Let’s talk about it: Halloween 2021. A “post-mortem,” if you will. What did you see this year as far as costumes representing women and girls*, racially diverse characters, etc.? Good? Bad? Ugly? Is anything getting better for representation during Halloween? Please comment below, and let us know your city and state/province, what you saw, and… Continue Reading →
Fifteen-year-old Halley started crying. Through her tears, she confessed to me, “I was so obsessed about if I looked good enough and how many Likes I had, that I made it my whole life. I would come out of my room after scrolling through Instagram and TikTok, angry at the world because I was depressed… Continue Reading →
Photo by Taan Huyn on Unsplash A sex educator for teens talks about why being critical of “perfection” matters in our everyday social media lives. You pull out your phone to snap a selfie. You’re probably going to use a filter, right? Maybe your go-to filter is something simple that erases blemishes and brightens your… Continue Reading →
Part 2: Myth versus reality In my last post, I laid out how girls* are still objectified, judged, and put in boxes by our toxic media culture. We looked at the reasons that social media encourages girls to judge themselves and each other harshly. All of this points to an urgent need for media education… Continue Reading →
The first time I saw “Killing Us Softly,” Dr. Jean Kilbourne’s take-down of the toxic, dehumanizing culture that surrounds women in advertising, it was 1996. I was a naïve sophomore at the University of Michigan who had been raised, above all, to be pretty – with Victoria’s Secret catalog pages and Self magazine workouts pinned… Continue Reading →
2020 marks the 5-year anniversary of the #SayHerName campaign, and 6 years since the first #BlackLivesMatter call to action that would soon provoke global outcries and ignite a massive movement against violence and systemic racism towards Black people. Both of these movements were dreamed up, shaped, and brought to life by Black women, and by… Continue Reading →
Which part of Victoria’s Secret do I disdain most deeply? There’s the catalog! The fashion show. The website. The storefronts. All with their models with exactly the same body type — not the body type of most healthy women on the planet. It’s incredibly awful for girls’ development and women’s mental health, and harmful for… Continue Reading →
Let the girls tell it for themselves! We asked eighth graders at Julia Morgan School for Girls in Oakland, CA what they thought of their About-Face Education Into Action Lab.
We’re pretty excited over here at About-Face to share a brand-new video, “Digging In with About-Face”, where badass women sit on a couch, eat, laugh, and rant and rave about current media and culture issues.
