You make me wanna la la

Recently, Seventeen Magazine has launched the Body Peace Treaty. For those of you who are not a fifteen-year-old girl or an internet pedophile, you probably don’t visit http://www.seventeen.com with frequency. I am among you non-pedophiles and stumbled upon this treaty through a far more adult source. Yes, I’m talking about the Internet Movie Database’s daily celebrity news (how often can they spell Ben Affleck wrong?). On further research, here is what I discovered: Seventeen’s Body Peace Treaty is a pledge for young girls where they sign their names and agree to stop harassing their own bodies. The vow goes:
1. Remember that the sun will still rise tomorrow even if I had one too many slices of pizza or an extra scoop of ice cream tonight.
2. Never blame my body for the bad day I'm having.
3. Stop joining in when my friends compare and trash their own bodies.
4. Never allow a dirty look from someone else to influence how I feel about my appearance.
5. Quit judging a person solely by how his or her body looks — even if it seems harmless — because I'd never want anyone to do that to me.
6. Notice all the amazing things my body is doing for me every moment I walk, talk, think, breathe...
7. Quiet that negative little voice in my head when it starts to say mean things about my body that I'd never tolerate anyone else saying about me.
8. Remind myself that what you see isn't always what you get on TV and in ads — it takes a lot of airbrushing, dieting, money, and work to look like that.
9. Remember that even the girl who I'd swap bodies with in a minute has something about her looks that she hates.
10. Respect my body by feeding it well, working up a sweat when it needs it, and knowing when to give it a break.
11. Realize that the mirror can reflect only what's on the surface of me, not who I am inside.
12. Know that I'm already beautiful just the way I am.

Way to go Seventeen! Who could give you a hard time for encouraging teenage girls to feel good about themselves? Oh wait, I can.
1. The sun will not rise tomorrow if you die of a heart attack, induced by one too many extra slices of pizza or scoops of ice cream. Even if you don’t die, you might wish you were dead because you suffer from extreme diabetes and have to roll around in a custom made plus size wheelchair as you are now too fat to walk.
2. Perhaps you fell down and broke your leg and are in excruciating pain all day. Then it is perfectly legitimate to blame your body for a bad day.
3. We’ve all had friends who insult themselves just to have everyone around them compliment them. I find that the best response to a friend’s “I’m so fat!” is to oink like a pig and pelt them with whatever food I’m am eating. The more it splatters, the better. Another example of a time where you should maybe trash your own body is when you need to call attention to a problem that you are having, but are too embarrassed to recognize. You might say, “These track marks make my arms look so ugly” or “My stomach has gotten so swollen since I went all the way with that college guy who works at Chi Chi’s.”
4. I can’t even count the number of friends that I have heard say, “If I look bad in something, I wanna know.” Actually, I can. I have heard 4.6 people say that. Back on point, when someone gives me a dirty look, I either assume that they are jealous of me and my trés chic three-week-no-wash pants and battered loafers or I go up and thank them for making me aware that bubble hems are passé.
5. Generally a good rule of thumb. Make an exception if the person has swastikas tattooed on their skin, looks like a child molester, is Elijah Wood, or is unbearably ugly.
6. Unless you suffer from cerebral palsy. In that case, your body is holding you back a little bit.
7. Some people have emotionally abusive relationships where people say much meaner things to them all of the time! I guess they have a much bigger right to berate themselves and with good reason, too, because they’re just a bunch of stupid idiots that can never do anything right and are ruining my life.
8. This would be great if this weren’t Seventeen telling you this. This is the magazine that brings the frozen face of The Hill’s Lauren Conrad and the bleached out and bared teeth of Avril Levine into the grocery store line every month. This is like John Wayne telling you not to ride a horse or Dick Cheney telling you not to shoot your friend in the face.
9. Boohoo, Sienna Miller. Suck it up.
10. I can’t think of anything funny to say about this one, so I’ll let it go.
11. Obviously, you have never read Harry Potter and heard about the Mirror of Erised. Mirrors can tell you quite a bit more than they used to. That being said, it pays to have a nice surface.
12. Unless you’re an asshole. Then you should probably try and change a few things.

I have one more bone to pick with this treaty. At the end, Seventeen has a list of all of the celebrities that have signed the pledge. You know, real A-listers like human cartoon Brittany Snow, whos-her-face Emmy Rossum, Billy Ray Cyrus’ daughter, and Katherine McPhee (she was anorexic, so she has learned all about loving her body in recovery). But the cherry on top of the petition signing cake? Ashlee Simpson. Now poor Ashlee has faced a lot of ridicule in her time. There was the lip-synching debacle and the videotaped drunken McDonald’s thing. She dated human porcupine Ryan Cabrera and had to grow up with Ol’ Leering Joe Simpson as a father. Through all of this, I watched from a far as she collapsed in on herself. I even sat through the entire first season of The Ashlee Simpson Show, listening her strain to hit the notes of “Pieces of Me” and desperately try to demonstrate what a punk she was (“Look! I have brown hair and a cut up t-shirt! Look!”). I’ll take it a step farther and say that, the first time I saw her, I thought, “that’s a very pretty girl.” My one nice thought about young Ashlee was destroyed when she, in the past two years, emerged looking like the long lost Olsen triplet. Having altered her nose, which, in my opinion, was her best feature, and adhering long and limp dread-like blonde extensions, Ashlee Simpson went from being a unique looking no-talent example of nepotism to another generic blonde no-talent example of nepotism.
Now, what does a person like this, a person so obviously caught up in conforming to the roles given to her by her manager and lover/father, doing endorsing a petition to make teenage girls accept and learn to love their appearances? Maybe Seventeen should make a Body-Peace-if-you-don’t-have-the-money-for-plastic-surgery-that-will-make-you-like-everyone-else-Treaty. Then Ashlee could sign away without a word from me.

Then. Ashlee looking slightly too tan and made up, but none the less pretty.

And now. This might actually be a picture of a contestant on ANTM. There's no way of knowing without a blood test.

That’s all the snark that I can muster up for the day.
P.S.- Here’s an odd coincidence. This is the second letter that I have written in response to a Seventeen article. The first was written when I was a sophomore or a junior in high school and was published in an issue with Ashlee’s sister Jessica on the cover. Something just draws me to that family,