"mrselliotnightray:  This is from the March 2012 issue of Seventeen magazine. The contest, basically, is to showcase a girl that has done astounding things. (Like raising money for research on eating disorders, like said in the article.) However, they have to be pretty. Excuse me, what? Let me try and decipher this for a moment. If a girl that isn't your definition of 'pretty' does something beyond amazing, and is running against a girl that does something fairly amazing but is pretty… then the pretty girl wins? Seventeen always seems to be promoting ""being you"" and ""going for your dreams"". Well they sure are doing asplendid job with that pitch, now aren't they? This is putting the notion into the reader's head that no matter how incredible they are, if they aren't pretty they won't be on the covers of magazines for their achievements. I've noticed, though, that this doesn't really seem to apply that much to men! Frankly, I've seem somebutt-ass uglymen on magazine covers, and you eventually find out their some wicked-smart scientist or inventor. But the rule about being attractive doesn't apply to them? And,Seventeen, let's be honest here. You're going to Photoshop the winner anyway, who cares of they aren't ""pretty""? You can turn them into all the other aliens in a few clicks of a mouse. You don't need brains for that. Which, apparently, doesn't matter in your contest either. I'm a 16-year-old girl wanting to minor in media studies. I'm practically seventeen, I know what is going through those girl's minds when they read that. And it's nothing good. We better stop making girls think that beauty is priority over brains. I see first-hand how the new forms of media impact young minds — heck, I'm one of them. And I know the media is well aware of how they're manipulating the minds of their viewers. It's terrible on either side of the equation."
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