The new issue of Allure magazine features "Star Trek" and "Avatar" actress Zoe Saldana, with a tagline on the cover that reads, "115 pounds of Grit and Heartache."
Many are upset at mention of Saldana'a weight, seeing it as a negative message to women and a step backward after forward social progress on accepting women of different sizes.
It is a message that "you need to be thin and strong," Hilary Levey Friedman, a Harvard sociologist who writes about images in the media, said to omg! On Yahoo! "Just one isn't enough anymore.
"This only puts more demands on women and can lead to varied types of disordered eating," Friedman adds, calling the decision to print her weight "an interesting choice."
Body Mass Index (BMI) has become more regarded than just the number on the scale, so Friedman feels the headline looks back to a bygone era.
"It used to be common to share numbers like weight and measurements," Friedman said. "While it is still common within the modeling industry...more mainstream pop culture has shied away from it.
"Even the Miss America Pageant stopped listing the weights and measurements of its competitors by the 1990s," she continued.
This follows the voluntary ban on women younger than 16 from the runways by the Council of Fashion Designers of America in 2007. Their counterparts in Spain and Italy said they would no longer use models who fell below a certain BMI level, and Israel went as far as to pass a law against the use of models deemed too skinny.
In May 2012, Vogue vowed that the 19 editions worldwide would "project the image of healthy models," according to a press release from the magazine. They continued to say they would "not knowingly work with models under the age of 16 or who appear to have an eating disorder," and would even check IDs at fashion shows and photo shoots.
Saldana has not commented on the magazine cover through her rep, who said, "no comment." Allure has not commented either, though they have received a lot of media attention resulting from the decision.
This article is copyrighted by Travelers Today, the travel news leader
