Reviews
PTC review: 'Media has a tremendous influence in shaping how individuals think about the world; and this influence is even greater over children. One of the most harmful, and certainly saddest, examples is the influence which the fashion industry has over young girls. Incessantly bombarded by sexualized imagery and messages direct and indirect encouraging promiscuous behavior and telling them that “to be beautiful, you must look a certain way,” today’s girls are increasingly subject to depression, low self-esteem, body image disorders and even dangerous behaviors like bulimia.
Cover Girl Culture: Awakening the Media Generation exposes the deceptive imagery and practices of teen-targeted fashion magazines like Teen Vogue, Elle, Marie Claire and others. A feature-length documentary by filmmaker Nicole Clark – herself a former Elite International fashion model – Cover Girl Culture explores how the worlds of fashion, modeling, advertising and celebrity impact our teens and young women. Featuring interviews with teen fashion magazine editors, the film compares the supposedly “healthy” and “joyful” images presented by their models with the pictures run in the magazines themselves. It also offers – and encourages – conversations among actual teen girls about the implications of such imagery, helps them to consider the ways in which fashion and advertising attempt to manipulate them, and encourages girls to reject the misogynistic messages in the media they consume and embrace themselves as they are.
There is no harmful content in Cover Girl Culture. Many examples of models and magazine photo layouts are shown, and some of these show young girls in lingerie or sexy poses; but the purpose of these images is educational, to demonstrate how the fashion and advertising industries sell sex and distorted body image to our children, in the cause of teaching girls to understand and fight against such objectification. All of the pictures shown are images from actual fashion magazines, and none contain explicit nudity or sex.
Because of this film’s brilliant expose of the harmful influences of media, and for the ways in which it encourages teens to reject such influences, the Parents Television Council is proud to award Cover Girl Culture with the PTC Seal of ApprovalTM. The PTC recommends this DVD for every parent of a young or teenage girl, and for children over the age of eight.' - Christoper Gildemeister, Parent's Television Council
Press - Miami Beach: Plum TV interview:
"Reminds others loudly that a true cover girl is one who is full of strength, power, confidence and compassion, not a vapid, thinned out display model used to sell self-loathing to the masses" - Dr. Robyn Silverman. body Image Expert, Coach & Author, "Good Girls Don't Get Fat"
"A Powerful teaching tool to deconstruct and uplift...poignantly gives the girls' eye view of the collateral damage in this fight for the hearts and minds of children's perception of their OWN self-worth." - Amy Jussel, Executive Directo of Shaping Youth.
~ Chosen by USC's Intellectual Property Clinic & Stanford Cyberlaw Clinic for pro-bono work with FAIR USE LAW (3.5 yrs). Lead by Professor J. Urban.
“Cover Girl Culture exemplified my feelings and fears about the media, and how the outside culture of television and advertisement affects my life. The movie made me realize how much i allow our current day culture to influence my life, making me want to "step outside the box." Cover Girl Culture was a moving movie and I think every teenager should experience a movie pertaining to this topic, to show how the media alters our perception of beauty, and that everyone is special in their "own way."” -Aliya Appelbaum, 15 yrs old, NY
High School Teacher, Ontario CANADA
Ms. Clark’s documentary Cover Girl Culture and her speaking engagement had a profound effect on my co-ed senior level writing class. While these young adults were not naïve to the manipulative practices of the media, they were thoroughly engaged and shocked to learn the extent of the propaganda. As well, they were enraptured with Ms. Clark’s personal anecdotes of her experiences as a model in what the young consider to be a glamourous industry.
After the speaking engagement, I offered my class three topics on which to write a personal essay. The majority wrote about Ms. Clark’s documentary and speaking engagement and how, even as young adults with blossoming futures, they still struggle with their self-image. During the presentation, one student remarked that, “[she] can’t win because even though [she knows] she will never be like that person on the cover, [she] still tries.” This same student revealed in her essay that she has been and continues to battle an eating disorder. The struggle for her is constant as she cannot escape the images of perfection in the media; she was thankful that Ms. Clark reminded her that the media is only concerned with just that – image- as opposed to reality. I WILL WIN is how she ended her essay which revealed to me the importance of Ms. Clark’s message. - Emma Cooper
Review from Women Make Movies:
"COVER GIRL CULTURE pairs images of girls and women in television and print ads with footage from the catwalks and celebrity media. Clark is given rare access to women editors from major magazines like Teen Vogue and ELLE, who provide a shocking defense of the fashion and advertising worlds. The film juxtaposes these interviews with revealing insights from models, parents, teachers, psychologists, body image experts and most importantly, the heartfelt expressions of girls themselves on how they feel about the media that surrounds them.
With an insider's view, the film addresses issues like today's increasingly invasive media, heightened advertising to tweens, the sexualization of girls, and how consumer culture serves to disempower young women. Not only examining how advertising and the cult of celebrity have deeply and negatively impacted teens and young women, COVER GIRL CULTURE also offers solutions for how to educate young women to think critically about the media." - Women Make Movies www.wmm.com
"A powerful and unrelenting critique of the marketing of sexiness to young women and even little girls."
Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Cornell University
MOLI REVIEW: By Celeste Fraser Delgado/MOLI
Documentary takes on the images aimed at young women!
When I was 13, I was a huge fan of Seventeen magazine. My friends and I used to line up covers featuring our favorite model, Phoebe Cates, and vote on our favorite shot. I even went to a modeling workshop hosted by the magazine in my hometown of Cleveland. I remember the speaker telling us that to model we had to wear a size eight or a size ten. The average model back then wore a size eight.
Nearly 30 years later, models must starve themselves down to a size 0 or 1. The teens and tweens poring over magazine covers today face a much more daunting task if they attempt to look like the women and girls on those pages. That's the dilemma explored by former model Nicole Clark in her documentary, Cover Girl Culture: Awakening the Media Generation.
Last Saturday, I moderated a panel on the documentary following its world premiere during the Women's International Film Festival in Miami. As a former editor of a men's magazine that featured beautiful women on the cover, I'd seen the production team digitally manipulate the models' bodies: thinning faces and thighs and even, in one case I'll never forget, augmenting the curve of one young woman's behind.
Clark does not focus on the manipulation of women's bodies, but of our minds. She interviews a number of editors from Teen Vogue and Elle Magazine about their policies in presenting images of young women. She also quizzes a host of experts on teen psychology for their views on the image of these images on young women. This commentary alternates with interviews with a group of teen girls, who alternately reject the images presented to themselves and proclaim their own desire to be models.
Cover Girl Culture can be funny, especially when the editors claim they don't show girls who are "too skinny" while Teen Vogue pages featuring emaciated models roll or when they pretend only to present good role models while we see Teen Vogue spreads of Lindsay Lohan and a post-lock up Paris Hilton. It also can be heartbreaking, as when a lovely little girl says she would like to be a model, "I don't feel that comfortable with how I look down here." And it's disturbing, as image after image of sexualized teens and pre-teens flash across the screen.
After the showing, the audience was fired up. Women over 60 spoke up about their shock at seeing the changes from the ideals of their youth to today and girls in their teens shared their determination not to let these images sway them. A middle-school teacher declared that the documentary should be shown in schools across the country. Filmmaker Clark, standing proudly at the front of the cinema, agreed. She's currently seeking national distribution for the film. Watch for it at a school near you.
MOLI
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