This article titled “Thousands join girl in urging Seventeen magazine to publish unedited images” was written by Karen McVeigh in New York, for guardian.co.uk on Wednesday 2nd May 2012 19.33 UTC

A teenage reader of Seventeen magazine is hoping to change the title’s practice of airbrushing images to make young girls appear flawless and thin.

Eighth-grader Julia Bluhm, 14, from Maine, delivered a 15,000-name petition to the Hearst magazine’s editor-in-chief, Ann Shoket, on Wednesday calling for the magazine to publish at least one unaltered photo spread a month.

“A lot of my friends are happy in their skin, but I know people who aren’t comfortable and wished they looked differently,” said Bluhm, who dreams of becoming a professional ballet dancer and activist. “There are pictures all over the media that show photoshopped girls that have no flaws and they are perfect.”

In her petition, titled Give Girls Images of Real Girls, Bluhm, a blogger with Sparksummit, a “girl-fuelled” movement against the sexualisation of young women, wrote: “Those ‘pretty women’ that we see in magazines are fake. They’re often photoshopped, air-brushed, edited to look thinner, and to appear like they have perfect skin. A girl you see in a magazine probably looks a lot different in real life.”

Bluhm hopes to fight back through her work with Sparksummit, which began after the American Psychological Association task force reported the harm to girls’ self-esteem caused by sexualised images of young women.

By lunchtime on Wednesday, the petition, hosted on the social action platform Change.org, had amassed even more names, with the total passing 25,000 signatures.

It chronicles the daily battles faced by her peers over their body image. It reads: “I’m in a ballet class with a bunch of high-school girls. On a daily basis I hear comments like: ‘It’s a fat day’, and ‘I ate well today, but I still feel fat’. Ballet dancers do get a lot of flack about their bodies, but it’s not just ballet dancers who feel the pressure to be ‘pretty’. It’s everyone. To girls today, the word ‘pretty’ means skinny and blemish-free. Why is that, when so few girls actually fit into such a narrow category? It’s because the media tells us that ‘pretty’ girls are impossibly thin with perfect skin.”

Bluhm said the “fake” photographs she and her friends see in magazines and adverts has been shown to lead to low self-esteem.

Her petition states: “Girls want to be accepted, appreciated and liked. And when they don’t fit the criteria, some girls try to ‘fix’ themselves. This can lead to eating disorders, dieting, depression, and low self-esteem.”

Seventeen magazine said it had invited Bluhm to its offices after seeing her petition. It said in a statement: “We’re proud of Julia for being so passionate about an issue – it’s exactly the kind of attitude we encourage in our readers – so we invited her to our office to meet with editor in chief Ann Shoket this morning.

“They had a great discussion, and we believe that Julia left understanding that Seventeen celebrates girls for being their authentic selves, and that’s how we present them. We feature real girls in our pages and there is no other magazine that highlights such a diversity of size, shape, skin tone and ethnicity.”

Bluhm started the petition when she learned that another magazine, Glamour, had decided to limit its use of the airbrush to make people look thinner. After a survey of women found 43% believed magazines should not retouch pictures, Glamour magazine introduced limits for retouching photographs, even if a celebrity or model requested the modifications.

Bluhm said: “A lot of girls read Seventeen magazine. They do a lot to make girls feel good about themselves, stuff like Body Peace. So I thought if they are already doing it, they might like to do more. There have been stories about how much photoshopped images can hurt girls with low self-esteem and eating disorders.”

Body Peace asks women and girls to make peace with the body they have and carries interviews with celebrities talking about the issue.

Bluhm said it would be “awesome” if her petition kick-started a trend. She said: “If Seventeen magazine agree to do print just one unaltered spread a month and other magazines would do the same – it could grow into a trend. Not spreads but on the cover. It would help so many girls feel better about their bodies.”

Bluhm’s mother, Mary Biter, a social worker and mother of two girls, said she is proud of her youngest daughter.

She said: “She has taken on something that is important to her and it is something that both Robert (Julia’s dad) and I have felt important raising two girls. That they are judged by their abilities and abilities and qualities other than their appearance.”

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This article titled “For sale: Tony Bennett’s nude sketch of Lady Gaga” was written by Sean Michaels, for guardian.co.uk on Tuesday 13th December 2011 12.29 UTC

If your living room is missing that certain je ne sais quoi, perhaps you would like a nude portrait of Lady Gaga? Drawn by Tony Bennett. The crooner’s charcoal rendition of Gaga is now up for auction, with proceeds to benefit an arts charity.

“I walked in and said, ‘Well Tony, here we are’, and I dropped my robe and I got into position,” Gaga said during her Thanksgiving TV special. She and Bennett previously collaborated on Lady Is a Tramp, a song from his recent duets album. “I felt shy and thought, ‘It’s Tony Bennett, why am I naked?’”

The sitting was part of a Vanity Fair photoshoot: Bennett stands with his sketch pad while Gaga poses in her birthday suit. “She is the most beautiful person I ever met,” Bennett said later, “but there is something special about her.”

That “but” is a little peculiar. Certainly Bennett’s sketch makes Gaga look sinister and vaguely, er, wrong. Still, if we set aside the wonky eye and weirdly oblong breast, it more or less resembles the Poker Face star. Bennett signed the portrait with his given name, Benedetto, and he is also offering a print of one of his Venice paintings.

Bidding on the Lady Gaga nude sketch begins at ,000 (£3,200).

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This article titled “Enough, Nigella” was written by Alexander Chancellor, for The Guardian on Thursday 8th December 2011 20.30 UTC

The photograph of Nigella Lawson on the cover of Stylist magazine, eyes closed in ecstasy as sticky caramel sauce trickles down her face, rather put me off the whole idea of Christmas. She denies that the picture is erotic, and I tend to agree with her. It is rather disgusting. It makes me want to send her off to the bathroom for a shower. But what it suggests more than sex is a rather unhealthy relationship with food, an addiction to the kind of self-indulgence for which Christmas is famous. In a newspaper interview this week, Nigella acknowledged the existence of a recession by recommending that people on tight budgets buy smaller turkeys than usual, which is good advice, given that no Christmas turkey ever gets finished. But she seems to have said this only to allow that gluttony could be satisfied more cheaply with ladles of sauces, gravy, stuffing and so on.

More in tune with the times is a book called Starvation Recipes recently published in Greece, where times are a good deal harder than here. Written by a high-school teacher called Eleni Nikolaidu, it draws inspiration from the Nazi occupation years, when Greeks found survival even harder than they do now. It tells you how to make do with cheap vegetables, to chew very slowly so as to feel as if you are eating more, and to throw nothing away. It even advises you to sweep all crumbs from the table and keep them in a jar. This may be going a bit far, but it is a refreshing antidote to the Nigella school of overeating.

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