by Maya Brown This past summer, fabulous SPARKTeam members Emma and Carina wrote a Change.org petition and staged a mock fashion show outside of Teen Vogue headquarters, asking the magazine to follow the lead of Seventeen and pledge to stop photoshopping the bodies and faces of girls in their magazine and commit to showing diversity…
by Maya Brown In a world where we are constantly bombarded with images of women on stripper poles, girls on diets, and babies in heels, it’s easy to get wrapped up in all the bad stuff and forget about who we’re doing all of this for. After watching TV or looking through magazines, it can…
By Maya Brown It was that time of year again: I slowly awoke on a bright Sunday morning a couple weeks ago, lurched out of bed, and grabbed my laptop. Quickly navigating to Facebook, I immediately found what I was looking for: the pages and pages of prom photos from the night before. Later in…
Recently, for my English class we had to write an essay about the “Power of a Word.” While a lot of my other friends were writing about words like “Hope” and “Love,” I wrote about “Sexualization.” Since I’m really passionate about SPARK and feminism, I figured writing about it would be easy, plus maybe I…
By Maya Brown This has been a busy week here at SPARK! Hot on the heels of our fantastic meeting with LEGO is a new petition (gotta love ‘em) started by SPARKteam girl activist Julia Bluhm. This fab 14 year old is calling out Seventeen Magazine on their overwhelming usage of photoshop. Julia is asking…
By Maya Brown So the other day I went with my friends to see The Adventures of Tintin at the movies. On my way out the door my mom told me she had heard that the author of the Tintin comic books was really sexist, so I went with a mind to watch out for…
By Maya Brown Her eyes are crazed, her tan glows under the florescent lights, and her hair springs from its tight bun as she pushes past everyone to land that first spot in line. Every year millions of American women make their way to stores at 5 a.m., midnight — even 9pm the day before…
The media doesn’t represent us–so we’re making our own media. We’re sick of media that shows women and girls as weak, catty, looks-obsessed, boy-crazy objects of pleasure, so the SPARKteam is joining Miss Representation in demanding media that fairly, fully, and accurately represents women. For every 1000 videos submitted, the folks at the Miss Representation campaign…