No, really?

This Straits Times story carries the headline "Teens pressured to be thin".

In other news, water is wet.

Forgive my snark. It's good that the media is reporting the truth. It's just astonishing that this can remain a revelation, considering that more than half the adult population have themselves been teenage girls at some point. It's almost as if our experiences don't count until they're packaged in some Researchy Research to remove the taint of female subjectivity.

The article itself:

ALMOST nine in 10 American teenage girls say they feel pressured by the fashion and media industries to be skinny and that an unrealistic, unattainable image of beauty has been created, a poll showed on Monday.

The online survey of 1,000 girls aged between 13 and 17 for the Girl Scouts of the USA found that three quarters said they would be more likely to buy clothes that they see on real-size models than on women who are skinny.

But three out of four girls said that fashion is 'really important' to them.

'The fashion industry remains a powerful influence on girls and the way they view themselves and their bodies,' said Kimberlee Salmond, senior researchers at the Girl Scout Research Institute.

'Teenage girls take cues about how they should look from models they see in fashion magazines and on TV and it is something that they struggle to reconcile with when they lookat themselves in the mirror,' she said.

More than 80 per cent of teen girls said they would rather see natural photos of models rather than pictures that had been digitally altered or enhanced. Other top influences on body perceptions, aside from celebrities and models, are peers, friends and parents, the poll showed.