Debbie says:
Almost every week, I collect a bunch of links for Laurie and me out of my regular blog reading, and other folks send us cool things too. We usually only write about one or two of them. We’re going to start posting the ones we don’t feature on a regular basis, so you can share in the amazing range of body image stories (the good, the bad, and the very bad) on the Internet. Please put your own faves in the comments!
1) Free love in the 1960s in Australia.
I never heard of Lynne Segal, and I’m glad she came my way.
For all our sexual freedom, we women had few female guides or gurus, as we listened to Odetta or Janis Joplin belting out their blues. The anguished suffering of heroines created by the few contemporary female novelists – from Simone de Beauvoir and Doris Lessing to Margaret Drabble or Shelagh Delaney – was just as discouraging for any woman seeking inspiration on how to lead a freer, more authentic life.
By 1969 I still knew no woman who could face the world and speak boldly in her own right, with the ambiguous exception of de Beauvoir, who had explicitly rejected the possibility of having children. No wonder we were growing confused. I had yet to meet a woman who did not feel, in some buried and resentful way – or quite explicitly, as my mother had – that it was pitiable to exist as a woman, without a man.
Thanks to oursin for this one.
2) Artist David Trumble is trying to make a point about women not needing to be princesses, but I think his art is scary.
3) Not often discussed: the relationship between African fashion designers and high-profile cultural appropriators.
Milan’s Hallowood party featured the tribal African aesthetic as a comedic source of “inspiration”—but mostly, we know this is a way for these people to have “fun” playing dress-up. How on earth might African designers stand a chance to break into the global fashion market with such odds stacked against them? With odds like this, to be African is to be the butt of the fashion world’s joke. It is to pit yourself against European and American designers who have little to no regard for blackness, African-ness ,and your point-of-view because of a neo-colonial assertion of their aesthetic superiority.
This is where the current major players in fashion are dead wrong.
A new study published in the Journal of Women and Aging illustrates how few of us are happy with how our bodies look, even as we get older: Only 12 percent of women reported being satisfied with their body size.
5) I’m pleased to say I had never heard of the “thigh gap,” but apparently I’m in a minority.
Naomi Shimada began modelling at 13, but had to quit the industry when her weight changed. “I was what they call a straight-size model – a size 6 – when I started, which is normal for a very young girl.
“But as I got older my body didn’t stay like that, because, guess what, that doesn’t happen to people! So I took a break and went back in as a size 14 and now work as a plus-size model.”
Shimada is unequivocal about where the obsession with the thigh gap comes from. “It’s not a new trend: it’s been around for years. It comes partly from a fashion industry that won’t acknowledge that there are different ways a woman should look, and it comes from the pro-anorexic community. It’s a path to an eating disorder.”
5) Voice and the performance of gender.
Sociological Images is one of my very favorite sources of information.
In the movie [In a Word, by Lake Bell, linked from the article] and in reality, when Hollywood wants an authoritative voice, a powerful voice, or simply “the voice of god”, they turn to male voice over actors more often than not. We should stop and ask, why is it this way? Are masculine voices just naturally more powerful? Nah. If you’ve spent anytime with opera singers you know that both male and female voices can rattle your ribcage. The answer then must be cultural.
6) And a sampling beautiful art people make to replace missing limbs.
Lizzie sent us the last one.