“Say something juicy.” “Dare to go nude.” “You change your style. Why not your eye color?" These are all tag lines from ads that appeared in the November issues of Teen Vogue and Seventeen. As teenage girls, we are constantly confronted with messages like these, accompanied by images of unattainable standards of beauty, and the way these types of ads affect our daily lives is significant. Since Teen Vogue and Seventeen claim to be about celebrating and empowering young women, why do they continue to include messages like these in their magazines?

We are bombarded by advertisements that objectify women and reinforce harmful gender stereotypes every day. These advertisements set an impossible standard of beauty and physical perfection, fuel body insecurities, and perpetuate the idea that women are no more than their looks.

We need to tell Seventeen Magazine and Teen Vogue that they have a responsibility to us, their readers, to eliminate sexist advertisements from their issues. As young women, we are in a critical stage of our development, and it is hard not to be influenced by societal influences and messages, especially in the magazines that we love to read.

Young women are more than their bodies and appearance. We should receive messages that promote positive body image and boost self-esteem instead of encouraging us to diminish ourselves.

Marie C. Wilson, founder and president of The White House Project, once stated, “You can’t be what you can’t see.” Please stand with us to help eliminate these images, and the messages they stand for, so that we can strive to be much more than objects of physical beauty.