Leanne and I stayed after class tonight to work on our final project. Together we are working on developing a social network through Ning. We discovered that our website about self-esteem had a ridiculous amount of advertisements concerning weight loss and changing one’s outwards appearance. How encouraging are these ads? They say things like, “10 Rules for Stomach Fat” and “Teen Slim Natural Remedy.”

We were trying to find a way to rid our site of these ads since they go against the very purpose of our project. We’ve contacted the site’s administrators and requested to have an ad-free website as it is primarily an educational tool. Hopefully within three days we should see a difference as we want this to be a comfortable and safe place for women and girls of all ages to feel beautiful and discuss issues related to self-image and self-esteem.

Is it pure irony that our pure beauty project is being bombarded with advertisements encouraging women and girls to indulge in the latest “Chinese weight loss secrets” and follow the “idiot rules” of dieting? What do you think?

Also, feel free to have a look at our project in progress. JOIN, give us feedback, and enjoy!

Self-Esteem Project