Don't Believe The Hype

Big news coming soon....

About Audrey.

On tour.

Next fall...

With another totally kick-ass author....

oooh la la.

More news here and on AllMadeUp.net soon!

All Made Up and Audrey in the Boulder, Colorado newspaper

What can I say?  I get around.

The article is from the Daily Camera and is called "In the Mirror: Teens Struggle with Body Image." It appeared earlier this week--and included these smart bits from me:

Celebrating real beauty

As a teenager, Audrey Brashich got caught up in society's definition of beauty. She was a teen model, landing gigs with magazines such as YM, Seventeen, Elle Girl, Cosmo Girl, Lucky and Self.

Brashich also was elected to her New York high school's student government, one of the first girls chosen since the school's founding in 1709, she says.

No one seemed to care about that.

"I was in a bunch of magazines, and a lot of people were asking me about that," she says. "Why is that so much more important than something else that took a lot of intelligence to achieve?"

Brashich, who now lives in Canada, says society's messages to girls perplexed her. So she decided to do some research.

Brashich published a book in May, "A Girl's Guide to Seeing Through Celebrity Hype and Celebrating Real Beauty," a body image and media literacy guide for teens. She says some girls don't realize there is more to life than feeling "pretty."

"The girls I've spoken to are torn. They want to fit in to what is beautiful, but be valued for other things they know are important and are told are important," she says.

She urges parents and teachers to talk to their children about what they see in the media — "raise questions and get kids thinking about what they see," she says.

"If you ask kids what's important in a role model, they'll make a mini list, or if you ask them what professions are the most important in the world, they'll probably say doctors and teachers," Brashich says. "Then ask them to name famous doctors and teachers, and they'll have a harder time. It shows them that we know these things are important, yet we don't see them in the media. Let's find them."

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Cool hunh?  And the rest of the article is worth checking out too!

Miss America going to lead a "model" life

One word to start: H.Y.P.O.C.R.I.T.I.C.A.L

Oh wait, and also: CONFLICTING MESSAGES...

That's how I feel about the whole morality vibe that's now surrounding things like the Miss USA scandal and the new Miss America.

Let me explain:

So last night some girl from Oklahoma was crowned Miss America.  yay. hooray. whatever.  Today's news reports INSTANTLY focus on how she's going to be a great role model and have a chaperon looking after her to make sure she doesn't slip up (and go in for all that underage drinking and partying a la Tara Conner, the nearly dethroned Miss USA).....

But here's the part that irks me:  Our pop culture is ALL ABOUT celebrating crazy, good time party girls (until they go a leetle too far.  Hello Tara Reid!  Then they are totally ridiculed.)  But before they reach that point, we're all like:

"Wooo hoo!  Girls just want to have fun.  And it's all about Girl Power today... partying as much as you want!  Awww yeah!  Girls Gone Wild is awwwwwesome, dude.  So what if Joe Francis paid underage girlies to expose their boobies.  No biggie.  They did it cause they want to. Lighten up!  And girls, let's go to some pole dancing classes at the gym to get in touch with our inner strippers.  It's the new, hip, thing--and totally acceptable.  Every starlet in Hollywood is doing it.  And next year for Halloween, I'm going to be a scantily clad nurse/catholic school girl/Playboy Bunny etc... and all I'll have to do is pick up my costume at the local Rite Aid/CVS/Longs Drugs/Safeway etc...And what's wrong with tweens showing a little midriff.  It's cute!  Just like t-shirts that say things like "Why Would I Want to Go To School When I've Got These?!" (nudge nudge, wink wink.  Tee hee.  That's about boobs too.  But it doesn't SAY boob, so it's sassy and funny.) "  etc AD NAUSEUM.....

And then we're going to turn around and be all like "TARA CONNER (or any beauty pageant winner), you have done a bad bad thing.  You are under age and have gone drinking, and dancing and in fact looked like all the other young women that dominate the media today.  You have disgraced the title of Miss USA and you must repent and realize that you are supposed to be a role model to young women and not sully or tarnish the name of this illustrious institution that continues to put women on display to be judged for their "talents" and appearance, to be consumed and dissected and looked at, all while saying it's for the good of everyone because there is scholarship money involved."

And make the new Miss America promise to be all moral-like and have a chaperon.  Puhlease.   It's pathetic and hypocritical.

YEAH, I want Miss America to be a good role model (wellll, actually, I want female doctors, lawyers,politicians, mothers, social workers and artists to get as much attention and media buzz as Miss America so girls have those options easily accessible when it comes to searching for role models... but, yeah, I still want Miss A to pull her weight when it comes to setting a tone)... But do I think we have the right to get all puritanical and moral on her ass when our pop culture is awash in messages directed at young women that promote entirely oppositional messages?

Nope.  It's a band aid on the symptom instead of a cure for the cause...

Liposuction on the rise

According to a new British report, the number of cases of liposuction in that country NEARLY DOUBLED last year  and over all cosmetic plastic surgery procedures rose by 31 per cent last year, with an estimated  90,000 procedures carried out.

Compare that, though, with the most recent stats from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons and you find that the most popular plastic surgery procedure in 2005 (2006 stats not yet available) is breast augmentation (291,350 performed) ...

Hmmmmm.

Um, Tyra Banks is not fat (and even if she were.... SO WHAT)

Have y'all been following this pop culture thread?  Photos of Tyra at the beach (see left) came out last week... and lots of celeb blogs posted them with headlines like "Tyra Banks is Fat"  and comments like:

"Tyra Banks has always said that her role model in life is Oprah Winfrey, and after being really rich, and having a talk show, you can add being pretty fat to her list of accomplishments.

Now, I know some of you are probably going to get mad at me for saying Tyra Banks is fat, but could anyone out there really see her walking down the catwalk looking like that? I didn't think so."

(You suck for posting this, btw, Egotastic.com)

 

In response, there have been news reports (yes, news reports, about whether or not Tyra is fat) where she's been quoted saying

"It was such a strange meanness and rejoicing that people had when thinking that was what my body looked like. It was really hurtful to me" 

and then pulling a Jennifer Garner (who, last month, was all "My post-baby body is a disaster!  My trainer has given up on me!"  instead of embracing her new body...or at least not making any comments in public about when people would kill to look like her post-baby or not...)

"I don't want to sit in front of you and be soap-boxy and fake and say, `I love myself, I'm beautiful, it's great,'" says Banks, who is 5 feet 10 inches tall. "I still feel hot, but every day is different. It's when I put on the jeans that used to fit a year ago and don't fit now and give me the muffin top, that's when I say, `Damn!'"

and

"I'm not the healthiest eater" and isn't required to "live up to that model standard anymore."

Grrr.  I HATE HATE HATE it when women feel like they need to publicly defend why they don't look "better" ie "It's all water weight!"  "I've still got five pounds to go from the baby!"  etc.  It reveals just how much the "model standard" (or celeb look, or whatever you want to call it) touches all of us and how few of us escape comparing ourselves to it.

Kelly Osbourne, Playboy, Hef (that looooser) and Posh Spice

"I can't see it happening somehow - we don't airbrush to that extent."

Hugh Hefner on Kelly Osbourne's desire to be in Playboy.

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Hmmm.... Let me say straight off that I am no Playboy fan.  I don't buy into the argument that if a woman is choosing to do it, it's liberating.  But that aside, it still bums me out immensely that an 80-year-old slime bag (that would be Hugh Hefner) gets to have some sort of final say about what vision of the female body is appropriate to be considered sexy.

Why is Kelly any less desirable or sexy than the blonde, surgically-enhanced, homogeneous images Playboy often promotes? Why can't Kelly be lauded as sexy and enviable instead of being indirectly ridiculed for the amount of air brushing it would take to make her "presentable?"

Meanwhile, Hef says that he's "inviting" Posh Spice to pose for the mag.  Posh--who's clearly has eating/body issues.  And that's going to end up influencing what some men think of as attractive and what women feel like they need to measure up to....

Yeah see, I don't like that....

French government forming international body to investigate skinny model phenom

Bravo, mes amis!  Et en fin!

News reports out today say that the French fashion federation is now agreeing that the skinny model prob needs to investigated. BUT, Didier Grumbach, the "chief" of the federation is still maintaining that more regulation IS NOT in order... it's "the education of young women."

Yeah... um well... I see where he's coming from.  And I'm not the type of person who generally wants to start regulating everything either, but the problem with putting the onus on young women to get educated is that it puts the onus on young women to get educated--and we (as a global culture) don't really spend a lot of time, effort, or money on helping girls decode the images they see.  In other words, I agree that we need to give girls the tools to make sense of media images etc, but I also think that designers, photographers, PEOPLE IN GENERAL should do their part in wanting to create healthy images.   So it's not like they get to put out whatever they want, and then educators (like me?) and girls need to scramble to understand and save themselves.

My other fave part of the news report:

"France's health minister has said he wants a working group to assess the impact that images of skinny models have on young women."

Hmmm.... gee. How are they going to do that? I mean, as we've all been talking about on this Skinny Model thread it's not a simple direct correlation ie Skinny Models On Paris Runway= Specific Number of New Cases of Anorexia Per Year. In my opinion, the images and messages created by parading these models down a runway and paying them big fat salaries (way bigger than say a high school teacher or a computer technician...jobs that require actual skills and talents) contribute to a larger message about which qualities in women are valuable and worth compensating. And THAT'S where the problem lies.   

So how do you quantify how much a photo of a skinny model on the runway actually influences a girl? Again in my opinion, you'd need to talk to every girl out there, to decode how she feels about herself when looking at media images, find out how much she understands about how those images get created, THEN determine if she has positive role models, influences and activities in her life that help offset all the messages she's getting regarding the importance of thinness, fame, beauty etc....

Wait a minute.  That sounds a lot like my job.  Alors les francais, if you're looking for an American expert on this topic then call me up! Je suis disponible et je parle francais!

"Vanity Sizing" (ie a 6 is not a 6 is not a 6)

Back when Miss Leslie Bibb was just a teen on a show called Popular, I was an editor at a very cool magazine called Jump ("For girls who dare to be real").  It was published by the same company that prints Shape, and competed with Seventeen, YM, Teen People etc for readers.  Only it was way better. (Sadly, it folded in 2000.. .but that's another story)

Anyway, one of the articles I wrote for Jump was titled "Size Doesn't Matter" and it was all about how a a girl might be a size 4 in one brand of clothing, yet a 6 or an 8 in another.  That's because some companies purposefully change the names of their sizes because they think it will appeal to consumers.  (IE, a 30 inch waist may have once been the basis for a size medium.  But heck, let's start calling everything with a 30 inch waste a size SMALL!  Then more people will want to buy our clothes because when they wear them, they'll feel thin.  And thin is good!)  Get it?

I've posted a scan of the article here in case you feel like giving it the once over....
But what I really want to do is relate all this to Spain's announcement that it's going to try to standardize women's sizing....

Because according to news reports out today, Spain's government has reached an agreement with major fashion designers to "standardize women's clothing sizes with the aim of promoting a healthier image."

Ay Mami that's good news!  Especially since the designers on board are Mango (cheap and trendy... a la H&M), El Corte Ingles (THE department store of Spain) and ZARA  (um.... famous everywhere!)

Another cool componant of the program? It will also prevent participating companies from using window displays featuring clothes smaller than a European size 38 (10 in Britain, 8 in the United States). Dude, I can dig it.

And check out this sane quote: 

"It is not reasonable for a modern and advanced society to establish stereotypes of beauty that are far removed from the social reality of a community. It is everyone's commitment that beauty and health go hand in hand," Health Minister Elena Salgado said at a signing ceremony Tuesday.

Hola Elena..., we should hang out some time.

And one more cool bit:

The Health Ministry's program aims to end a situation in which a woman who buys a size 40 dress from one designer may not fit in a size 40 garment from another designer. The ministry said the differences sometimes lead women to feel compelled to lose weight.

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Very, very interesting.  Not sure how all this will play out.... or if this is the best course of action....but I'm happy to see someone doing something at a high level on this important issue. 

What do YOU think?

Audrey, All Made Up and Booksmart

Justina Chen Headley, a fellow Young Adult author (check out her book Nothing But the Truth [and a few white lies]) , colleague of mine, and all around cool girl has started a really great blog for authors and aspiring writers.  It's called BookSmart, and it aims to help writers market their books, get the word out etc.

It's totally worth checking out if you dream of writing a book some day and wonder jussst how you're going to make it to the New York Times Bestseller List (um, if you find out how, you owe me an email), or if you wonder what the book business is about.  Lively posts, funny comments, and yeah, a mini interview with me today about how I've gone about making sure as many people as possible know about All Made Up: A Girl's Guide to Seeing Through Celebrity Hype and Celebrating Real Beauty.

Justina also has a new book coming out this year called Girl Overboard--so if you're looking for inspiring gifts to give a teen girl... something with positive role models that's also cool (and a GREAT alternative to the whole Gossip Girl, A List phenom) then you should most definitely check out her work.  You will not be disappointed.

Oh yeaaaah, and Justina and I were both featured in the cool Girls Inc interview last spring when our books first hit the shelves.  So there's more dirt HERE!

Young women and diet aids

Sorry for not posting yesterday.. I literally couldn't find anything I wanted to  comment on.

(Not sure if that means I'm getting soft... or if things are looking up out there... but either way.  Here's some news:)

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According to the University of Minnesota's Project EAT (Eating Among Teens), the use of diet pills in high school-aged females went from 7.5 to 14.2 percent between 1999 to 2004. Researchers also found: "By 19 or 20 years old, 20 percent of the females in the study used diet pills....21.9 percent of females use 'very unhealthy weight control behaviors,' which include laxatives, vomiting, skipping meals or diet pills."