Oh, and the commentary about the copy editing drives the point home. Class and cultural tourism by "enlightened" middle class white girls. Typical.

What are your thoughts? Is this another form of objectification or does it provide us (both men and women) with another form of beauty standards?

It's a bit of both.

The current beauty standard is rather exclusionary. There are many theories as to what influences these ideals but it's getting harder to argue that preferences are not in part shaped by the media.

Currently our society essentially segregates women of color who don't conform to the European ideal. This works to maintain the status quo which then creates more of a niche market for magazines such as the above examples.

I totally agree that there is an element of sort of a point-and-gasp circus show mentality that all too often shows up regarding non-European features in the mainstream.

Whether it's strangers wanting to touch your hair or people surprised that darker skin ages slower or this odd fascination with booties. In 2009, it strikes me as a bit pathetic. It would be like me unaware of what freckles are or that fair skin gets sun burned: Imagine if I said, "hey wow, you turned bright red, can I touch that?"

While I don't care for these mags, objectification isn't the only problem wrong with how media portrays women; and objectification is so subjective anyway. It's much easier to rail against the absurdly unrealistic standards, lack of inclusion, funky power dynamic (nude women, clothed men), etc. While I think these magazines fail in many areas they do give room for something more inclusive. I guess all cultural beauty standards (youth and fertility do not correlate with skin color, hair texture, hair color, etc) are unrealistic but I do think these magazines are not quite as health damaging as the "rail thin" ideal.

Spike the cat, I have to agree. One question that I have is: Where do regular women fit in this standard? I'm not a model, I don't have big boobs and a huge but, I'm not skinny at all. Even if I had a lot of these things or one thing, many other women have these assets. Either side of the standard really isn't healthy for anyone...black, white, Hispanic, Asian. So why is it acceptable to have 2, instead of featuring models who possess the standards of some kind of gray area? Most of us are regular women who won't be on the cover or article of a magazine, but that doesn't mean we're ugly or less desirable...

Not only do "minority" women have 1 standard of beauty to look at constantly (The European), now we have some sort of Curvacious one to uphold. It's really not fair.

I agree with Bianca that it gives another unrealistic standard to live up to for WOC. While it's nice on one end that there are women of color being seen as beautiful, it stops there. If you go to that magazines site....it just seems very exploitive to me. I feel like they're just being reduced to their bodies again and that's all.

But is it objectification? Objectification is when someone is sexualized without regard for their feelings or desires, without regard for who they are as a person and what they want.

At first, I thought that this was definitely objectification, and the idea that just because the models were not-white and not-skinny made it not-objectification was fairly insulting.

But then I read the Jezebel article and now I'm a little doubtful. The models aren't just being looked at - they're being interviewed and interacted with on an intellectual level. Maybe they're not discussing global politics or whatever else is an "intellectual" topic, but they're being engaged, which would be an element of not-objectification.

It's objectifying to a degree, definitely, but I would argue much less so than high-end fashion magazines featuring skinny models.