Have you heard about Dove’s campaign called Lets Make Girls Unstoppable? It aims to help girls build self esteem. I first heard about this on Access Hollywood’s morning show when Jess Weiner was a guest on the show. Please take six and half minutes to watch the clip from the show.
Listening, talking, sharing, and acting are all great ways to help girls learn about their own self esteem. Listen to the things they have to say, talk with them, share your experiences, and act on it don’t just talk about it. Everything these days impacts not just young girl but women and men of all ages. From social media, to billboards, to peers. With everything coming at us we have to be able to stop and think “what does this tell me I should do or think?” and then assess why that is a potential problem. How can we teach this to young people so that the cycle of questioning our own selves stops?
Access Hollywood did another segment on air brushing.and they actually had one of the hosts from the show do a photo shoot. They showed how the digitally manipulated the photos to make them “ad worthy.” I can’t find the video or the pictures from this for whatever reason but I can tell you that it was incredible the changes they were able to make to these pictures. If I hadn’t known otherwise I probably would have thought the before and after pictures were of two different people. This is what they do with every picture taken for advertisements or magazines or any other type of publication. It makes me rather sick and frustrated that we as a society feel the need to photoshop everything. Is natural beauty not so beautiful anymore? And then people have the nerve to wonder why their little girls go on crash diets and are constantly uncomfortable in their own bodies.
I find the Dove campaign to be a good one. Get parents and other adult figures involved in young people’s lives to keep them from drowning in their self esteem issues. But, more needs to be done within society as a whole to change the way we view beauty and images of the body.
Unruly Bodies 
As I watched the show, I felt really sad. I never had to grow up with that kind of mentality as a kid, I always watched cartoons and played with my brother and friends. I was always watching shows on Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network: I wasn’t that interested in my looks or appearance. I liked what you said about the use of photo shopping pics to sell to magazines. I find it strange that our society is wondering why young girls are getting so preoccupied with their body image while fashion magazines have images of stick-thin models on the cover! It makes me angry because I think that everyone is naturally beautiful and it’s a shame that we are being told that our “natural” body shape is not as good as these “model” bodies.