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Update: Summer's Eve has pulled some of their offensive ads; however, they refuse to admit to the racism or apologize. ESC Forever is asking that people continue to sign the petition to to end the entire campaign -- and don't give Summer's Eve any more credit than they deserve. You can read more here.

Last year, Summer's Eve ran an ad in Women's Day magazine called "Confidence at Work: How to Ask for a Raise". The ad featured a list of ten tips and first on that list was the suggestion that women should make sure to start off every work day feeling fresh by using Summer's Eve products.

After an outcry from women offended by the implication that using feminine hygiene products is the first step to career success, Summer's Eve agreed to pull the ad and issued an apology. They also created a Twitter account called Eve Cares to field the complaints. Director of U.S. Marketing Angela Bryant promised that Summer's Eve would do better in the future, and said, "Moving forward, Summer's Eve wants to not only connect with our customers, but to be an active leader on the issues that matter to women. We just engaged a progressive communications team, and in the next several weeks, we'll be talking to women all over the country about the issues that matter to us as women. We're insisting on open and frank discussions to make sure all of our future marketing and education efforts are relevant and respectful."

Summer's Eve recently unveiled their new ad campaign, called "The V", and it's safe to say that Bryant's promise was not kept. The press release announcing the new ads described an "empowering" campaign featuring "strong female archetypes" like Cleopatra, and stated that "Summer's Eve is not a means to confidence, rather it's a celebration of confidence, of being a woman, and taking care of their bodies." Missing from the press release was the fact that Summer's Eve makes products like douches that are considered by women's health experts to be unhealthy and unnecessary for women who want to "feel fresh" and take good care of their bodies.

Dutch tourist Jasmijn Rijcken reported that she was biking down a Manhattan street, minding her own business, when a cop pulled her over -- for wearing too short a skirt. Apparently, Rijcken's bare legs were "distracting the cars" and "dangerous." It seemed so absurd to be pulled over for "cycling while sexy," Rijcken thought the officer was joking, but he became angry and demanded her ID. She went straight back to her hotel and changed into pants, covering up her "killer" legs.

As Margaret Hartmann points out at Jezebel, you'd think the NYPD would be quick to assure women that they don't have to worry about the fashion police monitoring the length of their skirts -- the last thing you want to deal with when dressing for the summer heat. After all, they're already being scrutinized after a controversial "not-guilty" verdict that many people believe let an NYC cop get away with rape. Over 5000 Change.org members have already signed a petition started by the feminist group Permanent Wave telling the NYPD to implement comprehensive sexual assault and harassment training and a zero-tolerance policy.

Instead, this is what Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne had to say: "Whether this story bears even a modest semblance of what actually occurred is impossible to establish without being provided the purported officer's name and getting his side of the story." So not only is he failing to apologize for the sexual harassment, or assure women that the NYPD is not going to start acting like a Catholic school and insisting that your skirts go past your fingertips, he's also suggesting that the complainant is a big fat liar.

The co-optation of social justice issues for corporate gain is nothing new. The folks in charge of marketing campaigns make a living sniffing out new ways to sell their company's products, and exploiting people's desires is a crucial part of that process. To that end, Unilever promotes "real beauty" as a way to sell bath products by running Dove advertisements that feature "real women" of all shapes, sizes, ages, and colors (while simultaneously undermining and over-sexualizing women with its sexist Axe ads), and Glamour makes a stink about printing one photo feature of a plus-sized model (amid a hundred or so pages of ones who are stick skinny) to sell heteronormative relationship and fashion advice. Both of these campaigns knew the golden rule of marketing: snag the media's attention when you've got something you're trying to sell because an impressed or outraged free press provides ... well, free press.

In an attempt to grab $2 billion in tween (8- to 12-year-olds) product revenue, Walmart is discontinuing its Mary-Kate and Ashley (Olsen) cosmetics, which has been on the financial decline, to launch a new brand called GeoGirl on February 21st. A product of Pacific World Corp, GeoGirl is a so-called eco-friendly makeup line of 69 items (e.g., lip balm, face shimmer, body mist, mascara) that are made using natural ingredients that have been specially formulated for "young skin." The products will come in recyclable containers, and an unspecified portion of the company's net profits will be donated to a customer-chosen charity. Walmart representative Carmen Bauza says, “GeoGirl is about teaching this generation about beauty care in a responsible way.”

In the coming weeks, many parenting and feminist blogs are sure to rehash the question of whether marketing makeup to children for everyday wear is appropriate -- and let this post be among the ones that reignite that debate. But further exploration of GeoGirl's marketing strategy (stating that it's encouraging young girls to buy green) is necessary as well, and I hope one important question doesn't get lost in the mix: how appropriate is it to teach tweens that consumerism will solve environmental problems that are, in large part, created by over-consumption?

Unfortunately, there's more to write about when it comes to the exploitation of little girls. In the commenting section of my previous post on Vogue Paris' photo shoot featuring little girls as sex objects, someone brought up child beauty pageants. I call them perverse circuses, and they can be severely detrimental to girls' well-being, especially as they go woefully under-regulated in this country.

Take Mia, for instance. Mia was featured in the TLC program "Toddlers and Tiaras." At two years old, Mia can be found onstage in a tight-fitting gold bustier with cones where her (non-existent) breasts would be, a la Madonna during her "Like A Virgin" tour. But this is only after she rips off her white robe outfitted with angel wings. Get it? From sweet, little angel to sex-pot? Oh, wait. She's TWO.

Her faux strip routine is cut a bit short when, after she removes the robe to reveal the gold-breasted costume, she forgets what else is supposed to happen. You can't blame the two-year-old girl. After all, she hasn't yet learned how to bump and grind, or pretend to hump the stage the way Madonna did during her on-stage performances. The audience is whooping and screaming as if they're at an actual Madonna concert and everyone seems immune to the fact that this girl is engaging in an approximation of an overtly sexual performance by a grown woman known for her overtly sexual public persona. You can hear Mia's mother in the crowd screaming to her toddler, "Yeah, Mia! Work it!" Work what, exactly?

It's great for Madonna -- it's entirely offensive for toddlers. It's offensive for young girls, period.

Wow: compared to these hypersexualized photos of young girls in the December 2010 issue of Vogue Paris, Bratz dolls are practically Puritan.

The photo shoot features young girls (five, six years old at the youngest?) with come-hither eyes, lounging on leopard-print pillows, stiletto-heeled and red-lipped, mimicking only the more sexualized poses one finds in fashion mags. It's verging on repulsive.

Yet a spread like this doesn't make it through to publication in a "high-fashion" magazine like Vogue Paris without the nod of more than a few editors. Unbelievably, not one person felt these photos were not just inappropriate, but disturbing and clearly detrimental to the psychological and physical well-being of girls.

Maybe the editors of Vogue Paris need a copy of the the American Psychological Association's (APA) most recent report on the sexualization of girls in popular culture. An APA task force found that the proliferation of sexualized images of girls and young women in advertising, merchandising, and media is undoubtedly harmful to girls' self-image and healthy development. Analyzing published research on the effects of everything from music lyrics to magazines to video games on health and well-being, the task force unearthed startling consequences from the overwhelming portrayals of women and girls as solely sexualized beings.

There are two things our society tells women they need to be happy: beauty and a man.

In the extreme, this means women go under the knife, trying to make their bodies conform to our ridiculous beauty standards. A premium is placed on weddings and how the bride looks at the wedding. Feminists were horrified when these damaging obsessions became reality TV shows like The Swan and My Fair Wedding. Now, E! Entertainment has taken the next logical step and combined them into one massively-sexist show: Bridalplasty.

Brides-to-be compete in wedding-themed contests like writing vows, then the winner picks a desired surgery off her “wish list,” anything from a nose job to liposuction to breast implants. The husband-to-be does not get to see his surgically altered bride until she walks down the aisle. Each week a woman is voted off, so the audience gets to see women scheming and backstabbing, maybe even some cat-fights.

Here's a taste from Jezebel of the first episode: "The contestants had to race to finish a puzzle, by covering up their old 'gross' bodies with Photoshopped versions of themselves. The women who finished their puzzles in a timely fashion were allowed to attend an "injection party," where they would be able to get a bunch of fillers and Botox." The last woman to make it into the injection party wept for joy.

By now I assume you've seen the column by MarieClaire.com columnist Maura Kelly entitled, "Should 'Fatties' Get A Room? (Even on TV?)" If you did miss it, Kelly ruminates on whether the title characters of television show "Mike & Molly" should be allowed to kiss, because some people expressed discomfort at watching two overweight people go at it.

Kelly's verdict was yes, they should keep their fat love private and, while they're at it, get off their fat asses and slim down. With phrases like, "No one who is as fat as Mike and Molly can be healthy," and "I think I'd be grossed out if I had to watch two characters with rolls and rolls of fat kissing each other ... because I'd be grossed out if I had to watch them doing anything," it's a misguided attempt to shame "unhealthy" fat people into slimming down at best, and fatphobia at worst.

But a lot of venom being spewed at Kelly and Marie Claire is misdirected. No, Kelly shouldn't be fired. (And not for the really lame reasons that Babble gave, either.) Yes, Marie Claire should issue an apology. But it shouldn't stop there.

Kelly believed that it's okay to attack fat people because our culture promotes that way of thinking. Even on the show itself, which critics say is too filled with fat jokes, Mike and Molly meet at Overeaters Anonymous (of course) and are trying to change. The show tells viewers that being fat is not good and that fat people only belong on television when we can all laugh at their attempts to de-fat. (Though fat men are routinely seen on television with skinny, "attractive" wives or girlfriends.)

In 2007, Sue Thomason started an email magazine for plus-size British women. Now, she's transitioning the magazine to print, and vowing not to include any diet tips or do any photoshopping. The magazine, titled "Just As Beautiful," [ed note: now just "Beautiful"] will feature only women from British size 14 to 20 (US sizes 10 to 16).

The magazine is meant to act in part as an antidote to so many other women's magazines that lay on the pressure to get down to a size 0 and encourage constant self-critique. Content will include interviews with "plus-size celebrities," but supposedly won't focus on their bodies. The first issue's cover advertises: "Smokin' hot big girls," "Bitch fight! We battle with the diet pushers," and "How to win an argument: learn his tactics."

Not exactly groundbreaking material. I want to be enthusiastic about the no-photoshopping and no-diet-tips rules, but here the language of empowerment feels like a front for what is essentially another flighty women's magazine with a slightly different tack.

It's no surprise that being skinny is an advantage for women in our society. Just how much of an advantage? About $15,000 worth.

A recent study by Timothy A. Judge of the University of Florida has revealed that very skinny women — those weighing an average of 25 pounds less than the "normal" or "average" weight for women of their group — earn $15,572 more per year than women of average weight.

Women whose weight is around 25 pounds higher than the "norm" for their group make $13,847 less than the women of average weight. The study proposed that women are most harshly punished for an initial deviation from the ideal —  a jump from being 25 lbs underweight to "normal" or just below normal weight — and they suffer the biggest drop in salary when they make this initial transgression. From then on out, they'll take smaller pay cuts for each increase in weight.

Men, meanwhile, get a financial pat on the back for gaining weight. They're penalized for being "too thin." Gaining 25 lbs per year brings a man a yearly salary boost of $8,437. This boost drops slightly to $7,775 per year once the men have reached above average weights.

So let's get this straight: women earn in the ballpark of $15,000 extra for being too skinny, whereas men earn in the ballpark of $7,000 extra for being over their recommended weight. Any sort of argument about how our society's obsession with weight is merely tied to health concerns flies out the window in the face of a study like this.

Jacob, a Quebec-based clothing company, has decided to stop retouching both its lingerie and its clothing models. Spokeswoman Cristelle Basmaji explains, "As a socially responsible company, JACOB has always made an effort to promote a healthy image of the female body. By adopting an official policy and broadcasting it publicly, we hope to reverse the trend in digital photo manipulation that has become excessive in our industry."

The company offered an example of one particular photo in both its original and retouched form. The difference in this case is hardly noticeable — a slimmer thigh, a softened collarbone, a slightly tinier belly and bigger bust. It's definitely not a retouching job on the scale of other Photoshop disasters. But Jacob's decision is hopefully more impacting in encouraging a more widespread trend of moving away from excessive retouching.

The company clarifies that it's not abandoning the practice altogether: scars and tattoos will still be removed from photos. But at least this initial statement is addressing the havoc that Photoshop can wreck on already thin bodies and the way in which it plays such a critical role in creating literally impossible and unattainable beauty standards.

Having retailers speak up about retouching — a practice that only recently has begun crossing women's minds when they look at images of impractically skinny models — is a step in the right direction, away from twisted lollipop heads and hipless ghosts towards healthier bodies. Please consider adding your voice to the petition asking the New York State legislature to require disclaimers on Photoshopped images.

Photo credit: Simon_Music