Jennifer Sky

Sorry, I somehow missed your question and I'm come back up the thread now. Yes, I am not trying to take away from the horrible conditions that girls involved in human trafficking face. Human trafficking needs to be stopped now. But what happens under the guise of modeling often falls into similar categories, especially for girls that come from poor home lives and countries. They become indentured to their agents. Parents are sold a different story and then when the minor model is taken out of their home, a very different situation is at hand.

Anytime someone brings up TR, I point them to Statutory rape laws.

We can impress upon our lawmakers that they need to change the tax laws around the modeling industry. This is not only a NY State issue, but an industry wide one. Models are currently classified as independent contractors and so they can not guild together to form a union. In California, this standard has already been challenged: Zaremba v. Miller is about a model who was misclassified as an independent contractor for a two-hour job. (The law in CA has since become even clearer in classifying workers as employees.) The court found Zaremba, the model, to be an employee and therefore protected by CA’s Labor Code, including Labor Code Section 203. Labor Code Section 203 says that if an employer willfully fails to timely pay an employee’s wages, the employee can obtain both his/her wages for that day AND 30 days additional wages. This is how the precedent begins.

Hi! The film industry has similar image issues around youth and weight. But they have one definable difference that made a huge difference in my life, and that was a union. With a union, actors have the ability to enforce protections. If producers want you to do a stunt, and you are not a trained stunt person, actors do not have to feel pressured to put themselves in harm's way. But in fashion, models do not have a union. We have so far been unable to unionize because of tax codes qualifying us as independent contractors. This needs to change.

Both young men and women are abused and objectified.

I did not have that problem, but yes, these are beautiful teens with money and no supervision. You do the math.

Great question, and yes, fighting against the images that media sends to young women and girls since the day they are born is difficult to impossible. A woman should be able to feel strong and sex-positive in her body without it being seen as a corrupting object. I believe this starts with age. If we raise the global average age of models to actual adult age, 18 and above, then we will see a rolling effect of beauty across the spectrum. The way we view beauty will not be so focused on fetishizing youth. If we change advertising, this will reflect in how girls feel.

Child actors are also around by adult situations and in adult work places, but they have a union that for the last 80 years has set specific boundaries for how these adults can act. Child actors must be chaperoned and must attend school. Child models are often without supervision and being photographed in hypersexualized ways. Models need to be allowed to unionize, this will make all the difference.

I won a modeling contest with 17 magazine. I was 14 and from swampy Florida. It was a complete shock.

Thanks for this question, Ben. I believe if the overall industry trended toward older models than the image and body ideal problems we have would become better. It is not the girls in the industry that choose to be so thin but the adults around them telling them they must be. If we made it more difficult, or even trendy, for magazines and designers to use older and more body-positive models, then that may have a trickle down effect for girl readers.

And, of course, if we all consumed less media, and less body-negative media, this would also help.