by Maya Brown Last month, I was lucky enough to see Gloria Steinem speak at Colby College. Her talk was beyond fabulous, and really inspired me as a young activist and a SPARKteam member. It’s hard for me to pick out pieces to highlight because the whole talk was great, but there were three things she [...]
In this edition of our Teen Vogue Homework, Izzy, Maya, and Julia got together to go through the August 2012 issue of Teen Vogue, marking “non-diverse” images (or images of white, thin women) with “diverse” images (images of women of color or non-thin women), and at the end of their journey, here’s what they’d found: 110 [...]
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 [...]
We’ve done our homework–now it’s time for Teen Vogue to do theirs
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 [...]