"Am I not pretty enough? Is my heart too broken?
Do I cry too much? Am I too outspoken?
Don't I make you laugh? Should I try it harder?
Why do you see right through me?"

These opening lines from "Not Pretty Enough," a song written and performed by Australian folk-rocker Kasey Chambers, speak volumes about what it is like to be female in a society where media shapes beliefs and perceptions of what it means to be beautiful. In a culture that currently equates success and happiness with being thin and attractive "just like models or movie stars," many of our female students, our daughters, our friends, are left feeling at best invisible and at worst fat and unaccepted.

What makes a girl beautiful? It isn't what one might think — and that's the whole point of Turn Beauty Inside Out Day, which is next Wednesday, May 15. The Turn Beauty Inside Out campaign is sponsored by New Moon Publishing and is coordinated with the publication of the May/June issue of New Moon: The Magazine for Girls and Their Dreams, which highlights "25 Beautiful Girls" as nominated by their friends, family, and acquaintances.

Now in its third year, Turn Beauty Inside Out is an international campaign designed to focus attention on how different forms of mass media — movies, television shows, magazines, music videos, etc.— portray girls and women, with the end goal of having decision-makers in the industry rethink and take responsibility for creating media messages that are positive and that promote a girl's self-esteem. This year's focus is on the portrayal of girls and women in the movies.

It might not surprise you to read that 75% of American women think that they are "too fat." But many people do not realize how these ideas about body image have trickled down to teenagers and children. Studies have shown that:

• When asked what they would wish for if they had just one wish, girls age 11-17 wish to be thinner.
  
• The desire to be thinner is also found in elementary schools. 42% of girls age 6 to 8 want to be thinner. Eighty percent of 10-year-old American girls diet.
  
• Between 5 and 10 million Americans suffer from eating disorders; almost all of those people are teenage girls and young women.
  
• Between elementary and high school, the percentage of American girls who are "happy with the way I am" drops from 60% to 29%
  
• Teenage cosmetic surgeries doubled between 1996 and 1998 and appear to be continuing to grow at an alarming rate.
  

You don't have to go much farther than a billboard, magazine advertisement, or popular television show to understand New Moon's concern over how girls and women are being presented and how that is being internalized by girls. Is Kate Moss a role model? Was Courtney Cox more or less attractive before she lost weight? Here are a few reasons why the media is important in this discussion:

• 70% of girls say they have wanted to look like a character on television. About 30% have actually changed their appearance or gone on a diet in order to be more like a television character.
  
• On average, children age 8 and older spend almost seven hours a day using some form of media.
  
• The average American child is growing up in a home with multiple televisions, VCRs, DVD players, computers, and video games. 65% of kids age 8-18 have a television in their bedroom.
  
• The average American woman is 5' 4" tall and weighs 140 pounds. The average American model is 5' 11" tall and weighs 117 pounds..
  

Both girls and boys can benefit from realizing the extent to which they are being targeted as a consumer group and how media messages are used to either sell them products or convey messages about body image, self-worth, social values, and behavior.

New Moon invites everyone to also take part in the Turn Beauty Inside Out letter writing campaign.

Stop Worrying
University of Michigan psychologists did a study that shows that the more women worry about how they look, the less able they are to think about other things. One at a time, researchers had men and women try on either a sweater or a swimsuit in front of a full-length mirror. The subjects were told that they were being tested on whether they would like the piece of clothing better after looking at it for 15 minutes. While they were waiting, the psychologists had them do math problems — that was the real test. Men did about the same on the math problems whether they were wearing the sweater or the swimsuit. Women, however, had significantly lower math scores when wearing the swimsuits! Worrying about your appearance can sap your brain! For more on the study, see this story at ABCnews.com.

Learn About the Problem
The issues surrounding body image, media literacy, and the perception of beauty can be interesting topics for essays and for class discussion. Here are a few ideas on how to prepare your students for a discussion of this topic:

Language Arts: Students may have strong opinions on body image in the movies and in other media. Writing an analytical essay can help students combine evidence with commentary to clearly express those opinions. Evidence might take the form of examples or observations about how girls or women are shown in popular movies, television shows, music videos, or magazines. But the glue that holds the analytical essay together is the clear, explanatory commentary about that evidence.

To learn more about writing analytical essays, invite your students to launch the free demo of Riverdeep's Write for Your Life: Analytical Essay. In the demo, students will be able to view videos about beauty, access evidence and quotations, take a fun quiz, and then write their own analytical essay about beauty.

Think About the Problem
Language arts: Good class discussions naturally depend on the maturity of your students, their willingness to take the discussion seriously, and their ability to value the opinions of others in the class. Only you know whether or not it will work to discuss issues of body image and the media in your classroom. The following activities are only suggestions:

• What is "self-image?" Have students identify qualities they admire in others. Do they themselves possess those qualities? Is there a large gap between each student's self-image and the ideal self-image the class described? Is this gap realistic or a creation of unreal expectations?
  
• How would your students describe the ideal body for both men and women? Where does the idea of what is an ideal body come from? Is there more importance placed on a woman's conforming to an ideal body than there is for a man? Why? Has the ideal body changed over time?
  
• Have students watch the same television show or movie. In class, discuss class perceptions of the main characters in the show/movie. How were the women or girls portrayed? How were the men or boys portrayed? Are they good role models? Do they look like people your students know in real life? Why or why not? Have students read About-Face facts on Body Image and then repeat the process (watch the same show and then discuss in class). Did students notice anything different this time about how characters are presented?
  
• Finally, have students practice the analytical essay-writing skills they developed in Write for Your Life by writing a review of a movie that has girls or women as main characters. Students may want to read the Movie Reviewer Questions provided by New Moon for the Turn Beauty Inside Out essay contest.
  

Your middle school and high school students may want to practice their media literacy skills with the Internet fieldtrip, Images of Adolescence — a Riverdeep Xcursion. This guided journey to several media Web sites targeted at teens allows students to take a critical look at what the media thinks is the "ideal teen." After completing the trip and analyzing the messages on each site, the student is invited to write about an imaginary encounter between the ideal teen and herself. (Note: The teen.com Web site is no longer available. Students taking the Images of Adolescence Xcursion should start with the TeenPeople Web site.)

Media Literacy
All stories and images in the media are presented from a particular point of view and with a conscious purpose. Media literacy is designed to help students develop a critical understanding of how mass media works. For more information, see What is Media Literacy? from the Media Awareness Network and this glossary of media literacy terms.

More Links
At once funny and scary, Girls, Worms, and Body Image is the story of how a teacher tried to deal with body image stereotypes with her second- and third-graders.

Reflections of Girls in the Media was a large study of how girls participate in media as consumers and how they are affected by images of themselves in the media. Read an overview of the study at Children Now.

For more statistics, read Girls and the Media from girls, inc.

Extending the Problem
Youth print media Your students may also want to do an analytical essay critiquing such teen magazines as ym, Seventeen, and Cosmo Girl. These magazines are most certainly aimed at teenage girls and, while they often deal with important issues such as friendship, careers, and good health, they are also marketing everything from lip gloss to hip-hugger jeans between less serious articles on how to tell if a boy is "the one" and the latest rumors on N'sync. As junior versions of womens' fashion magazines, such as Cosmopolitan and Elle, these teen magazines have often suffered from the same problems: advertisements featuring too-skinny models and monthly articles on dieting. To her credit, Christa Kelly, Editor-in-Chief at ym, recently announced that ym will no longer run diet stories and that she will start using models of all shapes and sizes in the magazine's own stories. Read more in this girls, inc. article.

Thinner in the public eye The list of known media personalities with or recovering from eating disorders related to body image — those with conditions such as anorexia or bulimia — is lengthy. The likelihood that many stars have unreported or even unrecognized illness is high. Within the last month, actress Christina Ricci revealed that she is recovering from anorexia. Other famous names that you and perhaps your students will recognize who have battled or continue to battle eating disorders include Courtney Thorne-Smith, Ally Sheedy, Fiona Apple, Elton John, Alanis Morissette, Brandi, and many many more. For more information on eating disorders and how to recognize them in your students, children, friends, or family, visit the National Eating Disorders Association.

Plastic perfection Barbie, the world's most popular doll, was introduced in 1959. Since then, more than 1 billion Barbie dolls have been sold worldwide. Ruth Handler, Barbie's creator, died on April 27th. Handler created Barbie at a time when the only "people dolls" available for girls to play with were baby dolls. She said that girls could see Barbie be anything she wanted to be and that Barbie "represented the fact that a woman has choices." However, Barbie has also drawn fire over the years. Barbie was based on a German doll modeled after Lilli, a newspaper cartoon character who happened to be a prostitute. With her face slightly redesigned and her nipples filed off, the Lilli doll was relaunched on the American market. Barbie's impossible figure always infuriated feminists; the original Barbie would have been over seven feet tall and had a 39-18-33 figure if she were human. Do your girl students remember positive or negative experiences playing with Barbie? Do your boy students feel that they ever felt pressured to be more muscular because of the appearance of action hero toys and games?