| Graphic: Style Rookie |
| Yes, girls, pot makes you “Fat & Ugly,” if you believe Seventeen. (look on the lower right). |
Seventeen Magazine, that bastion of annoying shallowness aimed at teenage girls, has reached a new low.
The rag, which for years has plumbed the depths of journalism, exploring just how negative a self image can be foisted upon America’s anorexics-in-training, has now told its wide-eyed readership that marijuana is, and I’m quoting here, “THE PARTY DRUG THAT CAN MAKE YOU FAT & UGLY.”
Never mind, as pointed out by 13-year-old Style Rookie blogger Tavi in a righteously indignant open letter to the magazine, that the message being given to impressionable teenage girls is oh God, the worst possible thing that could ever, ever happen to them is that, heaven forbid, their appearance should fall short of Hollywood ideals!
Never mind that equating “fat” and “ugly” in such a casually cruel way — in a culture which, more and more, values artificial standards of “attractiveness” and “beauty” over all else, and defines those as being synonymous with “unhealthily skinny” — tells teenage girls that their looks define them, and that they should feel really bad about themselves if they somehow don’t “fit.”
Never mind that for many of us, a full figured, curvaceous, generously proportioned, healthy woman is one of the most awesomely beautiful things Nature has ever created.
Let’s not forget that marijuana does NOT, in fact, cause weight gain — it simply increases appetite, and what you do with that increased appetite CAN cause weight gain, if you aren’t careful.
In the meantime, we have dim-witted excuses for information like Seventeen Magazine preparing the next generation of American women for a lifetime of self-loathing and possibly even anorexia.
Who knows how many girls might be influenced to choose methamphetamine or cocaine instead of far-less-dangerous marijuana, since those hard drugs certainly won’t “make you fat”!
Way to be a responsible role model, Seventeen.