Enter your e-mail address to receive updates! You have just entered the most popularóand controversialópage on the About-Face website. Its popularity comes not because it's the most important page we have (it's not), but because people just love to see what we've put up and labeled as OFFENSIVE! Of course, we take full advantage of this. Since people are drawn to the Gallery, it is a great opportunity for us to illustrate the negative ways that women are depicted in popular culture and to suggest that we can have some input about it. The images here are pretty bad, but they are by no means unique. It takes a ridiculously short time to collect a dozen annoying images from any fashion or women's "sport" magazine. Conversely, and sadly, it is very, very difficult to find an image of a woman that looks confident, competent or even content in a magazine directed at women* and nearly impossible to find any woman larger than a size six. (Newsflash: size six is tiny! Showing a size eight would not be a radical move!) Some of the images here are advertisements, but many of the worst ones are actually fashion spreads produced by the fashion magazines themselves. You'll note that all of the women in the Gallery of Offenders are quite thin. That's just because all models are thin, it isn't necessarily why they made it into the Gallery. It is true that a few of the women are so thin you gasp, but most of the images in the gallery of Offenders are inducted because the woman looks drugged, scared, vulnerable or just plain stupid. This isn't about Magazines being evil... We use magazine images as a way to illustrate some really negative trends in our culture, but magazines and other media products are a mere reflection of the trends in a society in a moment in time, and the things it finds important. Magazines, movies, television shows and music videos don't cause low self-esteem or eating disorders, but they absolutely reflect a culture that encourages its young people to focus on the superficial rather than the profound. Our society is extremely appearance-conscious and in fact, pretty bloody superficial, but we might also seek to create some balance in the cultural messages we send to young women, and to young men. A society that continues to emphasize a women's body and appearance over her other traits is destined to produce generations of women who don't feel good about themselves. And that's not good for anybody. Seeing the Light While we believe these issues to be vitally important, our approach is quite light. We are having fun with this and have purposely used a lot of humor and sarcasm to illustrate the ideas. Please note that if you find yourself getting upset, you have probably missed our point. Our goal is to show you some of what's out there and suggest that you look more critically at what you see. It is not to censor, not to demand that ads be pulled, not to stamp our feet and have a hissy fit. We want to remind you that there is inherent power in a culture's images and remind you that you have some say about that. If you want some. Thanks! *We concentrate primarily on fashion and "self improvement" magazines rather than magazines aimed at mothers.

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