Be suspicious! 

Advertising can be tricky. 

Find the advertiser's false claims in the next ads you see.

 

 

 

Bust the false claims, images, and broken promises…  If you can name the tricks and hidden messages, they lose their power over you.

•  Pressure to be skinny

• Too much attention on certain body parts
• Girls looking weak, confused, like they need to be rescued
• Young girls and teens looking too sexy too soon
• Buy more, buy more, buy more… to solve your problems, to make you happy
• Girls not getting along with each other
• Girl/boy stereotypes
• Too much violence and making violence cool
• Last word game—disrespectful relationship

Girl-Led, Arts-Based Workshops with Project Girl

Jane Bartell and I participated in the March 30, 2009 LEAP conference. 

This is Wisconsin’s only one day conference dedicated to inspiring high school girls to live their dreams and find their path to a bright future.  

 Students gain the tools to explore educational and career opportunities, with emphasis on:

• STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics),
• Health Care
• Skilled Trades

Fun, hands-on activities include a college and career exploration fair, interactive workshops and mentoring by successful professional women.

The Project Girl Workshop guided future girl leaders through the process of exploring the following topics with adolescent girls:

1) Basic media literacy concepts;

2) Stereotypes and labeling;

3) Body image and the beauty myth;

4) Consumerism;

5) Real girl power.

Participants took part in a unique reflective and expressive art experience, equipping them to replicate this essential component of Project Girl’s arts-based curriculum.

It is essential that girls everywhere become educated, supported, equipped, and inspired to be critical consumers of media. Project Girl’s proven arts-based approach gets girls asking questions they’ve never heard asked before and gives them critical tools to look at their contemporary media based culture with smarter, more resistant eyes

The Brand Brainwashing Cartoon - Meet The Girl - tells the story of a young girl’s search for her identity. She attempts to solve her problems by conforming to a deceptive beauty mold. This artificial beauty mold makes false claims and promises.

As it does for many of us, the process of striving to fit the mold leaves the young girl feeling that she isn’t worthy enough…not to mention her pockets empty. Advertisers want us to feel insecure so they can sell us products. They want us to believe that buying their products will make us happy and solve our problems.

I have a deep suspicion of the beauty industry and its deceptions.  The tactics it uses pierce the self esteem of women. False images and realities fill magazine pages, featuring models that don’t exist and products that don’t work.

Our culture is blinded by false truths. We all must  awakened to the media untruths, learn what false marketing claims sound like, and understand the motives behind them, then they will have no control over us.

Co-Creators of ProjectGirl.org - Jane Bartell (video producer) and Kelly Parks Snider (visual artist)

The origin of an idea or vision is often difficult to define. Years ago, I was rummaging through an old box in a junk store. It got me thinking about today’s culture, my four children, and their childhood and kid culture. It seems that the absurd had become the living reality for many of our kids. Our culture seems to normalize and often glamorizes disrespect. From the moment our kids begin speaking, they are exposed to cartoon characters with big bad attitude, negative tones and so many word wars.

Jane Bartell (co-creator of ProjectGirl.org) and I started thinking about kid culture, the overall lack of respect for one another, the over-sexualized images that surround us. Images that glamorize violence, a culture obsessed with thinness, advertising that perpetuated stereotypes, excessive consumption, and body objectification. The stories, attitudes and the relationships depicted in contemporary media show nothing but girl fighting and competition. These observations made us realize that the world that our kids were growing up in is far more polluted than the world we grew up in.

So we began ProjectGirl.org.

We asked the question “why?” Asking why usually demands social action.

• Why are girls dissatisfied with their bodies?
• Why do we stereotype?
• Why are girls having trouble getting along with each other and their parents?
• Why are young girls so sexy so soon?
• Why are we as a society passively allowing this to go on?

At the start of ProjectGirl.org we started researching, obsessing, networking, going to the experts around the country and asking questions, gathering information. And here’s what we found. There seemed to be a big fat arrow pointing to the media. There also seemed to have been some significant changes that had taken place over the last few years. Take a look.

When our kids were born in the mid 90’s, advertisers were spending $6.2 billion marketing to children. By the time our kids were ready to go to Kindergarten just five years later, that amount had nearly doubled to $12 billion. Now it’s over $18 billion.
We felt vindicated, and angry. We also found out that in the ‘80s, right before our kids were born, kids were being exposed to 1500 commercial media messages a day. Today, that number has grown to 3,000.

The media is everywhere. We can’t escape it. We must be awakened, the media is everywhere and we must learn to read it, deconstruct it so it doesn’t run and ruin the lives of our girls.

So we took action. We developed the ProjectGirl.org curriculum to help educators and group leaders learn how to talk to girls about the media…to say things they’ve never been told in ways they can understand.
Stay tuned for our updates from our travels and experiences presenting the ProjectGirl.org story and curriculum throughout the USA.

This amazing teen philanthropy program is giving teenagers the power to make their world a better place by placing in their hands the opportunity to help decide where $1 million in donations goes. Yes, you read that correctly…$1 MILLION DOLLARS!!

Here’s how it works: Teens earn points by doing cool activities on the @15 web site (www.at15.com). The more they participate, the more points they earn. In this case, more is definitely BETTER especially if the points go to Project Girl. Best Buy adds up all of the earned points, then divides up the cash pile and lets teens decide who gets the money.

So here’s our advice to every 11 to 17-year-old kid in the universe… Go to www.at15.com, set up a profile and take the @15 IMO survey. From there on out the sky is the limit on earning points for Project Girl. Being a Project Girl supporter has never been easier!

And here’s what we are going to do with all your hard earned points and Best Buy’s dollars. Project Girl is going to create the first ever PG National Virtual Gallery. What’s that, you ask? The PG National Virtual Gallery is where kids can tell the world what they truly care about through their art—through visual art, through their poetry, their music, their videos, their photography. It’s where kids can focus attention on issues that matter to them and are relevant to their lives. The gallery enables kids to share their experiences, opinions, observations and what they know with other kids throughout the cyber sphere.

So here’s the take-away message…GO VOTE! Go to www.at15.com , register, create a profile, then click on anything that says Change Exchange, or Earn Points. Then VOTE FOR PROJECT GIRL!