The Pioneers with the youngest member of the group - six week-old Alaina Therese

The pioneers have just begun their study of Chapter Five, Wisdom for the Abundant Life, and decided to apply these teachings in a way that is particularly relevant to young women – the way the media portrays us.

After praying for guidance from the Holy Spirit, and armed with recent copies of popular teen magazines such as Seventeen and Teen Vogue, we separated into teams and began to analyze the advertisements. Do the ads feature women of all body types? Do the models really look the way they appear in the ad in real life? What message is the ad sending to young women? How does the ad make you feel about your own looks?

Relying on God’s wisdom, the girls were able to pierce the veil of the advertisers’ subterfuge, the way they misrepresent women as being creatures obsessed with exterior beauty rather than the living, thinking breathing human beings that we are.

For instance, we analyzed one ad for shorts that featured three women wearing very skimpy short-shorts who had their backs to the camera. What was wrong with this ad? First of all, there were no faces shown – just bodies – which grossly depersonalized the women in the ad. Second, the shorts were immodestly short and revealed far more than they had to. Third, there wasn’t a dimple of fat on any of the women’s bodies which is a very unrealistic portrayal of real women.

In the ads analyzed by the girls, the most offensive were those where the women were posed provocatively – even in outfits that weren’t necessarily provocative such as jeans and blouses. It was clear that regardless of what the women were wearing, what mattered was how sexy they looked in the outfit.

Even though photo-shopping was obvious in some of the photos where women were portrayed as having ridiculously skinny limbs, many of the girls admitted that looking at these ads made them feel at least somewhat dissatisfied with their own looks.

So what message are these ads sending to young women? That they have to be skinny to be in a magazine and get attention, the pioneers said.

What would they change about the ads? “Less makeup and touching up,” one group reported, and advised marketers to “alter their sales pitch to be less revealing.”

By the end of the class, the pioneers experienced first-hand just what a difference the wisdom of God makes in a world that is sorely in need of a higher love.