It’s Day One of the Keep It Real Challenge! Join us today on Twitter (and on Facebook if you don’t have a Twitter!) asking magazines to keep it real in the pages of their magazines.
What does it mean to Keep It Real? Here’s what we think:
- Representing TRUE authenticity and diversity. When we met with Seventeen, they claimed to be excelling at both of these things, but as this post from our partners at FAAN Mail shows, they’re actually not. (Surprised?) Showing a few brown girls isn’t diversity, it’s tokenism.
- Appreciating women & their actual bodies, not just digitized, CGI’d versions of them—total body reshaping, skin lightening, limb lengthening, etc. are unacceptable practices, and when magazines continue them, they’re sending the message that women’s bodies are literal objects to be reshaped and rebuilt at the whims of editors.
- DOING something about it! We know that these magazines are building unattainable, white-washed images of perfection that harm women and girls, but not engaging with the problem won’t fix it—it’ll just make things worse.
What does Keeping It Real mean to you? Tell us over the next three days: today on Twitter, tomorrow in your blogs, and Friday through pictures on Instagram, Flickr, or Facebook. Join us!
Do it everyone! I’m vlogging tomorrow and I hope you all get involved as well!
