By Loris Simon Dear Time Magazine:
Of course, I love your magazine, I Would not Have Bothered to write you if I did not care. I guess that's the problem with my generation, we do not really care about anything anymore if it Does not concern 'sex (or anything else in the Media That Seems To Be original but it really all just comes down to sex), and it’s sad that this letter will be discarded along with the rest of the .001% of the population that actually care now days… 
I am a Psychology student at Rice University in Houston, TX and I just received this week’s issue with the cover of fetal origins. The photograph impacted me quite significantly. Though I believe it to be very aesthetically pleasing, I don’t think it’s very representative of the message you’re trying to give out. I thought it was an interesting choice of yours to portray the perfect, unattainable pregnant woman to represent all women who might be pregnant one day in their lives and are interested in reading this article. Being a young girl, I do not know much about pregnancy, but I have certainly been around many lucky women whom I have watched since the beginning of their pregnancy until they give birth; and let me tell you this, none of them look like the model you have on the cover there. I think that the majority of women in the world would agree with me on this one. 
I’m sure there’s no reason why you believe you should be concerned, as you sell millions of magazines a year, but I always loved reading Times Magazine because it was a brief respite from the subliminal messages of superficiality that are inclded in the general media’s perfectionist portrayal of women. It’s upsetting to find this in a magazine whose content is globally recognized as intellectual. Due to the state of education at present, it is evident that girls cannot read between the lines and come to the conclusion that there is a huge gap between the media’s version of reality and reality itself. We all know that young girls aspire, even in unhealthy ways, to be thin, no matter what the costs or consequences are. This is not a matter of being intelligent or not; as human beings, we have the instinctual drive to belong. It is part of our survival mechanism, we are social beings; if we isolate we die. Therefore, I would have assumed it is important to guide the younger crowds exactly where to invest their time and energy in their quest to “belong.” The portrayal of the unattainable as a representation of “normality” is not what I’m paying for when I buy your magazine. As an artist myself, I understand the importance of beauty and visual attraction, but keep in mind there are billions of girls out there who read your magazine and believe in everything they see and read. If you are not selling sex, clothes, cosmetics or anything that may involve the new posh, underweight beauty, would make a significant difference for you to choose the covers of your magazines in a more thoughtful way? In this same issue you published Aaron Sorking in an interview saying, “I have a hunch we all get told that we’re a loser, and how healthy you are as an adult depends on how much you believed it when you were growing up” (p. 73). In case you haven’t heard, today, Having a healthy weight Being Considered is a loser. Size 0 is the new size 4 for us ladies. So for the sake of all of us, please do not perpetuate the Oppression and call us losers on the cover of your magazine. 
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