The fashion police or more properly, vigilante stylists have taken it upon themselves to loudly shame women who have the nerve to appear in public with visible curvaceousness.See the above? That's not a 'before and after' photo-shopped slenderized model.
The photo on the right was the original picture taken on the red carpet. The one on the left was distorted, perhaps to reinforce the point the NYT flak was trying to make about 'big-boned' gals.
Here's a phenomenon we've noted, that shows itself in the outright attempt to humiliate women who don't and won't obey the imperative of "You can never be too thin ...."
We wrote about it here. Jezebel has been documenting the revisionism, calling it The Photoshop of Horrors, when images are manipulated to turn models into stick figures.
Hopefully, Brigitte - the German magazine which made an editorial decision to no longer use models in its pages (not sure if the ban applies to advertising too) but rather to photograph real women with their flaws and natural beauty, without any digital embellishments - will be successful. Then perhaps girls and women will no longer torture and starve their bodies.
10 comments:
It's quite a dilemma though, isn't it? Given the current level of obesity, we do really want to encourage people to get more fit. But somehow the press releases relating to fitness pass through the media filter as "losing weight" ... and then it then comes out as bulimia.
If only there could be a happy medium where people didn't hate their bodies in either direction.
And ponies. Everyone should have a pony.
It's about balance and moderation. Personally, I think that the obesity epidemic is mostly caused by sugar and fat-laden processed foods that are cheaply produced and advertised non-stop.
Add to the recipe the pervasive portrayal of desirable female beauty as anorectic clothes-horses instead of promoting fit and healthy bodies and you have a backlash.
I have been fighting that battle for over 30 years now. Since age 12 when I started binging and purging. I wanted to look like the Tee Vee stars.
I now have a couple eating disorders that come and go with stress. I can drop 20 pounds in a couple weeks with no control over it.
No scales allowed in my house now.
My own daughter, started talking about how fat she is...*sigh* at age 14. And she isn't at all fat of course.
She wants to look like the ladies and young women she sees in media.
At least I am totally aware of what to watch for eh?
And so it goes.
I think there's also all the tiny bits of energy we don't expend anymore. I'm always amazed when I see perfectly able, unburdened people hit the automatic door opener on buildings. And then wait there for the couple of seconds it takes to open.
One of my windows looks out onto an alley. Many of the garages are pretty ramshackle-looking but every one of them has an automatic door opener.
Revolving doors you don't have to push, TV remotes, etc., etc. Effort-saving gizmos everywhere.
I'm all for real labour-saving devices -- I'm not going to go down to the river and pound my laundry on the rocks, but sheesh. Open the damn door yourself!
And elevators. When I worked in a building that had 4 levels, I was the only one who consistently walked up and down the stairs. Some of my colleagues took the elevator to go up to the next floor.
Right, elevators. I live on the third floor, no elevator. Once, when my mother was visiting, she said: 'Now I see why you don't have a weight problem, skipping up and down these stairs all the time.'
I used to walk past the MAC cosmetics store in Rideau Centre in Ottawa on a regular basis, and it always amazed me how often the models in their ad posters looked like emaciated hookers. The though that this was somehow going to make people want their cosmetics baffled me.
Give me a happy, normal sized (or "plus-sized" according to industry jargon) model any day of the week. Curves are attractive.
I was thinking that it's not so much balance and moderation as changing the goal from "losing weight" to "fitness".
And I have no idea what an emaciated hooker looks like.
Unwell and unhappy, perhaps?
Not that's the fate destined for all sex workers. But the threat of potential criminal prosecution must hang heavily over their heads and must produce incredible stress.
great post
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