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In case you missed it, a few weeks ago, two gay black South African men tied the knot at their 200-guest traditional wedding in KwaDukuza, the first of its kind in the old Zulu capital.

Love birds Tshepo Modisane and Thoba Sithole, both proudly Zulu and Tswana, have made their union a part of South Africa’s history by deciding to go public with their gay African traditional wedding ceremony, with a few twists:

In place of the customary lobolo (bride price or dowry), via which the husband customarily offer’s the wife’s family money and/or gifts, they’ve decided to opt for gender parity and, instead,  offer gifts to each of their families in thanks for raising them. They also plan to use the hyphenated version of both their last names, Sithole-Modisane, and are planning to start a family soon using a surrogate (though this report says they’ll be adopting.)

In the video report (below), the couple shares, “It’s against this idea that being gay is unAfrican… Being gay is as African as being black. We are a part of our culture. Thoba is Zulu and I’m Tswana. We’re rooted in our culture and very excited about it.”

On paper, South Africa boasts the friendliest constitution, which protects its lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) citizens from discrimination based on race, gender and sexual orientation. Yet, the country’s struggle to shift cultural attitudes towards acceptance for this marginalized group of people, especially in rural areas and townships, remains.

According to this Human Rights Watch report, “Black lesbians and transgender men in South African townships and rural areas face an overwhelming climate of discrimination and violence despite protections promised them in the country’s constitution.” It’s no wonder, then, that the mere optics of the “first gay traditional African wedding,” warrant its celebration as a historical milestone for gay Africans everywhere.

Denis Nzioka, founder and editor of Identity Kenya, a news organization covering sexual and gender minorities in Kenya, remarked in an interview, “The gay Zulu wedding was epic, if not pioneering. Having seen the video and photos and customs I was amazed at how the two mixed their love and celebrated it in an ‘African’ way.” And in response to what’s become a slogan amongst anti-gay African leaders, “Homophobia is unAfrican,” Nzioka insists that “the fact that two African men can fall in love and wed, despite a homophobic society that frowns on same-sex relationships counters what many Africans [have been] saying’.”

The Danger of a Single LGBT African (Male, Middle-Class, and Marriage-Focused) Story

Chimamanda Adichie, a celebrated Nigerian writer said in her famous TEDTalk, “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes, is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete.”

Hence, as the media continues to hail this single occurrence as a milestone, it becomes critical that supporters of the LGBTI African movement for equality consider this single narrative exists within the context of many others.

For instance, the video report states that the two gay black men are based in the metropolitan city of Johannesburg and are working professionals in the fields of financial services and IT. That’s not to imply they’ve been in any way exempt from experiencing the debilitating impact of societal discrimination–far from it; the effects of homophobia (compounded with racism, as the couple is black) on the livelihood of people presumed to be LGBTI can result in workplace discrimination, prejudice in health care, not to mention depression, anxiety, even suicide.

Still, there’s a huge difference between the experience of being a “regular looking” cisgender male employee, at a “Big Four” financial consulting firm, in a  fairly liberal city that boasts the largest gay pride in the country, versus the harsh reality of a trying to make ends meet in a poor township, while also fearing rape for being a lesbian, or murder for being an effeminate gay man.

In a piece written for a South African LGBT publication last year, the author shared comments from a young, black, gay-identified male, who disagreed with South Africa’s reputation as a progressive state (emphasis in bold added by me):

“When you have money, it’s quite easy to set yourself free from discrimination and danger,” Junior says. “Many of the white gay and lesbian people here can afford to reside in a safe and progressive area, but the majority of us live in townships. In openly embracing your sexuality there, you run the risk of getting abused, raped or murdered.” Junior’s statement emphasizes that gay and lesbian equality in South Africa is strongly mediated by race and class, and that sexual freedom is often available to those who have the racial and literal capital to afford them.

In light of the struggles of LGBTI Africans, the desire to celebrate any kind of progress – especially when it comes in the form of a gleeful Zulu wedding – is understandable; the vibrant ceremony presented a sharp contrast to the media’s grim and, at times, gruesome depiction of violent homophobia on the African continent. However, it is dangerous to assign wide-sweeping gains to all LGBTI Africans based on the perceived victory of a few. 

What of gay Africans who view marriage as the least of their problems – young people, for instance, who have been disowned by their families and, above all, seek a stable alternative to homelessness? What about transgender women who experience rejection (and violence) from both gay and straight communities alike? And lesbians–forced to live in fear of so-called “corrective rape”–will marriage mean social acceptance for them, too?

If we’ve learned anything from criticism of the same sex marriage equality movement in the U.S., it’s that too much emphasis on marriage as a pathway to acceptance could only end up benefiting a small segment of the LGBTI community (e.g. gay men, or members of the middle class–while the groups most at-risk e.g. women, youth, transgender people, etc.–are likely to go unheard, and even unfunded.

A Nigerian lesbian activist (who prefers to remain anonymous) remarked on the unwillingness of many global human rights funders to support ‘less popular’ LGBTI programs:

“If you’re not doing HIV/AIDS work, forget it. Funders are mainly interested in gay men because of that. With women, we are not seen as much as being affected by these issues. And there is no research on Nigerian gay women to suggest otherwise, so we are at a disadvantage. Our organization provides a safe haven for lesbians and bisexual women to be out, be themselves, meet other women. We organize social events, movie nights, you name it. I know it is saving lives. But the funders don’t seem to feel that way because we are not in the news.”

Nigeria’s recent move to further criminalize homosexuality has no doubt sent even more LGBTI Nigerians back into the closest, making the need for safe social spaces even more critical. In this country, a publicly staged wedding is punishable by imprisonment for up to 14 years, and in the north, death. Hence, before the media declares the gay Zulu wedding as progress for the LGBTI African movement, it must ask itself, “What does progress for LGBTI people in other African countries (or even different groups of Africans within South Africa) look like?”

LGBTI African Activists Propose a Multi-Country, Multi-Issue Approach to Advocacy

Florence Xhaxas, founder and director of the gender justice organization, Young Feminist Movement, Namibia, warns against zero-ing in on the struggles – and progress – of a single African country at the expense of others:

“As much as I feel [the wedding video] is great for South Africans, the feeling isn’t shared by all LGBT people across the continent. The truth is that [South Africans] have mastered the art of amplifying their voices and documenting cases.”

To Xhaxas’ point, while stories from South Africa and Uganda continue to shape western media’s narrative about the LGBTI African movement, other countries experiencing their own share of hardships and progress go unnoticed. For instance, the murder of Ugandan LGBT rights activist David Kato sparked global outrage while the brutal torture and slaying of a gay Tanzanian community organizer, Maurice Mjomba barely received attention. Similarly, while South African women are perpetually victimized via “corrective rape” coverage, uprisings by lesbians in other countries, such as Namibia, and Malawi, aren’t likely to make headlines.

Says Xhaxas, “How can we improve documentation [in other countries]? How can we make sure that media hype is created for all the struggles we go through? And hold other states in the lime light of the global community’s responsibility to protect all citizens?”

To be sure, the cultural significance of the gay Zulu wedding video — the power of media, itself–cannot be ignored; LGBTI Africans all over the world were able to see their relationships affirmed in the media – a rarity. Denis Nzioka puts it best when he says, “Greater positive media portrayal of LGBT Africans has been proven to change people’s perception. As one of my close friend lesbian friend once quipped ‘Kenya’s often mild acceptance of homosexuality can be attributed, in some small way, to two persons – Will & Grace.’”

Given the impact a single video has had on recent conversations about homosexuality in Africa, among Africans at that, it goes without saying that proponents of LGBTI equality on the African continent, should more intentionally support LGBTI African media advocacy organizations and initiatives – the writers, journalists, digital media producers, and artists that risk backlash for daring to critique the world as it is, while imagining and inspiring the future as it could be.

Jabu Pereira, founder and executive of director of Iranti, a media advocacy organization based in South Africa emphasizes the importance (and threat) of LGBTI Africans using media to influence change:

“We must end the ongoing ignorance of states who continue to encourage systemic violence, we simply can’t afford this. We must not stop documenting the human rights violations we experience as LGBTI persons in Africa.. even when we are threatened…”

The media frenzy around this milestone should in no way serve as a distraction from supporting less visible, less “newsworthy” forms of activism. It should, in fact, galvanize allies to support more LGBT African organizations across the continent – not just South Africa or Uganda – that work on behalf of constituencies who fight for the most at-risk of their communities, and whose victories and milestones comprise the mundane of daily survival.

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by Chanel Dubofsky

My copy of The Feminine Mystique has a smell that I associate with trashy romance novels. I haven’t opened it in years, probably since I read it for a giant paper I wrote in college, about Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, confessional poetry and the domestic trap of the 1960’s. If you haven’t read it, here’s the deal (but you should read it): Friedan interrogates “the problem that has no name”, which is the misery of women living in material comfort who have husbands and children.

In short, women are told their entire lives that they will and must find fulfillment exclusively in their roles as a homemaker, wife, and mother. At the end of the book, Friedan discusses the importance of shifting our thinking around femininity, fulfillment, education and activism.

The book scared the hell out of me. I read it in my dorm lounge, and at the risk of being dramatic, my reaction was probably proportional to that of people when they saw “The Exorcist” during its original run in theatres. Whatever hallmates happened to be around were pulled into the lounge and asked, “Can you believe this shit??”

The idea of not having a choice in whether or not you got married and had children was terrifying. (I was not yet necessarily critical of marriage as an institution, but I was heading there). What was perhaps the most distressing about the book was how women were made to think of themselves as martyrs to the causes of wifedom and motherhood, suppressing other desires and needs that made them full humans.

This year marks the 50^th anniversary of the book’s publication, and there’s been various and assortedconversation around it. How far has feminism come? Have we accomplished anything? Are things better? (You know, not vague questions at all.)

It’s easy to blow off the book as not being relevant. For a lot of women, it never was. One of the things we’ve learned since the Feminine Mystique is that feminism is futile if it’s only a movement for white, upper-middle class women, which is unfortunately how it’s presented in the book. Feminism is still struggling with this, and we’ll continue to do so as long as white privilege remains a reality. Identifying as a feminist doesn’t mean you understand the concept of intersectionality, and as far as I’m concerned, a movement without that isn’t capable of forward motion.

I would also argue that while (most) white, economically privileged women are not expected to go right from college to their husband as they were in the era of the mystique, the idea that women are full human beings remains a cognitive challenge.

We’re still expected to want husbands and babies, to devote some part of our energy and creativity to planning our weddings.  We can’t be trusted to make decisions about our own bodies because we’re too stupid, too sexual, too frenetic, too fragile, too female.  Men are still supposed to be the answer, the panacea. The notion of “choice” feminism allows us to assign the title “feminist” to  whatever decisions we make, no matter how toxic to ourselves and other women, or how much they perpetuate systems of oppression that feminism (should) be actively working against.

Things are still broken. Some things are better, for some people. It’s important to acknowledge progress, of course, and to recognize when we are so battle weary that we can’t see it.  But things are also more complicated. Friedan’s book can be an instruction manual for a revolution, to be used as a measuring stick, a warning, and a magnifying glass.

This post originally appeared at Gender Focus.

By Roxanne Krystalli

As the calls for action issued on International Women’s Day suggest, there is indeed a great need for programs that seek to understand and meet the needs of women and girls worldwide who experience the effects of poverty, armed conflict, or discrimination in different ways than men.

One of the common misconceptions about gender-related work and advocacy is that gender and “women” are synonymous, interchangeable terms. However, as Dr. Carol Cohn writes in her recently-published collection, Women & Wars, “gender is, at its heart, a structural power relation. Just as colonialism, slavery, class, race, and caste are all systems of power, so is gender.”

It is, therefore, becoming critically important to complement the many efforts to serve women worldwide with an endeavor to better understand gender dynamics at large and respond to the needs to which they give rise.

Performing a nuanced gender analysis requires asking earnest questions about its value and dispelling some myths surrounding it. Simply put, there are three premises that underscore a gender analysis: First of all, “men,” “women,” “boys,” and “girls” are not monolithic categories that can describe a universal experience shared by people who share a sex; rather, gender is a fluid, dynamic, ever-involving system of power relations that need to be examined in the context of race, class, ethnicity, and other markers of identity.

Secondly, gender as a lens affects individuals’ experiences of poverty, armed conflict, civil resistance, or any form of struggle. Understanding the gender parameters of these experiences is critical for crafting effective responses to them, as Dyan Mazurana, Prisca Benelli, Huma Gupta, and Peter Walker highlight in this Feinstein Center report on sex and age-disaggregated data. Divorcing gender from the fields of international development, conflict management, humanitarian response, or policy-making is neither feasible nor desirable, as it will paint an incomplete picture of the effects of our actions and impact.

Thirdly, performing a gender analysis is a skill and, like all skills, it has to be learned. As Cynthia Enloe writes in the foreword to Women and Wars,  ”gender analysis is a skill. It’s not a passing fancy, it’s not a way to be polite. And it’s not something one picks up casually, on the run. One doesn’t acquire the capacity to do useful gender analysis simply because one is “modern”, “loves women,” “believes in equality, or “has daughters.” One has to learn how to do it, practice doing it, be candidly reflective about one’s shortcomings, try again.”

In the spirit of developing this skill, then, here are some questions to consider when performing a gender analysis of a policy we scrutinize, an action we advocate, or a position we support:

1. Where are the women and men in the data and in the story?

“Where are the women?” is one of Enloe’s favorite questions, stemming from a need to interrogate data, whether in press reports, academic papers, or policy documents, about their gender parameters. Her query can extend beyond women to motivate us to ask how the proposed policy or action may differentially affect people of all genders. Have the authors or advocates taken gender into account? What roles do men and women fulfill in the narrative? What power, if any, are they assigned? How are their strengths, needs, and vulnerabilities accounted for, if at all? And if the data is gender-blind, i.e., if the data has not been collected with an eye on gender differences and disaggregation, how can we correct that?

2. Which gender assumptions does the narrative reinforce and challenge? 

In gender-related advocacy, particularly in relation to women in developing countries or conflict-affected areas, we sometimes fall into the stereotypes we seek to combat. It is of paramount importance to question our own inferences on strength, power, and vulnerability, rather than – for example – portray women and girls exclusively as victims and men and boys as perpetrators of violence. As Neil Andersson states, moving beyond the paradigm of “victims and villains” and respecting the agency of the individuals and communities we seek to serve is an integral component of gender-related work and advocacy. This requires us to be mindful of everything from our narratives and diction to our international development initiatives and fundraising campaigns.

3. Whom should we be engaging in the conversation? 

A gender analysis is not the domain of “gender specialists” or “gender experts” alone; it is not only relevant to women, it does not unfold in opposition to or competition with men, and it is not exclusively applicable to those who work on gender-related issues. If it is to be a successful endeavor, a gender analysis needs to become part of the thinking and operation of sectors ranging from academia to government and journalism to advocacy. It starts with asking questions about the differential effects of policies and actions on people of all genders, and with a determination to find, collect, and highlight the data and stories that showcase these experiences. It requires engaging with critique, resistance, or lack of understanding of the value of this process or the system by which to implement it.

This International Women’s Day, let’s think about gender in a broader sense, as a dynamic system of power relations and as a lens through which to examine, critique, and understand the policies we advocate and systems of power of which we are a part.

This post originally appeared at PolicyMic. 

By Jina Moore

This week, the American Congress finally resolved its squabbles and brought itself to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act.  It was a fight, as many others will tell you.

But there’s another battle still to fight, and that’s how we talk about violence against women.

On Thursday, TIME magazine published a photo essay by Sara Naomi Lewkowicz.  The essay began as a project about a woman named Maggie and her boyfriend, Shane.  One night, an argument escalated to physical assault as the photographer was taking pictures.

The internet went crazy, blaming Sara for not trying to stop the violence — even though she called 911.  Even though her presence probably kept Maggie safer than she might otherwise be, based on what Shane was screaming as he beat her.  Even though the police are using Sara’s images to prosecute Shane.

At Salon, I write a seemingly deep collective need to blame everyone but the abuser for the abuse that happened that night.  Here’s a sample:

Many of us are familiar with the phrase “blame the victim,” and there’s no shortage of that in the comments, at Time, on Sara’s essay. Here’s a sampling of the ideas you’ll find there: Maggie, the beaten girlfriend, should have seen this coming. Maggie stays because she likes it. Good riddance, Maggie was cheating on her then-estranged husband anyway … etc. In classic form, one insists of Maggie, “She is not the victim. She is the perpetrator.”

If there’s a single thing about which the critics shouting about Maggie and Sara in Time’s comment section seem to agree, it’s this: The only adult in the house during the assault who isn’t responsible for the violence is the man committing it.

And at the Atlantic, I ask why on earth the cover story in the latest TIME magazine, about the trial of South African sports hero Oscar Pistorius for the fatal shooting of his girlfriend, talks about everything — race, class, wealth, inequality, sports, iconography, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission – except domestic violence.

[TIME] says that you can’t understand the Pistorius shooting — Pistorius denies murder — if you don’t understand Cape Town. And class. And wealth disparity. And race. And sports. And — of course — Apartheid.

All of these things combine in Perry’s story to explain a privileged white man’s fear of an imagined assailant which, according to his defense, led him to shoot his privileged white girlfriend. The only thing that doesn’t seem to merit inquiry in this American banner publication — ironically, published within 24 hours of the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act — is domestic violence.

You’d have thought I’d have exhausted myself, but one thing I’m still thinking about: When is domestic violence treated, and tracked, as a criminal issue, and when it’s treated, and tracked, as a public health issue, and what differences might that make?

Weigh in, world.

This post was originally posted at jinamoore.com. Photo credit: Alex Dram on Flickr, under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND-2.0)

By Jessica Critcher

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to go a whole day without feeling angry about misogyny. That day is not today.

Of all the ridiculous things said at the Oscars, I find myself most upset at Seth MacFarlane’s “Boobs” song. It’s like a splinter in my heel: it hurts and I can’t stop picking at it. The fact that I’ve already been told, in the nicest way possible, to calm down about it ties the whole thing up in a nice, sexist bow.

Where do I even start?

MacFarlane sang about having seen several actresses’ breasts in films. That was the entire joke: “We saw your boobs. In that movie that we saw, we saw your boobs.” He then lists specific films in which actresses, most of them present, appeared topless, except for Jennifer Lawrence, of whom he says, “We haven’t seen Jennifer Lawrence’s boobs at all.”

Apparently those are the only two relevant categories for women at the academy awards: those whose breasts we have seen and enjoyed and those whose breasts we haven’t. Maybe that has something to do with why only one woman has ever won Best Director.

The cheeky, adolescent, boys-will-be-boys tone of the song is played off as if it’s supposed to be a compliment. Angelina Jolie’s breasts, MacFarlane says, “made us feel excited and alive.” But whether it’s a famous man with a microphone on television or a stranger yelling at us from a street corner, women are constantly reminded that our bodies are public property – not our own, but belonging to and existing for men.

Even grammatically, the phrase “We saw your boobs” is problematic. It makes viewers the subject of the sentence and ignores the fact that these women have any sort of agency, phrasing it instead as if viewers were peeping without these women’s consent.

But exposing one’s breasts on film isn’t unequivocally good, either. The double standard would never allow that. It is apparently possible to do this in too many films, as he reminded Kate Winslet, listing off several films in which she appears topless, adding “and whatever you’re shooting right now.”

There was also a cheap dig at Scarlett Johansson, saying we saw her boobs not on the big screen, but on our mobile phones. I couldn’t help but make the connection to women being blackmailed with naked photos on the internet, or the recent trend of revenge porn. He has seen their breasts, he can see them anytime he wants, and he doesn’t let us forget.

Another disturbing thing about this song is that the films listed are serious dramas for which many of the actresses were critically praised. Several of the breasts MacFarlane delights in having seen were exposed in the context of rape or assault in the films. Boys Don’t Cry in particular is about a trans man who is beaten, raped and murdered. I fail to find anything hilarious about that, whether or not we saw Hilary Swank topless.

Do breasts in that context make MacFarlane feel equally “excited and alive”? The subject matter of the films and the acting those women did was deemed totally irrelevant because they have breasts. Even a serious actress like Meryl Streep is not above pervy ridicule, because Seth MacFarlane saw her breasts in Silkwood, twenty years ago.

The first time I saw the song, I was horrified at the reactions the women seemed to have at being mentioned by name. Hollywood demands that these women show their breasts, and then ridicules them when they do.

A few people from the Uphold Patriarchy committee chimed in to point out that the performance (and the reactions) were pre-recorded, and it wasn’t “real” sexism, but all in good fun. (Seriously, why can’t you feminists ever have any fun?) The fact that this skit was pre-recorded doesn’t make any of my previous concerns less relevant. That actually makes things worse.

Seth MacFarlane, jackass that he may be, is not the problem here, but a gross symptom. He didn’t crash the otherwise respectful Oscars and steal the mic to make jokes about eating disorders and domestic violence. He was hired in advance and advertized as a reason to watch this program.

This skit was pre-recorded. Music was scored, rehearsals were held, a dance was choreographed. At some point during the planning for this elaborate opening number, someone could have decided that this wasn’t a good idea. But no one did.

In an ideal world this song would never have been suggested. In an ideal world, a 9-year-old girl would never have been called a cunt on Twitter during this awards show. In an ideal world I wouldn’t be so angry about all of this all the time. That ideal world is never going to exist if we keep tolerating this day after week after year. This has to change.

Join me in my outrage. Sign Bitch Media’s petition and add your own ideas for how The Oscars can be improved. And if you won’t be outraged along with me, at least stop telling me to calm down.

Original posted at Gender Focus. Photo credit: lincolnblues via Compfight cc.

This year, however, SI brought its treatment of women to a new low.  In addition to the anticipated objectification and carbon-copy models, cover model Kate Upton was asked to pose in Antarctica wearing nothing but a bikini, a feat which resulted a temporary loss of hearing and eyesight when she felt like her “body was shutting down because it was working so hard to keep [her] warm.”  As Amanda Hess pointed out on The Slate’s XX Factor blog, Upton faced a frustrating Catch-22 during the shoot because “Apparently, when a model is harmed on set, she’s held accountable for taking the job. And if she were to stand up for her own health, she’d be labeled a diva.”  Either way, Upton willingly or unwillingly set the example that it’s okay to put a woman’s health at risk to better depict her as an exemplar of feminine beauty.

While SI’s photo shoot is only one chapter in the history of extremes women will go to in the pursuit of beauty, it always seemed safe to assume the Swimsuit Edition grew out of the heterosexual male gaze and a desire to see nearly-naked women splashed across the pages of a magazine.  As Tanzina Vega notes in the New York Times, however, men are not the only target audience of this issue.  For the first time, the 2013 SI Swimsuit Edition includes a style guide for its female readership, which numbers around 18 million.  Yes, you read that correctly: whether or not they strive to imitate the models in SI, at least 18 million women are receiving messages about what their bodies should look like from a magazine that puts its models at risk for hypothermia.

Unfortunately, Kate Upton isn’t the only woman whose body has suffered at the hands of the media as of late.  FOX News recently created a bit of firestorm after airing a segment in which nutritionist Keren Gilbert said that Adele and Kelly Clarkson are poor role models for young girls who might reach the false conclusion that beauty exists independently of thinness.  As Gilbert put it, “People are looking at Adele and saying ‘Look at what she’s accomplished, I can be overweight like her, I don’t need to address these issues in my life.’”

In order to have a constructive conversation about body image, however, it seems that the issue we need to address is not necessarily how to stop women from placing more importance on their careers than their body image but how to encourage girls and women to embrace their bodies even when they don’t grow up to resemble Kate Upton.  While Gilbert is correct in stating that unhealthy lifestyles are an issue that should be addressed, it is wrong to implicitly link “unhealthy lifestyles” with women who are still healthy but simply don’t have supermodel bodies.  Gilbert could have easily referenced body peace movements like Health at Every Size, which encourage healthy habits rather than a slimmer physique, but instead suggested that thinness would make them better role models.

Although this negative press surrounding “normal” women’s bodies in the media feels like a step in the wrong direction, one comforting counterpoint to the criticism can be found in Lena Dunham’s Girls.  Much has been said, both good and bad, of Dunham’s frequent nudity on the show.  She has her critics, to be sure, but the blogosphere has mostly praised Dunham for helping to make “normal” bodies a little more mainstream (in addition to other discussions about the fact that “normal” in nearly all of these conversations is defined as white, young, and able-bodied).

Dunham’s willingness to bare all certainly provides one positive role model for women and girls with “average” bodies, but we are going to need more than a few minutes of Hannah Horvath’s nudity to truly change the conversation about how women’s bodies are portrayed in the media.  So the next time you reach for a copy of SI with scantily clad models on the cover, don’t read passively.  Spark a conversation, critique what appears on its pages, and let other women and girls know that a healthy lifestyle is more important than a model-esque physique.  While SI might not have plans to do away with its Swimsuit Edition entirely, becoming a critical and active reader will be crucial to diminishing its influence on our beauty standards.

In the New York Times’ recent write-up of this milestone, author Christina Haughney doesn’t treat Teen Vogue’s tenth anniversary as a celebration but as a survival. Though a decade might not seem like a lot, Haughney points out that during those ten years Teen Vogue has “outlasted YM, Elle Girl, Teen People, Cosmo Girl! and Teen, which all folded” during that time.  In addition to the being part of a competitive niche market, Haughney also notes that Teen Vogue must constantly reshape its identity to remain relevant to “a readership with a narrow age range that outgrows the magazine every few years.”  Despite the narrow market and constantly shifting audience, however, Teen Vogue’s dazzling tenth anniversary March cover has no problem reminding readers of its hard-won success despite the failure of its peers.

Teen Vogue’s March 2013 cover: 10 Stylish (and exclusive) Years!

Part of what marks Teen Vogue a survivor in its field is the fact that many magazines, especially publications for young women, are struggling to maintain print subscribers when so much content is now available online. As Haughney reported in an additional piece for the Times, last year saw a rise in digital magazine subscriptions which “more than doubled” from 2011.  Although this increase presents a promising alternative model for a struggling industry, it doesn’t necessarily signal the magazine’s rebirth.

Haughney notes that even though digital subscriptions have increased significantly, “[those] numbers still make up less than 2.4 percent of the entire magazine industry’s average circulation” according to the Alliance for Audited Media.  The fact that online subscriptions make up so little of the industry’s profits means print media is still a necessary component of a magazine’s business model, an unfortunate fact for a magazine like Teen Vogue which now has half as many subscribers as it did ten years ago.

Putting the external forces of the magazine world aside, it seems that a more fundamental issue specifically confronting Teen Vogue’s survival will be its ability to keep up with the times and become a more inclusive publication.  One has to question Teen Vogue’s relevancy to teenage girls when so much of its content idolizes teens of one body type, skin tone, and sexual orientation.

An amazing team of young activists with the group SPARK (Sexualization Protest Action Resistance Knowledge) addressed this issue during the summer of 2012 when SPARK activist Julia Bluhm circulated a petition against Seventeen to protest its practice of airbrushing and Photoshopping the models that appeared in the magazine.  Seventeen responded positively to the girls’ request by agreeing to end its practice of digitally altering photos and instituting a “Body Peace Treaty,” including an online pledge which, at publication, has been signed by over 89,700 women and girls.

SPARK activists held a mock fashion show prior to meeting with Teen Vogue Editor-in-Chief Amy Astley. (Photo by Shawn Inglima for New York Daily News)

Teen Vogue Editor-in-Chief Amy Astley’s response to the SPARK Summit’s similar petition to her magazine was not only less encouraging, but less respectful.  Riding the wave of their success with Seventeen magazine, SPARK activists Carina Cruz and Emma Stydahar spearheaded the effort to have Teen Vogue follow suit and portray a greater diversity of models on its pages by ending their publication of Photoshopped images and bringing girls of different shapes, shades, and sizes to its pages.  After their five (five!) minute meeting with Astley, the two camps were unable to reach an agreement to promote a similar “Body Peace Treaty” on the pages of Teen Vogue and, to add insult to injury, the girls were sent off with copies of the latest issue and told to “do their homework” by studying up on the magazine.

It is surprising that in such a tough climate for print magazines Teen Vogue chose to ignore its readers’ concerns when the SPARK petition highlighted a potential reason for why the magazine’s readership is shrinking.  While Teen Vogue didn’t necessarily lose a significant number of readers due to the SPARK controversy, the magazine’s steady decline shows that its inability to change with the times certainly hasn’t helped to expand its readership.

Despite the loss of readers, Teen Vogue continues to endure in the face of opposition.  Perhaps its survival is a result of the fact that more empowering options for young girls who want to consume media (purportedly) written to address issues they care about don’t exist.  While a few alternative magazines for young feminists, like New Moon and Shameless, provide counternarratives to the image-obsessed family of teen magazines to which Teen Vogue belongs, they are few and far between.

Teen Vogue’s stubborn adherence to digitally altered images and a limited range of models is not only bad business, it is also sends the message that our standards of beauty cannot be altered.  Despite SPARK’s attempts to redefine beauty in the context of Teen Vogue, Astley has stuck to her definition of what qualifies a young woman to appear in the pages of her magazine.  Although Teen Vogue’s decade-long presence on newsstands is certainly a victory for the magazine industry, it is an empty victory when one considers the girls who have been excluded from its pages in order to maintain the magazine’s success.