Beauty in a Tech-World

Cute, right? Adorable. Half smile, hair clip, golden locks and all, she's just too cute.

Little does she know what will meet her today. The media is waiting for her around the corner, on TV, at home, at school, telling her what to be, how to look, what to think about herself. As she gorws up, she'll read more, get out more, see more, and realize more inadequacies according to the media's perception of beauty. who knows if she'll be lucky and naturally adhere to that standard? Maybe she won't-- maybe she'll have cankles, a thyroid problem, or a slower metabolism and hate herself from seventh grade on. Maybe she'll take matters into her own hands and become one of these statistics:

-Nationwide, 12.3% of highschool students had gone without eating for 24 hours or more to lose weight or to keep from gaining weight during the last thirty days.

-6.2% of girls have vomited or taken laxatives to lose weight or to keep from gaining weight over the last 30 days.

-4% of college-aged women have bulimia. (SADD.org)

-12% of teenage boys use steroids (teenbodybuilding.com)

The people at DOVE (yep, the soap and doederant people) have launched a campaign to celebrate real beauty and expose the media's propagation of unhealthy and falsified perfection. (AWESOME.) The video above I pulled from YouTube; it's called "Onslaught."

I heard today in my Teaching of Writing class about a lesson plan a teacher develpoed in which the students watched this and other DOVe YouTube videos and responded to them in writing. This is writing from a place of passion. "Powerful stuff," the teacher, Suzie, said of the activity. Yeah! These teens deal with this everyday and have been for years, since they were this girl's age! There is and has been for some years a huge pressure on todays youth (girls AND boys) to be something they are not and do not need to be. Let them talk about it!

I love the idea of using YoutTube videos like this (and other thought-provoking clips) to encourage and inspire REAL writing in the classroom, something the students care enough about to really WRITE about, from the heart. (Might have to get past some schools banning of YouTube, but hopefully I will be thech-savy enough by then to bypass that business.) Use technology, YouTube, which students relate to very well, to talk to them about isses they relate to-- media influences, teen problems. Let them vent, rage, storm, cry out. Use something real and potent to them-- technology-- to get something real and potent from them-- writing.