LEADER PREPARATION

• Get someone (if not yourself) to video record several commercials or movie clips about bodies, both male and female. Use this videotape as a source tape. Link up two video cassette recorders and slowly view your source tape. Look for similar body parts, male and female, and tape these onto your presentation tape. You should end up with a four-to six-minute tape of "commercial body image, female" depicting typical hair, skin, eyes, lips, stomachs, breasts, and legs shown, and "commercial body image, male" with corresponding body parts.
• Secure all equipment needed to present the video.
• Gather a variety of women, men, and fashion magazines to cut.
• Obtain scissors, poster board, and glue for the youth group to make collages.

GROUP BUILDING

Offer a stack of magazines. Divide into groups and have each group design a collage by clipping and pasting in terms of one or more of the following questions:

• What describes you best here?
• What might hurt someone most here?
• How might you picture your dream self?
• How might you picture your dream mate?
• How young would you want a viewer of this to be?

OR

(This activity idea was taken from Lisa and Emily Engelhardt, Youth Update, Cincinnati, OH: St. Anthony Messenger Press.)

Pass out blank pictures outlining the male and female body—front and back. Ask each individual to color the picture in green, yellow, and/or red. Green represents the parts of your body that are satisfactory to you, yellow reflects the parts that you need to think about, and red notes the parts that are not acceptable. Following the "coloring," consider these questions:

• How happy are you with your appearance?
• Are there parts of your body with which you are specially happy or unhappy?
• What would you like to do about it?
• Many top models do not feel beautiful. How do people come to be really happy with the way they look?

OR

"Finding your own 10!" Ask the teenagers to clip from the magazines people that they consider to be "10"s.

• What male or female actor or model would you consider a "10"?
• How would you rate your own appearance on a 1-10 scale?
• What are the dangers of such a concept?
• From where has such a concept come?
• How can the notion be changed and how can we personally be free from such bondage?

GROUP PRESENTATION

Show the commercial or movie clip videotape and these questions as discussion starters.

• How does this make men and women think about themselves and others?
• What does it do to a woman or man to be seen first as body parts?
• What negative messages about appearance are communicated through the media?
• What should be done about such media programming?

WRAP-UP

• From what sources do we receive negative messages about our appearance and self-worth?
• How can these messages be interpreted positively?

To help youth understand how media teach us to look at other people, as well as how media establish our own appearance criteria.

OVERVIEW