Editorial: Teen girl's petition reaches thousands

Talk about it

One can make the argument that the media contributes to the peer pressure teenagers everywhere face. Turn on the television or flip open a magazine, for instance, and there are young women and men alike with supposedly ideal body types engaging in - or talking about - behavior we wouldn’t want our kids to emulate.

That’s why a Thursday National Public Radio report about eighth-grader Julia Bluhm is so heartening. This past April, Bluhm started a petition on Change.org that called for Seventeen magazine “to print one unaltered photo spread each month,” the NPR report said. Said Bluhm in a radio interview in June: "We should focus on people’s personalities, not just how they look. If you’re looking for a girlfriend who looks like the models that you see in magazines, you’re never going to find a girlfriend, because those people are edited with computers."

Bluhm’s petition wound up getting more than 80,000 signatures worldwide, and as a result has earned a pledge from Seventeen to "not alter natural shapes and include only images of 'real girls and models' who are healthy,'" NPR reported.

It’s easy to be cynical and believe this development will be ultimately inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. Yet, it’s refreshing to see a young woman who cares enough to try and make some kind of positive societal impact.

Tags: opinion, editorials