Petition Sparks Changes in Seventeen Magazine

[Frank W. Baker]

In May, 14-year-old Julia Bluhm of Waterville, ME decided that she was tired of listening to her ballet classmates complain about their bodies, which weren’t always as rail-thin or clear-skinned as those of the retouched models in their favorite magazines. So Bluhm, a member of SPARK (an organization that aims to end the sexualization of girls in media), started a petition on Change.org to ask Seventeen magazine to print one unaltered photo spread a month. And after collecting nearly 85,000 signatures, staging a demonstration outside of Seventeen’s New York offices, launching a Twitter campaign, and meeting with editor in chief Ann Shoket, the teen magazine finally listened. Here is how the story played in AdWeek  and CNN.