MOLI VIEW™

When I was 13, I was a huge fan of Seventeen magazine. My friends and I used to line up covers featuring our favorite model, Phoebe Cates, and vote on our favorite shot. I even went to a modeling workshop hosted by the magazine in my hometown of Cleveland. I remember the speaker telling us that to model we had to wear a size eight or a size ten. The average model back then wore a size eight.

Nearly 30 years later, models must starve themselves down to a size 0 or 1. The teens and tweens poring over magazine covers today face a much more daunting task if they attempt to look like the women and girls on those pages. That's the dilemma explored by former model Nicole Clark in her documentary, Cover Girl Culture: Awakening the Media Generation.

Last Saturday, I moderated a panel on the documentary following its world premiere during the Women's International Film Festival in Miami. As a former editor of a men's magazine that featured beautiful women on the cover, I'd seen the production team digitally manipulate the models' bodies: thinning faces and thighs and even, in one case I'll never forget, augmenting the curve of one young woman's behind.

Clark does not focus on the manipulation of women's bodies, but of our minds. She interviews a number of editors from Teen Vogue and Elle Magazine about their policies in presenting images of young women. She also quizzes a host of experts on teen psychology for their views on the image of these images on young women. This commentary alternates with interviews with a group of teen girls, who alternately reject the images presented to themselves and proclaim their own desire to be models.

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