MAGAZINE MANIFESTO
“You, yes you who are reading this, you are flawless” Why do we not have that on the cover of magazines, skip the model, skip the celebrity, what about encouraging words with a beautiful photograph? Why? Because then you would not buy it and read it and obsess over how you can be better. You would say why thank you, you would walk away feeling better about you, not worse, and if you did buy it, it would be filled with more body, soul loving goodness that you may not feel the need to beat yourself up about it and buy next month’s copy so you can fix more things about yourself.
We need a new truth and a new vision. We are flawless; we are perfect, find magazines with things other than photo-shopped people on the cover, and find friends who build each other up instead of put each other down. Find a life where you are believing every second of every day that you are flawless and you will love everything that you are, as it is what makes you, YOU!
My vision is that when I have a little girl, magazines at the grocery store check-out won’t be loaded with photo-shopped bodies and ways to make you better in bed and look better in bed, but they will be inspirational magazines, ones that have design, art, photographs displaying life, not the version of life that society wants us to idealize. I hope her friends will only talk positively towards each other and about each other, especially concerning their bodies. I hope that self-hate, self-comparison, stops, and we can raise a culture who love their bodies, who are encouraging and supportive of each other and each person’s body, I hope that we can take a vision and re-write our society standards, as I do not know how a model within the next ten years can get any skinnier or have any more gaps created without disappearing off of the magazine entirely.
I am going to spend 2015 working towards creating the first magazine that goes mainstream that does not glamorize what society wants us to believe. There will be no self-hate, no self-comparison, no photo-shopped models, just encouragement, education, fashion, travel, fun, everything every other magazine holds but without the pressures of society whispering or screaming out at you.
This is my magazine manifesto.
Amanda Dack is a Florida native, and battled Anorexia Nervosa from the age of 14 and on. She is now in recovery and a healthy 26 year old, where she lives and works in the Nationals Capital, Washington, DC. Amanda started a blog, “A squared”, in which she describes as an “electrifying soul journey through the myriad thoughts of an eating disorder survivor.” http://asquaredaa.weebly.com/
