Magazine Under Fire For Instructing Tween Girls How To Look Good In A Swimsuit

A magazine in the US is under fire after it printed an article titled, 'What swimsuit best suits you?'

While these sorts of articles are often published in women's magazines, the problem here being that this magazine, Discovery Girls, is aimed at tween girls aged between 8 and 13.

A photo of the article appeared on Twitter and has quickly gone viral, with parents outraged that the magazine encourages girls to fix the problems on their body through their choice of swimwear.

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The article instructs its readers (according to their media kit the average age of their readers is 10.8) on what to wear to the beach based on whether they are "curvy on top", "straight up and down" or "rounder in the middle".

"If you're curvy on top, coverage is key!" reads the article. "A bra-like top offers extra support. Side ties and cut-outs draw the eyes down."

But with the average age of the magazine's readers being just 10.8—most of whom would not have even hit puberty yet—the question is why is this being written at all.

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"What really saddens me about the Discovery Girls feature is knowing that for the girls who picked up the magazine, this will be the first of many, many times the media tells them they are not good enough," writes Rachel Moss for Huffington Post U.K.

"From relentless messages about getting 'beach body ready' to fashion editors telling us how we should dress in line with random fruit shapes, time and time again the media tells women that if we don't conform to society's beauty standards we have to hide in the beach hut."

After calls for the magazine to respond to the criticism over their article, publisher of Discovery Girls Catherine Lee took to Facebook to share an open letter:

First, I want to thank all the parents and my amazing readers who brought this swimsuit article to my attention. As the founder of Discovery Girls magazine, and even more importantly, the mother of the first Discovery Girl in 2000, I am in total agreement with all of you regarding this article, so much so that I wanted to make this letter as public as possible. We want to make sure that our girls know that any article that makes you feel bad about your body is not a good article, and should be questioned.

It’s still hard for me to believe that an article so contrary to our magazine’s mission could have been published on our pages. I have been a loss for words for days. The article was supposed to be about finding cute, fun swimsuits that make girls feel confident, but instead it focused on girls’ body image and had a negative impact. Nobody knows better than Discovery Girls how impressionable our girls are at this age and we are ALWAYS mindful of this.

We’ve received hundreds of thousands of letters over the years from girls sharing their insecurities about their bodies. We’ve been so concerned about helping girls have a healthy body image that we wrote an entire book, Growing Up, on puberty and body image.

The book, which took over five years to write, was a labor of love. We worked with so many writers, editors, and over 20,000 girls and their parents, too. We invested so much time and effort into it because we knew how important it is to get it right. Our girls need resources to provide them with the guidance they need to develop a healthy body image and love all that they are.

As much we like to think that something like this would never happen to us, it did. We’re not immune to making mistakes, but we are always willing to get better and learn from our mistakes. We’d like to thank the readers who contacted us to let us know they couldn’t believe we could make such a mistake. It means a lot to us, because it means you hold us to a higher standard, which we hope you will continue to demand from us.''

And for those of you who don’t know us as well as our regular readers, our reader’s comments are what keeps us improving. This is what makes Discovery Girls the magazine that we’re all so proud to be a part of. I know with certainty, if you hang in there, you’ll find that no magazine works harder to ensure the well-being of your daughters than Discovery Girls.