that I was trying to promote. At the very least, I thought it might be cool to put some faces to the people that mainstream media is misrepresenting. Here is what I came up with. The project is called, "Hey mainstream media!" To participate in this project, all that you have to do is take a picture of yourself holding a sign with words finishing the statement, "Hey mainstream media! I am...."

Anyone can participate in this project. That is, anyone that at some point has felt misrepresented by or excluded from mainstream media. This project is NOT just for teens. Are you a black woman? Maybe you're more than just a sassy best friend character. A straight man? Maybe you're interested in more than just pictures of naked women. Unlike media, this project does not exclude or alienate any demographic.

You can email me your submissions here, or add them directly to the Flickr pool. I'll add all the pics that I get to the Flickr pool, and post the ones that I find most interesting here on the blog.

Eventually, if enough people participate, I am thinking about having these photos printed up into collage-style posters and mailing/delivering them to the offices of magazines/tv studios as a reminder of how few consumers actually fit the limited set of stereotypes that media prescribes to us.

Make the type on your poster bold and readable! Let's see how many pictures we can get by July 6. Here's number 1....

Hey mainstream media! I am...

Graduation

If you have noticed the lack of posts for the past few days, it is because I have been busy celebrating my high school graduation. I thought it would have been a grave injustice to sacrifice actual teenage experiences in the name of keeping up with my blog that is supposed to document actual teenage experiences.

Paradoxes and catch-22s aside, graduating high school was great, if not anticlimactic. The event took place on my school's football field. The temperature was a sweltering 94 degrees, but in my ankle-length, polyester sweatbox it felt much warmer. Numerous anti-frizz serums and elixirs kept my my hair from mushrooming out from beneath my mortarboard. I have to admit that, temperature aside, I felt hotter in my academic regalia than I have felt in

any other outfit that I've worn during the duration of this project. How anti-Seventeen this is, especially since I was wearing an identical outfit as 275 other girls.

The ceremony itself was fairly boring. I pomped. I circumstanced. I listened to a bunch of adults who I didn't know address the class of 2010, but actually address our parents, using metaphors about butterflies and the like. I sweated. I waved to my grandparents. I asked kids sitting near me overly personal questions about their sex lives. I counted how many people in the stands brought umbrellas for sun protection. I sweated some more. I cheered really loud for my friends. I got my diploma. Then I was graduated.

Initially I was surprised how easy it was to graduate. The only two skills you need are walking and sitting. My seat mate kindly reminded me that I actually had to do 12 years of work to earn the right to walk and sit. This observation made me feel stupid, but also accomplished. I know that school is mostly compulsory, but it felt really great to complete an endeavor that took twelve years, especially when I sometimes fail to finish projects intended to last an afternoon.

In the spirit of closure and accomplishment, I'll acknowledge the fact that today is the technical last day of this project. I'll save conclusions, summaries, and lessons learned for a future post, but I just wanted to sort of frame out what the rest of this blog is going to look like for everyone. Today is the last official day of The Seventeen Magazine Project, as outlined by my initial post. I am going swimming at my cousins' house for Father's Day, so I'll dress bikini confident and blog about it tomorrow. That will be the last fashion/beauty post.

The week to come is going to include lots of stuff related to teens and media and fair portrayal, including a list of pro-teen media that seems to "get" the teenage experience. I'll also be putting together a short project, a little bit of a fuck you to Seventeen, that lots of people will have the opportunity to get involved with. This will run all week. Hopefully we can affect some change in the ladymag industry. It'll be fun/badass/a little subversive I think. I'll introduce it in detail tomorrow probably.

EDITED TO ADD: Fan me on Facebook, and then maybe delete my personal profile from your friends? I am trying to figure out an easier way to keep in touch with people. My real life friends find the current system to be REALLY annoying.

Food Fearless

Yesterday was the gap day between my last day of high school and my final exams, which meant that it was a day devoid of any formal plans, an occurrence otherwise known as the best kind of day ever. If you are a fan of technicality, and I suppose that I am, then I guess that it was also the first day of my summer vacation, since all academic obligations had been accounted for up until that point. I decided that this day was an excellent opportunity to heed my call of duty as a dedicated Seventeen reader by partaking in one of the activities mentioned on the magazine's "17 Things You Need to Do This Summer!" list. Number 15, engaging in a food-fearless taste test, seemed like something worth making a day out of. Then again, I may have just been excited by the fact that a magazine targeted towards women was actually encouraging me to eat something, a welcome foil to the usual dieting advice that ladymags are all too happy to push.

I had some errands to run in Philadelphia, so I ended up hopping a train to the city, where I figured I could be food-fearless more cheaply than I could here in the suburbs. Once you stray too far north of Philadelphia, the result tends to be such that financing a decent Indian meal requires a second mortgage on your home and the sale of an organ, infant, or both. Thus, its not often that I get to eat Indian food.

I arrived in the city around noon and pursued lunch at Reading Terminal Market, a public marketplace in center city Philadelphia that falls somewhere between Epcot and street vendor on the spectrum of authentic marketplaces. Don't get me wrong-- the taste and variety of food is fantastic-- but Reading Terminal is uncharacteristically pristine for Philadelphia, a trait that I find somewhat unsettling.

Anyhow, the food was pretty good at Nanee's Kitchen, the Indian counter at which I ended up dining. When I go to restaurants where I don't know what I like, I tend to ask what the house specialty is-- in this case it was the vegetarian plate. Some of the foods were sweet, some were spicy. I'm not a picky eater, but I seemed to have missed the part of eating Indian food that was supposed strike fear in my heart. Seventeen's food-fearless reccomendation was obviously praiseworthy in encouraging girls to try new things, especially things of the food variety, but it would have been nice to see the suggestion presented in a light that didn't cast a negative shadow of fear on eating or make the previous experiences of girls seem so limited. After all, some girls may have eaten Indian food before, or might actually, gasp, be Indian.

On a tangent note, I'm not the first to notice the bizarre conflation of emotion and morality with food. Desserts are frequently described as sinfully sweet. Chocolate is a guilty pleasure. Waiters tell you to "be bad" and go ahead and order dessert. I could have sworn I read a post on this over at Sociological Images, or maybe it was Jezebel, but I can't seem to find anything right now. I would like to link to this post if I can. Anyone know what I'm talking about?

Edit: Commenter LiberalElitist15 found the Jezebel article here. It's as great as I remembered.

For my day out, I accessorized my favorite (vintage) floaty dress, with a fun vintage sash belt, both inspired by Katy Perry. Unfortunately, my arm and Indian food platter are obscuring your view of the outfit. An article with pictures of this outfit will run eventually in the Philadelphia Inquirer, so I'll steal their pictures once that goes up.

Overall the day was pleasant, but not any more so than the day-to-day fun that I plan for myself.

P.S. GRADUATING TOMORROW! :)

Last Day of High School

If there is a blogging equivalent to the AMBER alert, can somebody please activate it on my behalf? My camera charger has gone missing. What this means for me is that my room is now a pristine sanctuary, devoid of clutter-- a happy byproduct of my attempts to locate said charger. What this means for you is that today's post is, er, somewhat minimalist. Definitely lacking in the sort of aesthetically pleasing fashion photos that make a Seventeen girl like me go weak in the clean-shaven knees. Fear not, though, I'm buying a new charger tomorrow.

Today was my last day of high school. I still have finals and graduation to look forward to, but today was the last day of really being pushed through the hallway-classroom-hallway-classroom channel. I honestly can't say that I'm not glad the experience is over. I feel like the final two years of the American education system should be restructured toward something much more practical and "real-world" oriented. School has felt a lot like being babysat lately.

My final day passed very normally. I wore another tribal outfit, this time one that included a dress with a jaguar on it from H&M. I wore my hair in a top knot. I wore waterproof mascara in case there was any crying, but it turns out that nobody seemed to be overwhelmed with too much emotion about leaving a place that forces 18-year-olds to sit in tiny chairs and ask for permission to use the bathroom.

Tomorrow I have a free day, so I'll be heading into Philly to do some shopping, and to try a few of Seventeen's suggested "Summer Fun" activities. I plan on dressing appropriately "fashionable" and taking plenty of photos, so stay tuned.

On an unrelated note, I noticed that shaking my issue of Seventeen yielded FIVE pieces of business reply mail. These cards are really annoying, and Seventeen provides you with a bounty of them. I figured I'd provide the world with one of my own. Feel free to print this out on card and add it to magazines or something. This is mostly just me being goofy and nerdy.

Gay Teens (Not) In Seventeen

Friday's graph-heavy post on hot guys ended up generating a lot of discussion in the comments about how there appears to be a lack of attention, or even recognition, of LGBT girls in Seventeen. I'll state now, at the outset of this post, that I don't believe that Seventeen is an anti-gay publication. Searching gay on Seventeen.com yields a few basic, yet tolerant, tips and articles about coming out, supporting LGBT friends, and current events about gay rights. These articles exist on the site, though I couldn't find them without running a search. None were linked to from the home page, or the main pages for the heath or dating sections. In my mind, I imagine that every time one of these articles is searched for in the search bar, a snoozing librarian is nudged from her chair and begrudgingly has to go fetch the stack of Gay Articles from some 2' by 2' closet in the back of the Seventeen library.

Anyhow, once I determined that articles existed on Seventeen.com acknowledging the fact that gay teens existed, I was happy to draw the conclusion that the Seventeen editors assume that some LGBT teens do, in fact, read Seventeen. Since Friday's post focused heavily on hard data and statistics, I thought it might be interesting to focus more on feeling and general perception in addressing this issue. Accordingly, to find out what LGBT girls thought of their portrayal and inclusion in mainstream media, I simply chose to ask them.

Through a (mostly open-ended) survey, I asked 40 non-straight young women between the ages of 15 and 19 for their opinions on mainstream media, Seventeen, and how the two outlets address sexual orientation. The format of the survey, which you can view at the above link, asked participants to browse certain sections of the website and then describe their feelings and observations. The word cloud below shows the girls' responses to the prompt, "Describe how you are feeling about yourself after browsing the Dating section of the Seventeen website." Larger words were mentioned more frequently.

It was upsetting to see how many people replied with words like alienated and depressed, but those feelings were far outweighed by the fact that my survey group seemed too smart for Seventeen. By far, the most popular responses were those that took a joke's-on-you stance toward Seventeen's dating advice. Tons of girls were amused, bored, indifferent, and uninterested. Seventeen isn't giving advice to LGBT girls on how to date, but it doesn't see like these girls even would take Seventeen's advice very seriously. In fact, it turns out that they have plenty of other far-better sources for sex and dating advice. Here are their responses to the question, "If you are looking for dating/sex advice, where are you most likely to look?"

Magazines actually made a pretty good showing in this area. Luckily, only 22% of survey participants indicated that they read Seventeen in their spare time; most prefer magazines geared more toward specific interests or adults. Friends were by far the most mentioned source of information. Here are some direct quotes about where they get their sex advice:

• "The internet! The internet has bazillions of informations, so its easier to find the feminist stuff."
• "Feministing.com. It's discreet, fair, and honest. They don't loop groups together and say, 'This is how ALL of you must feel!'"
• "I know enough people of different ages, orientations, and experiences to feel understood and supported from different perspectives when it comes to a dating/sex situation I might want advice about."
• "Progressive sex sites like Scarleteen, Betty Dodson, etc. are my best bet because they are feminist, reality-based, and their duty is to educate people.

Overall, I think that the straight community (i.e. the rest of the world) could learn a lot from this mindset. Because gay teens don't have relevant media being thrown at them by mainstream sources, it seems that they have been far more successful than straight teens in finding good alternatives. Most of the advice mentioned by my survey group is applicable to teens regardless of sexual orientation. I'm willing to bet that a sex-positive website or chat with an older friend would be more helpful in most situation of query than Seventeen.

To close the survey, I asked the interview group about their qualms with how media portrays the LGBT community, and their suggestions on how to fix these issues. Sadly, but not surprisingly, only one girl out of the 40 surveyed found that mainstream media portrayed homosexuals fairly and accurately. To sum, here are the top directives provided by the survey group for improving media portrayal of LGBT teenagers, and LGBT people in general:

• Stop treating bisexual people like sluts who are willing to sleep with anything, or dumb confused people
• Stop simplifying gay problems/gay lifestyles
• Stop using gay and bi people as caricatures/tokens/props
• Consider that not everyone is cisgender
• Gay is not part of a plot line; its just another aspect of what makes up a person

A bunch of people also responded to the survey with information about asexuality. To be honest, I don't know enough about asexuality to write about the topic. This faction of my survey group seemed to express that their biggest concern was with people like me, who lacked even a basic premise of what their sexuality entailed. Anyone who is asexual, or has some reliable information about being asexual, please feel free to discuss in the comments. I'd love some recommended reading on the subject!

I'd also like to thank all the girls who participated in this survey, including Charlotte, Cornelia, Nyxelestia, Jill, Vida, Lauren, Catherine, Michelle, and my friend Laura Ansill. Check out their blogs!