Laurie and Debbie say: Melissa McEwan at Shakesville took the occasion of finding an ad for “Jingle Jugs” (they “jiggle to the jingle ‘Titties and Beer’ by Rodney Carrington) to pull together a somewhat more alarming collection of women’s bodies as bathroom furniture. This one apparently is (or was) in use in the Virgin Airlines [...]

Laurie and Debbie say: Eating disorders have gotten a lot more press in the last decade or so than they used to, and a lot of that press is in the glossy women’s (and girls’) magazines, such as Cosmopolitan, Glamour, and Seventeen. On the face of it, this seems like a good thing. However, two [...]

Laurie and Debbie say: A major science story on the consequences of what we believed was healthy eating has been simultaneously buried and distorted for the press by the National Institutes of Health, to a degree that even the two us find astonishing. It took the detective powers of Sandy Swarcz at Junk Food Science [...]

Laurie and Debbie say: We’ve gotten so many good links from so many of you that it’s time to share them around (plus a couple we found on our own). Lynn Kendall was first with this marvelous post from Kate Harding at Shapely Prose. As Kate says, “No, it’s not April 1, and that’s not [...]

Laurie and Debbie say: First of all, in honor of Love Your Body Day, we present you with one of our (many) favorite pictures from Women En Large. Second, in opposition to Love Your Body Day, Queen Latifah, star of stage and screen, has sold out to the diet industry. Until this week, it was [...]

Laurie and Debbie say: What better way to resume blogging together after a long break than to take apart a particularly sexist piece of junk science? The entire article, unfortunately, is only available to subscribers. The abstract, on the other hand, is so amazing that we can’t resist reprinting the entire text for your amusement: [...]

Debbie says: Leonard Nimoy’s Full Body Project book is being published. After 23 years, this book is the first volume (except for a Patricia Schwarz’s book, which was published in Japan and never received wide English-speaking country distribution) to treat the same kinds of subjects as Women En Large. The high-end gallery in New York [...]

Debbie says: Sorry to have been away for so many days! Laurie and I might finally get a chance to blog together tomorrow. While you’re waiting, here’s a wonderful picture of her in a museum in Alaska. Photograph by Ctein. Alaska, bears, Laurie Toby Edison, Ctein, Body Impolitic

Debbie says: A couple of years ago, I read a biography of Ida B. Wells, who is famous for, among other achievements her tireless crusade against lynching. When I read it, I felt secure in my belief that lynching–vigilante killings for unproven crimes–of African-Americans in this country was a thing of the past. We have [...]

Debbie says: Sometimes I’m amazed by how many different reactions a relatively straightforward story can bring up. Nearly six years after the overthrow of the strict Islamist Taliban government, almost all women in deeply conservative Afghanistan still only appear in public wafting past in the burqa’s pale blue, their dark eyes only occasionally visible behind [...]