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April 2010 REAL BEAUTY IS - honors Nicole for Cover Girl Culture!
"We think Nicole is a true force of Real Beauty. She is working tirelessly to shed some light on the harmful effect our media has on shaping our sense of beauty." -- read more here
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~ 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.
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.
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