My friend Tee Corinne the photographer is very ill. I have been going up to Oregon to see her but she also really likes mail. So I decided to send her naked lady postcards. After all she is a premiere photographer of nudes of women. She was delighted with the idea. I assumed that this [...]

Debbie is in Australia til mid May, hopefully having an amazing time. She won’t be blogging while she’s away. I’ll be blogging by myself til she gets back. The fabulous Lynne Murray, who wrote the Josephine Fuller mysteries (Josephine is a great detective in all meanings of “great”), will be guest blogging once a week [...]

Thomas Streeter, Nicole Hintlian, Samantha Chipetz, and Susanna Callender, working with the Semiotics Project of the University of Vermont, have done an excellent “web essay on the male gaze, fashion advertising, and the pose.” We suggest taking your time with this excellent overview of how women are depicted in the media, both currently and historically, [...]

Laurie says: This post on “How to Be a Good Christian Wife” (Thank you Ilyka Damen) is so far out on the curve that it achieves the surreal. I know that it’s a world lots of folks live in, but they are still living in Surreal World.. I love “ALWAYS serve fresh orange juice. Only [...]

Laurie and Debbie say: Both of us are fans of NPR’s slice-of-life show, This American Life, and both of us separately heard last week’s broadcast, entitled “A Better Mousetrap.” (Free downloadable streaming audio available at the link.) The theme of the show was “inventions,” and the piece that struck both of us was rather shoehorned [...]

Debbie says: [using "they" as a nongendered pronoun for an individual] Someone I know on line but not in real life posted a filtered entry (only available to people they chose to show it to) describing the attendance at a party they went to as “four butt-ugly women” and about twenty men of various degrees [...]

Our friend Tracy found this gallery of naughty French postcards in the Roaring Twenties. You’ll find a nice variety of bodies here; most fall into “conventionally attractive,” and there’s still a good range. Here’s one that Debbie especially likes. For a very different sort of nude, you might want to check out photographer Jack Gescheidt’s [...]

Debbie says: When I saw the link forThe Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, I started thinking about what it would be like to be a curator there. This site is very well-designed to protect us from having to see any of the images of the collection. You won’t see them on the front page, [...]

Laurie and Debbie say: Lots of people seem to have important things to say about the whole discussion of ugliness, prettiness, and beauty. We want to start with April‘s “I’m frustrated that so much of the fat movement is dedicated to making a larger appearance acceptable rather than just making appearance not matter.” Neither of [...]

Debbie says: Context is everything. Amanda at Pandagon found this story (and we found it through Arthur D. Hlavaty). There’s nothing new about exploiting women’s cleavage in the newspaper, and there’s nothing surprising about an Alabama reporter being upset because his column had a cleavage picture. The gold is in Loretta Nall’s response to having [...]