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Women, Let's Embrace Aging and Our Bodies

By Crystal Ogar The sexualization of young girls and women begins at a very early age. But what happens when you get older? There's a suspicious trend that starts to arise as you go from being a young adult to an older woman -- the marketing of beauty and anti-aging products exclusively to women. I'm talking about products like Latisse to lengthen your eyelashes, because apparently you can't get older without losing a few and, surprisingly, tha...

Toddlers & Tiaras: The Quintessential Reason For SPARK

By Crystal Ogar Child beauty pageants just may be the most quintessential sexualization of young girls to be found. It has always been hard for me to sit through a full episode of Toddlers & Tiaras, but I decided to finally do it.  Beauty pageants have always creeped me out --  even after winning a church pageant myself when I was five-years-old. I hardly remember it, although the pictures were adorable. The idea of dressing young girls up ...

Not Ever Not Ever Not Ever

By Crystal Ogar There's a great campaign running in Scotland called “Not Ever.” It focuses on the rape culture and victim blaming. They have an amazing commercial on TV that features a woman at a bar with her friends and a man who says, "Check out her skirt, she's asking for it." The commercial then cuts to the same woman shopping for the new skirt when a saleslady approaches her and asks if she needs help. The woman then replies, "I'm going out...

Pulled Perfection

by Crystal Ogar I'm sure by now you've all heard about two makeup ads being pulled in the U.K. for being misleading and heavily photoshopped. Bravo. The ads were Maybelline's "wrinkle eraser" starring Christy Turlington and the other was Julia Roberts for L'Oreal make-up. Both stars look as close to perfection as a woman can be. Of course, the advertisements we see every single day are never actually the real thing. Models, actresses, and acto...

Maria Talks, Getting it right

By Crystal Ogar Once in awhile on the Internet you stumble across a gem and MariaTalks.com is a website that wholly fits that criteria. Maria Talks was developed by the AIDS Action Committee with funding from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. The website talks about sexual health, protection, sexual violence, contraception, pregnancy and STD information for teens and young adults--not to mention a section dedicated to GLBTQ people....

Oh Happy Day? Or Wedding Madness?

by Crystal Ogar We've all been guilty of loving them. That's right, I'm talking about reality wedding shows. Reality planning shows run the gamete and television channels that mostly cater to women are infected with them: Bridezilla, Platinum Weddings, and My Fair Wedding, and the list goes on...WE TV and Oxygen give us a total of six or seven television shows based on weddings alone. TLC and now the CW are also guilty of pushing wedding realit...

A Girl Scout Speaks Back

by Crystal Ogar Girl Scouts is an organization that is extremely important to me. Having been a Girl Scout for 11 years--exactly half of my life--it shocked me to read about the anti-abortion rights website targeting this organization. Two Texas teenagers named Tess and Sydney Volanski, started a website called “Speak Now: Girl Scouts” with the notion that the organization has an "anti-life, pro-abortion agenda." Personally, I find the idea tha...

The Girls of Ark Music Factory

By Crystal Ogar I'm sure by now all of you have seen the viral video Friday by Rebecca Black. No? Don’t bother. It’s produced by Ark Music Factory, a company that features auto-tuned, pre-teen girls against a back drop of poorly edited green screen images. Company Founder and CEO Patrice Wilson talks about keeping his music "clean and safe", which apparently also means the mild exploitation of young kids for his own publicity. Wilson, also ca...
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